Avenue Q 20/20?

[Princeton78]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 5:15pm

Apparently, Avenue Q was featured in a song on the 9/15 edition of 20/20...anyone catch this?

[GYPSY1527]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 5:21pm

Yup. I caught it on TV and was actually interviewed for it with my sister. We got stopped after the opening night of Martin Short and were asked if we had seen Avenue Q, which we had, 6 times. We obviously were edited out which is fine and all, but the special itself was interesting to say the least. I was hoping for more footage of Avenue Q but they did show some experiment (I can't remember the name) thats pretty famous for disciminating agianst kids based on their eye color and then analyising how it felt.

[chinkie azn jai]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 5:48pm

What did they say about Avenue Q?

[SweetQintheLights]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 7:17pm

They just showed a clip of "Everyone's a little bit racist" when showing something specifc about racism.

Actaully, we talked about it in class today. The show, not Avenue Q. It's an education class...
The teacher said later in the semester he is going to bring it in!! I'm sooo excited. I'm sure I'm the only one who knows about Avenue Q so I'll have to keep my squeal to a minimum!

[Jon]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 7:21pm

The show was about racial and sexual stereotyping, and how it was taboo to discuss such things.

[SweetQintheLights]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 7:39pm

Well, it had other things in it too. I think it was the same episode on 20/20...or maybe it was another one.

Where the did a stud with something about golf. And then another one was they gave a puzzle to 2 groups of people. One group was told that they were measuring their mental abilty- (something like that) and the other group was told that it was for fun. The group that had it for "fun" was done faster because they weren't really "competing" or trying to show ability; they didn't have to "worry" about how they were doing.

And then there was one with blue eyed kids and brown eyed. They seperated them and one day told the brown eyed kids they were very, very smart and special. They told the blue eyed kids that they were average and they need to work extra hard. When both groups took a test, the brown eyed kids did much better because they were living up to what they were told/expectations.

Then another day, they took another group of kids and told the blue eyed kids that they were very, very smart and special and told the brown eyed kids that that they were average and needed to work extra hard. When given the same test to both groups, the blue eyed kids did better because they were the ones that were told they were smart and extra special and this they were living up to what they were told/expectations.

Did that make any sense? Did I totally go off-topic?

So sorry- back to our regular scheduled discussion

[Jon]

Posted: 9/25/06 at 8:58pm

The golf one had African-American men going through a mini-golf type putting range. When they were told it was a test of their natural athletic ability, they did well. When they were told it was a test of their intellectual ability to solve problems, they dod poorly. It showed that African-American men have been conditioned to beleive they are naturally good at sports, but not naturally intellegent. Being told it was an intellegence test made them nervous, and they performed badly.

[luvsbway]

Posted: 9/26/06 at 12:42pm

The blue eyes vs brown eyes was a PBS special back in the early 80's. It aired on their NOVA series and and was called A Class Divided. It was available at my local library. Very good and you will have a lot as a class to talk about after watching it.

[Yero my Hero]

Posted: 9/26/06 at 3:52pm

I've seen lots of studies like that. The group that stresses over the task will do worse than the group that doesn't. This particularly affects minorities. I think I read one study where four groups of kids or teenagers (I forget which) were given identical tests. The groups were divided into white and black kids. One white group and one black group were told that the test didn't really matter, it was just an experiment. The other two groups were told that it was a measure of their intelligence. The two white groups performed about equally, but the black group that had more at stake did considerably worse. Now that's an argument against standardized tests if I ever heard one.

Of my good friends in middle school happened to be black. He was really smart, got straight As, all that. Well, Massachusetts adopted a standardized test that all 8th graders needed to pass in order to graduate. It was pretty new. Our class was the first that needed to pass. The previous two classes had taken the test as an experiment. Anyway, my friend did not pass. He had to provide samples of his work and letters from his teachers in order to graduate on time. He ended up graduating as valedictorian. That made me lose all faith in any kind of standardized test.