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(08/27/13 2:46am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Windfall Dancers Inc. is tucked behind a series of rose bushes at 1101 N Dunn St., and Monday through Friday, it opens its doors to students of all ages. But this week, as a special trial, the studio is offering some of its signature classes for $6 a piece. The regular rate per class ranges from $9 to $17.The Windfall school of dance offers a variety of classes including ballet, jazz, modern, hip-hop and tap, as well as unconventional classes like musical theater movement. Classes are also offered at a variety of times to accommodate varying schedules. Senior dance major Kim Fahnestock has been a teacher at Windfall for the past year. She said she sees many IU students trying out classes during the week of sample classes.“A lot of people from the area come in and try classes out,” Fahnestock said. “It’s a good deal to come in and try what you like or don’t like.”She said it’s easy to get started, so anyone can do it.“People just come in and sign a quick waver in case they get hurt during class,” Fahnestock said. “It’s a quick process.”Freshman Melanie Matchette is one student trying out classes this week. She said she danced in high school in her hometown of Lansing, Mich., and though she’s a marketing major, she wants to dance in her spare time.“I’ve been dancing since I was little,” Matchette said. “I just moved here, so when I did, I looked for studios, and this is the best I’ve found.”Matchette said she enjoyed her first day of classes and plans on coming back in the future.“I took ballet earlier, and now I’m taking modern, and I really liked it,” Matchette said.“It was on my level — comfortable but challenging.”Follow local arts reporter Janica Kaneshiro on Twitter @janicakaneshiro.
(08/26/13 4:10am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Shaded from the bright sun, the Dark Side Tribal dancers lined up for a performance at the Flavors of Fourth Street Festival Saturday evening.The festival itself extended from 3 to 9 p.m., and attendees could get food and beverages for around $1 per sample from various Fourth Street restaurants including Amol India, Dats, Anatolia and more. Guests of the festival enjoyed various forms of entertainment including a balloon artist,an accordianist and calligraphers from the Chinese Calligraphy Club.In a flash of colored skirts and twinkling hand chimes, the dancers entertained the students and families attending the festival. While the audience ate, the dancers engaged them with seemingly impossible body movements performed with ease and smiles on their faces. But the women of Dark Side Tribal aren’t just traditional belly dancers. Alice Dobie, a member of the company since 2002, said their style of dance is specifically called American Tribal Style Belly Dancing. “It’s a fusion,” Dobie said. “It’s a group improv dance. There is a leader, and everyone else is following.”Newer member Sarah Akemon said the improv component of their dancing is one of many details that sets their style of dance apart.“It strings a vocabulary of dance together,” Akemon said. “When the music is playing we watch for clues and keep going.”The dance itself is a fusion of cultures and styles, Akemon said. “The movements are borrowed,” Akemon said. “It’s a fusion of belly dancing, flamenco and a variation of folkloric dancing.”But it’s not only their style of dance that is different. Their costumes are also different from traditional belly dancing garb. “It’s not a costume true of any culture or true of a dance specifically,” Dobie said. “It’s true to fusion.”The dancers consider their dance to be a fusion of different cultures, so their costumes reflect that fusion, Akemon said.“It’s not so much that our costume is borrowed, but it’s romanticized,” Akemon said. “Everybody’s costume is different. Everybody’s costume is unique, but some of it is based on what people expect us to be wearing.”But a key difference between what the Dark Side Tribal dancers wear and what traditional belly dancers wear is unexpected, Dobie said. “We never go without pants,” Dobie said. “We would be considered naked.”Though the style is very different, Dobie said anyone can take a class if interested. The group rehearses at Panache Dance on E. Winslow Road.“We’re always looking for new students,” Dobie said. Follow reporter Janica Kaneshiro on Twitter @janicakaneshiro.
