Discussion topics and concepts from week five

¶ … culture affects him or her in particular ways. There exists such a concept as social reality, which says that which we are surrounded with or brought up with creeps into our brain and effects the way we see things. This makes sense for our brain is influenced and developed by our milieu and social upbringing.

Aside from society, there is also gender that influences the way we judge and, accordingly, behave.

Culture first. I am a Latino. Although living in America for a while, I find that there are certain differences that I have absorbed from my family and my culture that step into my teaching and differentiate me form the 'normal' American (if there is such a thing). first of all, I abhor the American way of competition and individualism. I think working together is preferable than working against one another.

I also find myself less driven to demand success from my students than others do. What I mean by this is that I consider character and quality of person to be more important than performance. I do not understand all this onus on performance and see it as potentially self and socially (at least in a classroom perspective) destructive. I think academic rating should be directed towards character excellence as well as, or perhaps even more so than, to academic performance. After all, the one often exceeds and leads to the other. It is social and emotional skills that eventuate in vocational success and success in life as well as -- and arguably to a greater degree than -- academic performance does.

I have often been told that I am more serene. That too, if true, is a general Latino trait. The general American is more stress-driven. For Hispanics, on the other hand, the present has more value than the future. We are throughly lodged in the present.

I also see myself as being more warm with the children than American generally are. I am given more to touch and that is both positive, and, in contemporary American society, also negative in that it can be misconstrued.

Hispanics have a special way with children that can sometimes seem to be permissive. I believe that it is good because the playfulness gives the child a certain sense of identity. There is none of the rudeness that is sometimes seen in the American classroom. Rather the child grows up dependent on the adult, and yet is given sufficient freedom to foster his identity. I think that is a wonderful sort of education.

In a similar way, and this leads me to another point, I am still disturbed with the American laxity towards respect of adults. Likely, some of this unease with the Western mode makes itself felt in my teaching. Our culture is very formal and respectful towards adults. Children, for instance, often use formal titles when addressing adults, and we tend to be very polite. Many American that I know interpret this as subservience, but it is not so. It is rather respect towards an elder age. Americans seem to lack this, respecting youth rather than age. It is matters such as these that invariably and unavoidably effect my teaching.

Being a female also affects my teaching. Females are supposed to be softer, more compassionate, more intuitive, and less judgmental than the masculine sex. We are known as the mothering breed. Of course, this is a generalization, and there are always females such as Margaret Thatcher or Hilary Clinton -- or even Evita -- that break these rules and are masculine forms incarnate.

Nonetheless, I think that my female sex has influenced my teaching in that it makes me compassionate to my students and makes me earnestly want to mother some of them at times. This is not always positive.