Writing Collection: the Positive and Negative Effects of Peer Pressure

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Writing Collection: The Positive and Negative Effects of Peer Pressure

Task Prompt 25: What are the positive and negative effects of peer pressure? After reading The Pact and various newspaper articles about the Three Doctors on the influences of friends on future goals and dreams, write a letter to your fellow high school students that examines the causes of one of the doctor’s successes and struggles and explains the effect(s) of the pact he made with his two friends. What conclusions or implications can you draw? Support your discussion with evidence from the text(s).

Introduction

In a quick write, write your first reaction to the task prompt. What strategies might you use to gain knowledge of the issue and form an opinion?

Prompt Analysis

In your own words, write a brief explanation of what the task is asking you to do.

Product Plan

What should your final product look like?

Define

Content VocabularyAcademic Dialogue

Influence:Cause:

Peer Pressure:Factual Examples:

Pact: Effect:

Emulate: Editorial:

Intervene: Opinions:

Initial Thoughts Blog Post: What does “peer pressure” mean? What has been your experience with it, either negative or positive, up to this point?

Reading

Active Reading/Note taking —Writing Standard 2

After reading “George on Peer Pressure” from The Pact, list the positive effects of peer pressure and the negative effects of peer pressure. As you record these effects, be sure to include specific quotes from the book with citations.

George on: Peer Pressure

People often ask me how I avoided getting caught up in some of the negative things that many of the guys in my neighborhood were doing when I was growing up. I’ve often thought about that question myself. There wasn’t anything special about me. But I’d have to say that the kinds of friends I chose – positive guys who wanted to do the right thing – made a huge difference in how my life turned out.

In my experience, friends have more influence on one another’s lives than almost anyone else does, especially in those teenage years when kids are trying to discover who they really are. So hooking up with the wrong crowd can really drag you down.

Think about it. Most kids, rich or poor, spend more time with their friends than with their parents. They’re together all day at school. They’re together in the neighborhood after school. And they’re together on the weekends. Maybe they even spend their summers together at summer camp. Their friends define what is acceptable and cool. I’ve never known a kid who doesn’t want to be accepted, myself included. That can be particularly dangerous among boys because something about our makeup or upbringing suggests that to be macho is to be cool. And the wrong set of friends can persuade us that to prove how tough we are, we have to do crazy things, from small acts of defiance or bravado – like shoplifting, daring kids to do things we’d never do ourselves, or bullying – to more serious behavior, like using or selling drugs, getting into fights, stealing cars, robbing people, or worse. That’s why its so important to hang with the right people.

As a kid, I aligned myself with guys who thought like me, guys who did their work in school and avoided the negative stuff. And many of the friends I chose in my neighborhood were younger. I guess in some ways that satisfied my need to be accepted, because they looked up to me. I was pretty much winging it back then, just doing what felt right to me. But with hindsight, I realize that avoiding the older, more intimidating boys, and even becoming a big brother to my friends, was an excellent strategy. It allowed me to set the standard in my group for what was cool. I wasn’t in to drug dealing, stealing, or scheming, so my friends weren’t, either. There were always other guys doing other things, but they didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother them.

In high school, I followed the same pattern and chose friends who did well in school but still liked to have fun. That’s what drew me to Rameck and Sam. We have the same core desire to make something of our lives, and we brought out the best in one another. We weren’t exactly alike, but that was ok. They never tried to pressure me to indulge. In fact, they never even drank in front of me, so we were cool. I had to put up with some good-natured ribbing every now and then from some of our friends, but I knew it was all in fun. I suppose those were the times when my own confidence came into play. I didn’t like the taste of alcohol, and that was that.

Even though Rameck and Sam would eventually follow neighborhood friends into trouble, I admire them for also having the good sense to recognize that those friends were no good for them, and for having the guts to break away.

I’m not foolish enough to believe that I was able to avoid negative peer pressure alone. In the kind of neighborhood where I grew up, it would have been easy to believe that what I saw was all there was to life. But I had a third-grade teacher who taught me how to dream and to think for myself. I had a friend whose father spent god time with me and made me feel I was worthy of a father’s love. And most of all, I had a mother who worked hard and managed to keep things straight at home.