(08/25/13 8:56pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Shaded from the bright sun, the Dark Side Tribal dancers lined up for a performance at the Flavors of Fourth Street Festival Saturday evening.The festival itself extended from 3 to 9 p.m., and attendees could get food and beverages for around $1 per sample from various Fourth Street restaurants including Amol India, Dats, Anatolia and more. Guests of the festival enjoyed various forms of entertainment including a balloon artist,an accordianist and calligraphers from the Chinese Calligraphy Club.In a flash of colored skirts and twinkling hand chimes, the dancers entertained the students and families attending the festival. While the audience ate, the dancers engaged them with seemingly impossible body movements performed with ease and smiles on their faces. But the women of Dark Side Tribal aren’t just traditional belly dancers. Alice Dobie, a member of the company since 2002, said their style of dance is specifically called American Tribal Style Belly Dancing. “It’s a fusion,” Dobie said. “It’s a group improv dance. There is a leader, and everyone else is following.”Newer member Sarah Akemon said the improv component of their dancing is one of many details that sets their style of dance apart.“It strings a vocabulary of dance together,” Akemon said. “When the music is playing we watch for clues and keep going.”The dance itself is a fusion of cultures and styles, Akemon said. “The movements are borrowed,” Akemon said. “It’s a fusion of belly dancing, flamenco and a variation of folkloric dancing.”But it’s not only their style of dance that is different. Their costumes are also different from traditional belly dancing garb. “It’s not a costume true of any culture or true of a dance specifically,” Dobie said. “It’s true to fusion.”The dancers consider their dance to be a fusion of different cultures, so their costumes reflect that fusion, Akemon said.“It’s not so much that our costume is borrowed, but it’s romanticized,” Akemon said. “Everybody’s costume is different. Everybody’s costume is unique, but some of it is based on what people expect us to be wearing.”But a key difference between what the Dark Side Tribal dancers wear and what traditional belly dancers wear is unexpected, Dobie said. “We never go without pants,” Dobie said. “We would be considered naked.”Though the style is very different, Dobie said anyone can take a class if interested. The group rehearses at Panache Dance on E. Winslow Road.“We’re always looking for new students,” Dobie said. Follow reporter Janica Kaneshiro on Twitter @janicakaneshiro.
(08/23/13 3:22am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>With little set, no breaks and less than a night for the actors to mull over the changes the writers gave them, “Island Song” premiered at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at the Wells-Metz Theatre.Though “Island Song” is still a work in progress as a workshop musical, the cast of five opened to a large and diverse crowd ranging from students to elderly members of the Bloomington community.The musical runs for the next three nights, but Jesi Evans, who works at the Wells-Metz box office, said tickets are going fast.“The turnout is pretty big because of hype from the new material,” Evans said. “All the different nights are getting filled up.”Musical theatre major Hannah Slabaugh said although her friends are in the musical and attracted her to the show, she wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to see new material.“It’s an entirely new play,” Slabaugh said. “The writers are also from New York and pretty famous, so that’s really cool.”Also a musical theatre major, Elaine Cotter said the musical’s contemporary feel is what attracted her to “Island Song.”“I’m pretty excited,” Cotter said. “I’ve heard the music is really difficult and there’s not a lot of set.”Derek Gregor, who wrote the music for “Island Song,”said he met his co-writer, Sam Carner, in a graduate program for musical theatre at New York University.Since then, they have written two full shows together, including “Unlock’d,” which won a Richard Rodgers Award and has since been produced at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, where it was critically acclaimed. “Island Song” is their second full production.Gregor said the show is still in the works, and it has been performed at universities across the country as the pair tries to nail down specifics to put on a non-workshop production, the ultimate goal of the piece.The entire concept of “Island Song” was built around a single song the pair wrote called “Wall Lovin’,” Gregor said.“It was about feeling lonely,” Gregor said. “As we continued writing, we started having a common theme of life in New York, and from there we started fleshing it out.”Gregor said this isn’t the final version of “Island Song.” He said he and Carner plan to come back with a director from New York to put on a full production at IU sometime in January.“We really want to have it have a consistant theme,” Gregor said. “We hope one day to have it play in New York.”Follow reporter Janica Kaneshiro on Twitter @janicakaneshiro.
(08/22/13 3:45am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Tonight’s musical premiere at Wells-Metz Theatre combines dynamic writing and unconventional singing to offer fresh takes on its familiar themes. “Island Song” begins 7:30 tonight in partnership with the Bloomington Playwrights Project. Tickets are available online and at the theater box office, $15 for students and $25 for non-students.The production will conclude the 2013 Indiana Theater Festival season, which runs each summer. Actors Maddie Baldwin, Brian Bandura and Kaitlyn Mayse, who play Caroline, Cooper and Antonia, respectively, said “Island Song” is a very different production from their past projects. “This is the first workshop show I’ve done, so writers are still changing things,” Bandura said. “All the other things I’ve done, like, things are set, this is the order of songs. It’s a lot of constantly being on your toes.”Mayse said it’s the first time this production has been staged.“Before, it’s been a concert version where people sing from sheet music,” Mayse said. Baldwin said the concept of “Island Song” is very basic, but the way it’s staged is what sets it apart. “It’s about five different New Yorkers and their own stories about how they live in New York and how they deal with day-to-day issues,” Baldwin said. “They all have different issues. Mostly we all do our own solo songs, and your character develops throughout the show, but it’s all within the dialogue of the songs. So that’s something that’s different.”On a deeper level, “Island Song” is about the overlap in different people’s lives, Baldwin said. “At the end we all come together and we realize that we’re all in the same boat,” Baldwin said. “We’re in a big city trying to make our way as individuals.”But the lineup can change, Mayse said.“We’re going to meet the writers today and we’re going to have four hours where they can change stuff,” Mayse said on Wednesday. “So it’s crazy. You kind of just have to let go.”Follow reporter Janica Kaneshiro on Twitter @janicakaneshiro.
