Saints and Roughnecks

This week in class we read the story Saints and Roughnecks. I think that it has made the social class "discrimination" more easily seen. With this, it is not necessarily discrimination against the lower class citizens, but it is based upon their image or others perceptions of them, and the resources they have available to them. In some ways, Stevenson does have saints and roughnecks. Often times kids who are more involved and polite in class get an upper edge. People assume that these students are also good kids in the world outside of school, when often times this is not the case. Also, there is a perception that any kid who is not excelling in Stevenson must be a bad kid and involved with illegal things outside of school. At Stevenson, we are pushed so hard to be involved and do well at school that sometimes it is hard for people to see what students would be like in a different atmosphere, outside of school. This is oftentimes where the illegal actions occur, and while at school it is difficult to tell! Sometimes it is even hard for me, a fellow student, to tell if another student really is as good as they appear to be at school. Since Stevenson is such a large school, it is hard to designate two groups that fall directly into these two categories in the story, but there are students that fall into these saint and roughneck divisions.