#creativestrat

We were asked to write a Manifesto on the way brands SHOULD work. This is mine:

Today. Tonight. & Tomorrow.

by Bianca Pallotta 

Today, we are passionate learners.  

We listen.

We are media savages, yet we still understand the basics of communication.

We respect our family, friends, strangers, and customers.

We thrive in perpetuity, sustaining our society, economy, environment, and culture.

We believe in honesty and in karma.

We balance idealism and realism.

We are simple.

We do not work well with the selfish, the cynical, or the couch potatoes. 

For now, we are the unknown creative.

  Tonight, we are curious pioneers.

We salvage and cherish any information beneath, above, and around our path.

We do not know everything, but we will keep our knowledge current.

We create.

We are critiqued.

We fail. We fail. We fail.

We are a critic.

We perfect until our work is a divine cathedral.

We still fail.

We will work late tonight, polishing our expertise.

Tomorrow, we attack.

We are assembled, yet nimble.

We are prepared, confident, and courageous.

We do not settle with great.

We will terminate the average and liquidate the liars.

We do not settle with great.

I used to be best friends with a girl. She and I did everything together: walk home from school, go to the movies, spend the night; if I was out of the house, I was with her. It was a relationship of friend dates and late night phone calls. I thought we'd be friends forever until we were old and wrinkly, still laughing at our inside jokes. But, there were problems: depression, manipulation, jealousy. And so, as many friendships do, ours ended. I had thought that I'd be devastated without her, yet our friendship slowly disintegrated in an oddly neutral way; it was the best outcome either of us could have hoped for.

And when it ended, I realized something. I realized I had been denying my codependency. I realized my stubbornness in refusing to see the sickness that had grown between us. I realized that the change wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be; I could live without her. And, after I finally cut the dying flesh out of the wound and let it heal, I realized I was happier.

When Pottermore came out, everyone was freaking out over which house they were going to be in. Incidentally, I ended up in Slytherin. Now, people said, “You chose the answers that would get you in that house,” and,”You’re just in it because you like Snape,”. But the thing is that I really do act like a Slytherin. While I’m not the most cunning of people, I can be quite cruel. I’m extremely selfish, and I judge everyone.

There's a bit of an issue with gender stereotyping. We all know it happens because we've all experienced it as well as committed it. Now, while there are biological differences between men and women, society and culture still has a big hand in the whole she-bang. And it starts young.

Even as children, boys and girls are segregated with what toys they are expected to play with. Toys are geared towards the different genders based on traditional gender characteristics, where females are thought of “as emotional, gentle, understanding, and creative while masculine traits include [being] aggressive, active, dominant, and competitive” (from C. E. Campenni's study “Gender Stereotyping of Children's Toys: a Comparison of Parents and Nonparents”). Boys are given materials to build with, figures that can be dissembled and reassembled, war hero characters, and other spatial awareness-boosting, war-based toys. Girls, however, play with dolls, sing, or learn how to bake with their toys. Boys are encouraged to have battles with the actions figures while girls are told to play house. This behavior sets up stereotypes for our children before they can fully understand their roles in society.

A good start in either helping a child lose weight or helping them learn healthy habits is to not make food a reward; this helps break the connection between food and approval. Instead of forcing healthy food down your kid's throat, find healthy foods they enjoy. This helps them learn both the control they have over what they put in their bodies as well as the responsibility they have in making good choices for themselves.

Parents should also do activities with their children, from doing household chores together to running around outside at a local park. This allows both parties to be active while creating a strong bond together. The more a parent does, the more the child will want to do.

Parents, above all, are role-models. For teenaged children, packing their lunch for school is an easy way of helping them make healthy food-related choices. Parents can also provide their family with a gym membership; this can help parents themselves stay motivated to become more active while also being an interest for older children.

In “Teaching to the Testosterone”, Elizabeth Weil not only reports on but seems to support the recent deviation in America's education system from co-ed classrooms to single-gendered classrooms. Weil points out that this switch has been facilitated mainly by the work of Leonard Sax and his theory that males and females should be taught differently because they learn differently. Yet, due to the fight for gender equality in America, gender segregation in school is a controversial topic and many find it sexist. I'm not one to refute scientific evidence, but I think it's understandable to be concerned over gender segregation in schooling. The implications it has on how children would act in their adult life could be detrimental (I wouldn't want my first real experiences with men to be when I was a grown woman), and one could only really say this style of education is effective after conducting a longitudinal study comparing it with current teaching techniques.

I think that the separation of boys and girls at a young age could easily teach them to be distrustful of the opposite gender. The opening anecdote of the article describes a boys-only class and how the fourth graders enjoy being away from girls because their female peers “don't appreciate their jokes and think [they] are too messy, and are also scared of snakes”. Now, if a boy is kept away from females during his schooling—a time where he is supposed to learn how people interact—he could easily keep those childish views of femininity through to adulthood, which could damage his relations with women in general. I mean, yeah, that's a bit of a slippery slope, but if a boy thinks girls do not like his joking attitude and he is then never given a situation where he might find a girl who does enjoy his humor, what reason does he have to change his view of women when he grows older? And if such a boy is an only-child or grows up with only brothers, school could be one of the few places he has an opportunity to gain knowledge of how girls who are not his mother act. Children learn about how to make relationships with people and how to respect those who are different from themselves in school.

They are given a place slightly similar to the 'real world' with peers to get along with and work to do and authorities to abide by. And to give children the example that they should be separated in order to perform better could also affect job-performance during adulthood due to mixed gender workplaces and equal-opportunity employment.

I am 1/5th American. I took the immigration test and got 2 out of the 10 questions correct. Therefore, I'm only really 1/5th an American, right? What really makes an American an American anyway? How many senators there are? Who the Chief Justice on the Supreme Court is? No.

We are America. We the people. We the crowds and the protestors, we the women and children, we the workers, the volunteers, the lovers. We the tired and weary, we the trying and trying and trying. Yes, we have rich and poor, old and young, self-sacrificing and selfish, but we are America. We are not Justice John G. Roberts, we are not 100 or 435 or one man in a house. We are the people.