(04/29/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The best news I’ve heard in a while is that the Twinkie is making a comeback.Sometimes people are right when they say the news seems filed with darkness. After the Boston bombings, all the fear and the speculation cast a dark mood on everything. It seems like every piece of news is sad in some way. People everywhere are pointing fingers at different religious groups and ethnicities. It just goes to show you what fear can do to people. We live in a dark world, and it can be really hard to deal with at times. A logical transition here might be to start talking about how Twinkies help me through my dark days, and while that may be true, the real meaning here is that sometimes even infinitesimal good news can make things right.When I was growing up, my parents would tell me to focus on the small victories whenever I would get upset about not being the best at something or not reaching my ultimate goal, like all psycho perfectionist kids my age. But it was hard with all the pressure to maintain A’s, to end up at the top of my class, to get scholarships, etc, to not end up feeling like a constant failure. Heck, that still happens today.But I find that if I live for only my large victories, I’ll only be happy once in a blue moon, and that just simply isn’t enough to live a happy life.I think sometimes people pin college students wrong. Yes, we like to drink, and we party occasionally. Sometimes we even dress up like homeless people and give the rest of us a bad name, but for a majority of college students, college is a transition to the real world, and it’s really stressful. As fellow students are out in the world getting internships and taking names, it’s very easy to get bogged down in what you aren’t doing. As much as the adults around us preach not to compare yourself, they also evaluate us against each other for scholarships, grades and more in a never ending paradox.As a journalism student, this paradox also exists while we prepare ourselves for the professional world. Are we just meant to tell the sad stories of sweeping injustice across the world? In a short answer, yes. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate the small, hopeful stories that exist in the tiny cracks of dark news we have to report each day. It doesn’t make the good news any more important or valuable than the bad, because the truth is they both have to exist — especially for us to appreciate the good.So yes, I am excited that Twinkies are coming back. They’re little creme-filled reminders that there is at least a little good in all this bad.— jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(04/23/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When I pictured my freshman year in the dorm, I had a whole list of possibilities for what might await me. I thought about getting to know my neighbors, staying up late, ordering pizza a little too often and smuggling wine and nati in backpacks into the small space I was to share with a near stranger.Of course, I also thought about the downsides. I’m not totally out of my mind — there’s showering with shoes, that one crazy neighbor and maybe even some annoying bros down the hall.But I certainly didn’t expect to be woken up every morning by the sound of jackhammers echoing off the decrepit walls of Forest Quad. Well, that has been my freshman year. Not only that, but because of the construction around Forest this year, I’ve been notified that the water in the already sketchy bathrooms isn’t safe to drink for the next few days.Not to mention that occasionally we lose power, and instead of using the computers in the lounge, we get to listen to drilling or gaze out the sealed-off front doors at all the excitement unfolding in the middle of the circle drive.I know, it sounds like a laundry list of first-world problems. But in reality, I’m paying a lot of money to be living like this. The same amount of money that people not living around this construction are paying. And the same amount of money that incoming freshman will pay next year when everything will (hopefully) be finished and the new tricked-out food court will be in place. Awesome.Construction has been every roommate problem I thought I would ever have. Loud noises while I’m sleeping. All of their inconsiderate mess blocking my door. And just generally making my life difficult and not considering my time or happiness for that matter. I never got a warning about any of this, either. I just showed up on day one of college, and my resident assistant mentions, “Oh yeah, there might be some construction or something.” It’s times like these that I just feel like another cash cow in a herd of 40,000. IU certainly preaches an experience where each student is treated like a unique individual, but when I’m showering in the dark in unsanitary water, I don’t feel like it.— jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(04/15/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Yes, the celebrity stylist and designer has a flair for the dramatic. On her show on Bravo, every time she says “omigod” all lumped in together I cringe a little. And I’m not sure she has any other way of describing her love for something without saying “I die,” which she somehow makes a compliment. And yet, I can’t get enough of her glamorous although sometimes heinously stupid life.For the longest time, I just considered it my guilty pleasure. It’s not like I’m watching the Kardashians or anything, at least not very often, but that’s beside the point. I realized I watch Rachel Zoe more often during my more stressful times too, which seems as counterproductive as it actually is.I watch it when I’m doing projects, when I’m writing essays, whenever I’m supposed to be studying and lately, as I’m scheduling. For some reason, Rachel Zoe’s melodramatic account of her life helps me through my own, and it was only recently that I might have discovered the answer.I find myself and people around me in a constant battle between practicality and happiness, but why is that even a battle? College just happens to be the perfect environment to breed that kind of inner-fight. What is my major? What is my minor? Should I tack on a business minor? Is my folklore major ever going to get me anywhere? And so many more. These are the questions that keep me and so many like me up at night, but I don’t think we ask ourselves one particular question enough, “Is this going to make me happy?”I’m sure my parents would hate that I have any aspirations to be anything like a reality star, especially one that describes anything glittery as “major.” But as stupid as Rachel Zoe can sound, she is a woman of a single talent and a successful one at that. She probably shouldn’t ever do her own taxes or laundry for that matter, but is that a real measure of her success? It seems that in this economy, our generation of college students can be obsessed about being proficient in everything to secure a job. Not even one that we want, just a job, period. But why did our happiness go out the window? Sequins make Rachel Zoe “die,” (remember that’s a good thing) and though I don’t necessarily want my life to amount to glittery fabric, at least she fought to make her own passion her life purpose. People love to tell me a degree in journalism won’t get me anywhere, and whether I agree or not, it might be true that the industry is in some trouble, but it makes me happy. I shouldn’t have to tack on another degree in economics or what have you for the sake of practicality. Why is it we feel we need to take max credits and kill ourselves with internships and no sleep? Yes, our futures are important, but I think it’s also true we can inspire within ourselves our own level of happiness. For Rachel Zoe, it’s superficial — it’s true — but I shamelessly watch her show because I admire her happiness. I think I can be happy even if I do end up in a cardboard box like people keep saying I will. I choose happiness, and for me, that’s “major.”— jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(04/10/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The first semester of my freshman year, I took finite math. Needless to say, I struggled pretty hard. As I sat each day in that class fruitlessly trying to remember why I was drawing Venn diagrams, I would stare at the word problems on the screen and feel like I was trying to understand another language. Stochastic processes? Bernoulli trials? I grasped at straws for their definitions every day, and my teacher was less than helpful to say the least.But what if every class I took was like that? What if I absolutely struggled in each class just to understand what anybody was saying? And what if the teacher condemned me for not understanding what went on in class?That’s a reality for many international students. What makes it worse is so many professors and graduate assistants at IU are so ill-prepared to deal with these students that they end up treating them poorly. With the price international students pay to come to school here, they should expect to be treated with patience, or at the very least given the resources to enable understanding.One of my current classes is around 40 percent international, which is obvious because these students all sit together and mutter collectively under their breath trying to reach a joint understanding of what the teacher is saying. In our most recent presentations, one of the international students obviously gave his presentation directly from the unreliable pages of Wikipedia. What really bothered me in this situation was how my teacher handled it.She pulled him up in front of the class and spoke really slowly and loudly, “In this country, copying from a website is very bad. Do you understand?”It was terrible. The student hung his head in embarrassment and shame, because, despite his mistake and his language barrier, he has emotions and he didn’t deserve to be paraded around like a monkey in the middle of class. As a teacher, she utterly failed her students. She effectively taught about 20 students that this poor kid is an idiot. And her reason? He isn’t from this country.Part of the magic of teaching is getting to lead students to knowledge, but instead she led him and the rest of us to the recognition of a barrier bigger than language between American and international students. The perception is that they are stupid, totally unable to understand American customs or classes. I constantly hear “Why would they come to America if they can’t even speak the language?” Well that’s a Test Of English as a Foreign Language requirement problem, but that doesn’t matter because they are here already. Why are we so insistent on pointing out all the reasons they shouldn’t be? Would it kill us as students and teachers to try to make their experience a little easier?We are all Hoosiers, and it’s about time we start acting like it. Until there are more resources for learning English so they can reach out to us for help, we need to reach out to them as students and educators. We all deserve to look back on our college days fondly. Even finite might have been saved for me with a little help and understanding, but I guess I’ll never know. I just don’t wish that experience on anybody. — jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(04/01/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>There is no question that our