A note to remember a small exercise a professor showed their students in class. This happened prior to a library instruction session; instructor had some additional class activities to do before I did my part. They write to three categories, three lists:
- Privileges I have
- Privileges I lack
- Benefits
Idea is students make their list, then pass their notebook around and others comment on what they wrote. After that, teacher discusses some of their lists and comments with the class.
I have some time, so I will try to write my lists:
- Privileges I have:
- Being male.
- Being Caucasian.
- A good education: private schooling as a child and youth, relatively good universities.
- Stable family. Many of my peers had divorced parents.
- Having enough and a bit more.
- Access to certain resources such as Internet, good libraries, books, water, food.
- Privileges I lack:
- Privilege of money. I am not wealthy, but I have enough. Here I mean not having the ability to just wave money around and make problems vanish or seriously minimize problems.
- Health. This may be mixed. While I do have some health issues, I suppose I could be in worse shape, so maybe this is more a privilege I have. However, I am, like many folks, one medical catastrophe away from ruin, see above idea of money privilege I lack.
- Second class US citizenship being Puerto Rican. This is a bit more a political thing, what I call being a colonial. It does bring in some degree of discrimination in the U.S.
- Benefits:
- Got a decent job. On a side note, the job provides mostly decent health care plan (it does the job for now).
- A roof over the head.
- Food on the table.
I am sure there may be other privileges I have that I cannot recall, and a few that I lack that do not occur to me at the moment. This is just a short quick exercise just as the students did in the class.
