Socratic Seminar!

Well this week it came that magical time once again for our peers to share their ideas with the class and possibly be strongly criticized by you peers for doing so, fun fun fun… Anyways, we started off our seminar by asking the same question, “ How do you like the book so far?” And of course all the students gladly replied for an easy point or two to start off the seminar. Next my peers were asked what we had all week to prepare for, our talk about feminism and whether women today and in our novel, Macbeth, fit the criteria for being feminists. One student stated that to determine whether a women was a feminist or not some sort of criteria would have to be made to claim someone to be a feminist. The class of course agreed and they determined Lady Macbeth was a feminist in the sense she had control over her husband; however, as a woman in her time period she really had no power and she was not doing anything to better her fellow women. We also took into consideration whether Paris Hilton could be seen as a strong feminist role model, of course just having Paris Hilton and the words ‘role model; in the same sentence is laughable. The class agreed that Paris Hilton, while being exceedingly wealthy, is also somewhat of a moron in the sense that she does very stupid things.
The next portion of the class we discussed whether it was moral for a woman to use sexuality in order to gain power in today’s world. Personally I feel for a woman to gain power through sexuality is wrong morally and if a woman gains power that way the power they gain is sort of tainted. Another student brought up the point that men use brute force to gain what they want; however, I do not know what sort work environment that person was in but the males who tend to use brute force to gain power are commonly arrested because its labeled as assault. Males can only use brute force in a schoolyard setting such as high school, but in the real men cannot simply push people around physically to get what they want, they use the tactics that have been applied for years, hard work, persistence, and maybe lying once in awhile. Those are the techniques that people go about getting their way, but brute force and sexuality are not valid ways to gain power in my opinion.