Samuel Connery

Life of the Mind

Professor Lenard

30 September 2015

Blog Post #2

Over the summer we had to read “Whistling Vivaldi” which is a book that discusses stereotypes felt throughout society.  One of the contributors to the book was Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, who was also a student of the author Claude Steele.  The speaker was Valerie Purdie-Vaughns and I heard from a majority of professors that she was going to be a very entertaining speaker and provide  interesting topics to cover.

Valerie Purdie-Vaughns had started off the convocation in a very exciting way.  She told the audience to participate in an activity where you would turn to the person sitting next to you and discuss what you wanted to do for a living after you got out of college.  I enjoyed this activity because I got to meet two new people and since this was at the beginning of the year it had helped me introduce myself to some new friends.  After the opener Valerie Purdie-Vaughns began to go over statistics.  One of these was the difference between math scores of men and women and how the stereotype affects women in a learning setting.  Although this information was pertinent to the discussion it was very similar to examples that we had read throughout “Whistling Vivaldi”.    It seemed like a general overview of tests throughout the book which in some ways could be helpful since the majority of students had to do an assignment concerning the book.  I was hoping that we would hear about different tests or different findings not mentioned in the book that she could provide for us .  Although I didn’t find the information she presented very interesting Valerie Purdie-Vaughns was a very good speaker and knew how to keep her audience interested   throughout the whole presentation.  I definitely recommend the convocation to any incoming freshmen in the future.