Blog #8

When i think of pecks theory i look no further then my lacrosse team from my senior season in high school. We went through all these stages and grew as people and players.

The first stage, pseudocommunity, is described as one where there doesn't seem to be many problems and people get along. My team was much like this because almost all of us were really good friends and we hung out outside of school all the time. Everything seemed like we would be one of the most close knit teams i would be a part of. 

The next stage comes from different individuals stating their views and that leads to chaos. My team very clearly went through this at the beginning of our season. Many people believed that our coach didn't really know what he was doing. They questioned who he played and many of our playing strategies. There started to be a schism between the guys that supported the coach and guys that didn't. 

the next stage is the realization of the barrier that is being built from the disagreement. we had a large fight breakout in our locker room and realized it was time to sit down and talk about our issues. We held a captains meeting and talked everything out and fixed all the issues so we could move on which led to the next stage. 

The final stage was the team coming together. We finally started to win games after starting the season off with a lot of losses and started playing like a team. We ended up getting everything together and went on a long playoff run that ended at the hands of a team that won four straight championships and we were the only team to lose by just 1 to them. 

I learned a lot from this experience and i believe the application of pecks theory was something that came naturally to us and if we had known about it before we could have turned things around earlier before it became a serious problem in our locker room.  

Blog #7

As an upper class white male who is straight I pretty much fit in the non target identities for nearly every single facet of life. There is obviously nothing I did to choose whether I was or wasn't born into the family that I was born into. I feel like it is important for me to realize my privilege as I am about as privileged as a person can get. But I also feel that I shouldn't feel ashamed of my background either. I was lucky enough to be born into a great situation and I didn't take it for granted so I did all the work i needed to in order to be accepted into my dream school. I realize that having all of these benefits helped me achieve that, I also know that there are people in my same class as white males from upper class families that are straight and they don't succeed because they don't give any effort. I don't personally think anything is given nobody is handed anything in this world the difference between someone with these benefits and someone without them are just obstacles. For instance it may be harder for someone from a lower class family to pay for college so that's something I don't have to worry about necessarily but that doesn't mean that I was just "handed" my acceptance letter or my degree. I still have to work to get what I want granted it is easier and I realize that but I don't think the word "handed" should be used for people from my background.

Probably the only thing working against me, and it is only in select situations, is my age. I am the youngest of three kids in my family as well as the youngest of all my cousins. My whole life whenever with my family my opinions and thoughts on most things were not taken seriously because the older people didn't really respect them as much as the older wiser peoples opinions. I like to think of this as an advantage for my growth as a human though because one of my biggest skills in life is being able to listen to people and i believe strongly that came from being the youngest and never getting a chance to speak I was able to close my mouth and open my ears and really take in all the wisdom my family members had to offer.