When I look back over my life and the lives of my friends, I also see that involvement in school and community activities helped us to avoid the negative pull of our peers. I joined the Shakespeare Club in elementary school and the Police Athletic League in elementary and junior high, and I played baseball in high school. Sam took karate lessons from grade school through his early years in high school and also played on our high school baseball team. And Rameck took drama lessons in junior high school and in high school he joined the drama club and helped start the United Students Organization. Those activities gave us fun things with which to occupy our minds and our time. But perhaps even more valuable, they provided safe places for us to meet other kids who shared the same interests.

Its hard to have the confidence, especially in the teen years, to stand up for what you believe is right when people all around you are pulled in another direction. That’s where having positive friendships can really help. If you find the right guys to hang with – guys you trust, who share your values and your friendship – you’ll find that you can stand up to almost anything.

You may even be surprised how much you can accomplish together. I certainly was.

Use specific quotes from the passage in the chart below.

Writing Standard 2

Synthesize this information into a brief paragraph.

Exit Slip: Why was this passage an effective choice for determining positive and negative effects? Write this as a blog post.

Essential Vocabulary/Active Reading/Text Selection Writing Standard 6

Informational Article 1

Authors and 'Three Doctors' bond with fathers

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEWARK — They're three friends from Newark's inner city who demolished the stereotypes, overcame the odds and became doctors and authors.

They called themselves "The Three Doctors." Their third book, The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers (Riverhead, $24.95), arrives Thursday.

That also happens to be the birthday of Rameck Hunt's father, Alim Bilal. An ex-con and former drug addict, Bilal belatedly put his life together, inspired by his son's success.

"The publisher didn't know it was his birthday," Hunt says. "It's spooky in a way, but maybe it's a sign: that it's a book that was meant to be."

Hunt, Sampson Davis and George Jenkins, all 34, grew up in broken homes. As they tell it, their mothers and grandmothers did all the heavy lifting of being parents. Their fathers were mostly absent.

That part of the story is all too familiar. The rest is not: The three friends pledged in their senior year of high school that they would all go to college, then on to medical school.

They did, and they wrote about it in their 2002 best seller, The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream. A children's version, WeBeat the Street: How a Friendship Pact Led to Success, followed in 2005.

Hunt, an internist at the University Medical Center in Princeton, N.J., came up with the idea for the new book. At first, he thought it would be about just him and his father.

But as he talked to Davis and Jenkins, "we realized that each of us had a similar but different story to tell. We had all grown up in a world where it seemed normal for men to abandon their children."

Davis, an emergency-room doctor at Newark's St. Michael's Medical Center and two other hospitals, has a Christmas memory of the year when he was 6 when his father pulled a gun on his mother.

"Mine wasn't the kind of house where you could learn a lot about conflict resolution," he says.

Jenkins, a dentist in Harlem and a professor at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine, grew up with little contact with his father, who lived in South Carolina.

"I'm not sure I even knew his phone number," he says.

Never a Father's Day

In their predominantly poor and black Newark neighborhood, Hunt says, "Father's Day was kind of like Rosh Hashana," the Jewish New Year. "It seemed like a celebration for other people, a day that belonged to another culture."

For their book, they enlisted the assistance of Margaret Bernstein, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who wrote an article about them they liked.

They set out not only to describe their childhoods but also to include their fathers' stories and the sons' attempts to get past their lingering resentments. "Sometimes a son has to take it upon himself to bridge the gap when a father can't," is how Hunt puts it.

At the end of a workday last week, the three doctors all looked tired. They were meeting at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where they have an office for their educational/medical foundation (threedoctorsfoundation .org). But the more they talked about their book, the more energetic they became

Not that is was easy to write. Jenkins recalls that his initial enthusiasm for the project dredged up "bitter feelings I had buried about my dad, feelings that eat at you and can eat you up." For a while, he stopped work on the book, waiting to see chapters from Davis and Hunt. And he had to persuade his father to open up to Bernstein about his failures. Jenkins says, "My attitude was, 'At least he can do this for me.' "

Davis' father, Kenneth, 81, became too ill to cooperate, but the other two dads did. "Both were extremely likable men," Bernstein says. "Although they were absentee fathers, they weren't villains."

