Favorite Ted Talk: Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | TED – YouTube
When going through potential topics to write about for my Unit Two assignments, there are a few ideas that I have in mind. One of these ideas is about examining the changes in American family life and the concept of “nuclear family.” This topic is interesting to look at as there has been such a rapid change in family life over the last 75 years. This ranges from the “traditional” jobs of spouses to the ways in which families interact with one another. Some ways in which I could gather information for my research is to use movies or other motion pictures to do a comparison of how households are portrayed over the last several decades. In addition, I could use personal testimonies from my peers and individuals of other generations to see how parenting has changed.
Another topic that sounds interesting to do research on is the evolution of the education system since the start of the 20th century. Since this is a very broad topic, there are a few areas that I would focus on. For one, it would be interesting to examine how the amount and type of content being taught have changed over the years. In accordance with this, the amount of people having access to higher education and how this has expanded over the last several decades is also an interesting piece to look into. As a way to collect information about this topic, I would try to gather documents that show the curriculum of schools throughout the decade as well as the number of students enrolled. Also, pictures would be a great resource to actually see how the physical classroom has evolved and the implications that came from the changes made over the years. Even finding the notebook pages from students or the type of learning resources from various generations could provide significant insight.
Both of these project topics are great; there is a lot of potential for strong analysis with both of these. I think especially with the first one, media portrayal would especially be a good source for evaluating that shifting idea about family dynamics.
I found your potential topics very interesting, two in particular that I really liked would be your idea of examining the concept of “nuclear family” and how education has changed overtime involving the content that is being taught in schools. It would be super cool if you could find actual pictures of notebooks of students from different points of time and use that to support your claims. I also think both of these topics would have a lot to talk about and would be extremely interesting to do.