country is going through a major change right now. With same-sex marriage colorfully on the political spectrum, people are up in arms and ready to do battle.Whether you agree or disagree with same-sex marriage isn’t my issue — though for the record, I’m for it all the way. It’s the ignorant Bible-beating arguments that really kill me, and I don’t think I can read another re-post from an online Bible without pulling all of my hair out.Why? Because people depending on the Bible as their sole source of argument material is like expecting to win a national championship with two point guards under six feet tall.Sorry guys, that loss to Syracuse hurt me just as much as the rest of us, but the point is that using the Bible as the only source in such a complex argument just doesn’t make any sense.Of course religion complicates arguments regarding issues like same-sex marriage, but the dusty book in your closet isn’t an end-all for arguments, especially one of this magnitude. I understand people might have a religious reason for disagreeing — that’s this beautiful thing occasionally called free speech, and that’s fine. In fact, I don’t care if you have a differing opinion. My problem lies in the ignorance people blame on pages of a book they don’t understand.“Gay people deserve equal rights.”“No. The Bible.”What? If I had known ending arguments was that easy, I would have told my mom I couldn’t go to school anymore after fifth grade, because in Harry Potter he gets his letter to go to Hogwarts right around that time.I would have picked any somewhat significant noun and ended arguments right there.“Eat your vegetables”“No. Grandma’s ashes.”But it isn’t that simple. I know Harry Potter and the Bible are hardly the same thing. In fact, some people are probably horrified I even put them together in the same column.Clearly grandma’s ashes aren’t a solution to my aversion to vegetables, but the Bible as an argument makes about the same amount of sense.Being raised religiously to think same-sex marriage is wrong is a legitimate argument, but lackadaisically throwing quotes out from a book written 3,500 years ago and interspersing the words with personal hatreds and biases doesn’t count as a real argument. Or at least it is not an intelligent one.What really gets to me are the people who put their noses in the air and pretend to know God’s deepest secrets because they’ve read a holy book more than the person next to them. Congratulations, you can use douse holy words with your own malice and make a beautiful text, and a beautiful religion, rear a very ugly head.They use quoted passages they twist to satisfy their own discriminations so they can justify what they know somewhere deep down is wrong — or they wouldn’t have been looking for the passage to begin with.There are good Christians, yes. But there are also generally good people. Some of the “well-versed” Christians don’t seem to understand that. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve read a book or dressed up for church or attended Easter service. It matters if you’re doing the right thing. If your moral compass is so off you can’t even rely on yourself to make the right decision, so you consult the refracted passages of the Bible, then your argument doesn’t stand in my court.If you want to take anything from the Bible, just “love thy neighbor.” They may be gay, straight — hell, they may be the worst person in the world — but save the judgments for the big man. In the meantime, develop an argument with substance.— jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(03/18/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Spring break for me wasn’t spent blacked out on a beach in south Florida, but rather reporting in Hiroshima, Japan. I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.Although I learned about the culture, the food and the people while I was there, I was most impressed by the respect Japanese people had for others and the patience they had for my inability to speak Japanese.For some reason, at IU, people can’t deal with international students being unable to understand American customs. It’s gotten so bad that if you were to tell a non-Asian IU student they were “acting Asian” they would be insulted. Why? It’s a race, not a disease or a behavioral disorder.We say things like “my floor would be cool except for the Asians” or “I was running around like an Asian.”They get frustrated when international students can’t decide what they want in a fast food line and yell in their faces when they don’t understand English the first time, as if their words have simpler meaning by being louder and slower.I don’t speak Japanese, and the entire time I was in Japan, cashiers waited patiently for me to try to figure out which yen coins were in my purse. Japanese speakers tried very hard to mime out what they were trying to say to me and never once did somebody roll their eyes at me, point and laugh at me or yell in my face.IU students could take a lesson from the Japanese people. I mean I’m sure my inability to act like a Japanese person was annoying or funny at times. Heck, I got locked inside an ATM while I was there because I couldn’t read the Japanese on the door that told me to press the button in order to slide the door.So, yes, I recognize that it is aggravating when people commit cultural faux pas, or when they stare blankly at you when you just spent a long time trying to explain something. I get frustrated, too. It’s a part of our culture to expect efficiency. I’m not trying to say that it isn’t frustrating, but I don’t understand why we let ourselves treat the international students — who probably have a lot more in common with us than we want to admit — like they’re a species below native English speakers.They’re still people. They still get offended when people use the word “Asian” as a derogatory term. And just because they don’t understand when you speak in your native tongue doesn’t mean they can’t read your body language when you snicker at them or get frustrated with them.Now that I think about it, I was afraid to go to Japan because I was worried they would treat me the way IU students treat the Asians on our campus, and that’s pretty sad. Now that I’ve experienced such kindness, I can understand why Americans have such a bad reputation throughout the world. Maybe we should think about that the next time we’re about to scream in the face of somebody who doesn’t understand. — jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(02/12/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The world of scholarships is an ugly place.Applying involves selling yourself in fewer than 500 ringing words that are supposed to stick with an unknown panel of judges. But even less appealing than the application process is the backlash people experience for receiving scholarships. Sure, it’s all smiles at home, but when you’re around peers, they dole out bitter backhanded compliments about how nice it is that you got a scholarship because you’re Asian or African-American or Hispanic.The competitive nature of the game and the development of minority-only scholarships leads to a group of jealous have-nots making a rewarding achievement into a race issue.If I had a dime for every time I overheard someone saying that minorities take all of the scholarship money, I wouldn’t need scholarships to cover my out-of-state tuition.It’s true studies show minorities make up the lowest income families in America, and it’s important that scholarship programs acknowledge that children from low-income districts may not have the same opportunities as children from a higher-income district. And, although I recognize the importance of trying to level the playing field when it comes to financial need, as a minority student myself, sometimes I just wish that scholarships were based solely on merit.I’m tired of hearing I don’t deserve the money I get based on something I was born with. After all, we’re trying to use demographics and statistics to measure immeasurable qualities like ambition and probability of success.You know, maybe I don’t deserve a scholarship based on race, and I certainly don’t think people need any more reason to enforce stereotypes when it comes to minorities. We take your valedictorian title, your fancy cars, your jobs and now, lo and behold, your money for higher education.The perception is that minority students live to do the same work everyone else does and just get paid more for it, and I’m not going to deny there are a few people who cheat a flawed system. But I also know there are many people who happen to be minorities who work as hard as the top tier of white people who feel they have reverse-beat the “anti-racist” educational system.Scholarships and merit awards aren’t supposed to be “Survivor: White vs. Minority” edition, but now that’s exactly what it is. I long for a society blind to color. But don’t we all?— jkaneshi@indiana.edu
(01/15/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I fell hopelessly in love with this campus less than a year ago.Yes, I am a freshman, and not too long ago, I was one of those kids taking tours around campus in wonderment and awe at the beautiful buildings and all the strangers who walked past me with purpose. But what really got me was the journalism school. I took a step in the bustling Indiana Daily Student newsroom, and I knew I was home. I’m an out-of-state student, so I made sure to take my other options into deep consideration. I explored all the schools known for journalism in my area, and I settled here because the School of Journalism has a great reputation. It stands out boldly in the journalism field. The journalism school on this campus is unique because it creates such a small atmosphere of learning with the added benefit of having a large pool of events and people to report on. Well, now I’m worried. All of the reasons I chose this school are in jeopardy. With the proposed merger of the School of Journalism, Department of Telecommunications and Department of Communication and Culture, the specialized journalism education I came here for would be generalized into the School of Communication, Media and Journalism. So what’s the big deal? Yes, I realize that journalists also communicate and are also involved with the media. This is both true and painfully obvious. And I do realize that all of these departments do have some overlap, but as a journalism student, I shouldn’t have to take broad communication classes. Journalists communicate differently than a cinema and media studies major, and a blanket communications class won’t make that any less true. We focus on ethics, conflicts and values specifically relevant to journalism. And why would it be a problem for other similar departments to feed off of Ernie Pyle’s good name? Ernie Pyle was a journalist, and, like him, I want a career in journalism. I shouldn’t have to jump through big general hoops to study my specific career path. In my general education classes, like finite and statistics, I don’t mind sitting next to a communications major because, most likely, we will have a lot in common. But when it comes to my degree-specific classes, I think I have the right to sit in a room with like-minded people who all envision themselves in the field of journalism like I do. I am more than a communicator. I am a journalist, and I deserve to study like one. — jkaneshi@indiana.edu