By then, Hunt's father, 52, had rebuilt his life and talked "easily about his life and his flaws and his many regrets," she says. "He knew how to wield his personal story effectively, like a cautionary tale."

She found George Jenkins Sr., 65, "wanted badly to not repeat the pattern of fatherlessness he'd had in his own life. Yet he didn't know how to create that bond during his brief visits with his son. I found it sad; he had thought he could wait until George became a man to explain his side of the story, but it was too little too late."

Newark: 'Worst of all'

In 1975, two years after the three doctors were born, Harper's analyzed the 50 largest cities and declared that Newark "stands without serious challenge as worst of all." After decades of losing white and middle-class black residents, downtown is in what officials call a "renaissance," but Newark remains one of the most violent cities. Per capita, its murder rate is three times higher than New York's.

In August, even jaded Newark was shocked by the murders of three black college students who, police said, weren't involved with a gang or drugs, just socializing at a playground. Witnesses said they were lined up and shot in the head in an apparent robbery.

"It's so senseless," Jenkins says. "They weren't bad kids. They weren't in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. How can you protect them?"

Hunt knows how quickly a life can change on the streets. At 16, he got into a fight with a crackhead, and to show off to his friends, he "gently" stabbed him in the thigh with a knife. Hunt was charged with attempted murder, but the case was thrown out when the victim failed to appear in court. The close call helped him realize "that being a rough guy wasn't me."

None of the three doctors is married or a father. All are dating, a subject they kid each other about. And all say that growing up with absentee fathers has made relationships with women harder.

"I never got a chance to see how to treat a lady every day, how to compromise, how to make a relationship work while raising a family," Jenkins says.

Hunt says: "We didn't write a how-to book. We're not telling anyone how to be a good father. But we wanted to help inspire and provoke people to think about their fathers or their sons and daughters."

He hopes the book is "more universal than it appears on the cover: three young black guys, like this is only a problem for black families."

Statistics do show fatherlessness is most common among poor black families, but Hunt says: "It can be problem even if the dad is in the home but emotionally unavailable. They don't have statistics for that."

At the funeral of Davis' father in May, a relative showed Davis a copy of a résumé Davis wrote when he was in medical school.

"My dad had made copies of it and sent it around to relatives down South to show what I had done. He was proud of me, but he couldn't tell me directly. So part of me has to say, 'That's OK. That's who he was.' "

For years, Jenkins didn't want anyone to think "that my father had something to do with the success I've experienced. So I admit that I have put up a wall between us."

Changing that remains a work in progress. His father's chapter in the book ends hopefully: "I continue to invite George to family reunions so he can meet the folks down here who are so proud of him. Perhaps one of these days, he'll make it."

Jenkins hasn't but says he hopes to someday: "It's always at the wrong time. I'm busy. I've got a new job, and I've got the foundation, and I've got my own life.

"But it's not malicious. I used to have a lot of resentment that he wasn't there when I needed him, but at some point you've got to let it go and say, 'What's the point?' One of these years, I'll make that reunion."

Instructions: Using the article above about the Three Doctors’ fathers, as well as information from The Pact, fill in the Venn Diagram, with one side representing the influences of family members, and the other side representing the influence of friends, etc. outside the family.

Synthesize this information into a brief paragraph:

Describe the causes of the doctors’ distance from their fathers as well as the effects of this distance on their lives as adults. HINT: who did the doctors turn to in place of their fathers?

Note-taking: Writing Standard 2

Novel Passage 2:

Rameck on: Giving Back

I discovered early in my childhood that you don’t need money or status to enrich another person’s life. Anybody with passion and purpose can do so.

Throughout my life, people have given generously of their time, skills, money, and more to help me succeed. They all had busy lives, and they didn’t owe me a thing. Yet they gave. I’ve always believed in the old adage that says much is required of those to whom much is given. So I’ve always felt compelled to give back.

George, Sam, and I believe strongly that God protected us and lifted us up so that we could become examples to kids today – especially kids growing up in poor communities – of what is possible for them. That’s why we started the mentoring program called Ujima in our freshman year of college, and, more recently, the Three Doctors Foundation.