Beginning of the summer.

So I have wrapped up my year at the local high school and have taken off a bit of time from any analysis, work or thinking from the most part. But I have found myself explaining what I have observed and how students are perceived and present themselves. I have had a few ideas for chapter headings Chapter 1: Introduction Who are we?; Chapter 2: Difference makes it all better; Chapter 3: I am not the spokesperson for whateverness.
I have been thinking of how to write up vignettes and what types of ones I want to write. I want to start with descriptions of the students, teachers and school. Maybe 2 pages per each. They need to include physical descriptions of the students, character descriptions, family. There should be a description of the school day. And this is all outside of other pieces of the puzzle as they fit together. I can start writing these pieces as I go through the analysis.
One of the things I would like to do with it is get some small papers to post on my academia site. Plus I have to write stuff about me and about tay. Those pieces can be the first article I write I suppose. It is interesting how much of this generates thoughts about my experiences in Iceland as a child or the way things worked after I had tay and was dealing however obliviously with the way this society treats minorities and those who dane to have children or live within the minority communities. Now I worry that i see too much race in things. Do kids talk about it. Kat was saying yesterday that her son never indicates what racial group his friends are in. She think is it is because it just isn't an issue. But that makes me wonder if we are glossing over something that is still such an important issue. If equality was no longer an issue, then graduation rates and drop out rates would tell a totally different story.
So what is it that I am studying? I am examining how the school experience plays out for students who have parents from different racial backgrounds. When I began planning the study my initial intention was to only select students of European and African American heritage. But after spending time in the school, it became clearer to me that just selecting such a sample was not really representative of the students in this one school. In just identifying the students, which I did using the following methods: Teacher or administrators other students and through self revelation. More often than not you can tell who the mixed race children are, or so I thought. One of the young men I included in the study was only identified as multiracial by a cousin who is also part of the study. The cousin informed me the other boy was actually mixed African American and Native American. I had already formed a good relationship with the student so I invited him to join the study. So the final selection of subjects included students who are European American, African American, Native American (multiple different tribes, Hawaiian American, Israeli. I realized as I gathered students for the study that there were so many varieties and mixtures of races and cultures that limiting my sample in such simple terms as black and white was not possible.