Job Discussion Forums

[Cdaniels]

Valley_girl does bring up some thoughtful points, though. Is it just knowing the audience, but also the specific role as teacher in certain settings.

Here's a joke that requires quite a bit of knowledge of English. A man walks into a bar with a Genie's lamp. Behind him comes a tiny, 1 foot tall man in a tuxedo who jumps over to an unused piano and starts playing magnificent music with this feet. The bartender asks the lamp's owner who the little piano player is. He says, "Well the Genie of this Lamp doesn't understand English very well." Bartender: "that's hard to beleive!" Man:"Well, I wasn't wishing for a 12 inch pianist!"

(Usually I add in other details about getting a million ducks instead of bucks, etc., but that has more to do with timing, and doesn't add much to the joke when its written down)

[Justin Trullinger]

I like that one!


And about sexism in the classroom. It depends a lot on where you're at, I guess, but in my experience, gender roles and attitudes provide good fodder for classroom debates, and good opportunities to enhance cultural awareness. Gender roles and ideas about them vary a lot from culture to culture, and a lot of things that are taken as "normal" here would be seen as deeply sexist in my country of origin, amongst others.

For example, I might write "A woman's place is in the home," on the board, then divide students into groups to debate for and against this obviously sexist idea. It's good debating practice, and also gets them to explore a lot of cultural assumptions about gender. I don't see anything wrong with this.

So in a more advanced class, if I told a blatantly sexist joke, got them to enumerate the ideas and assumptions implicit in the joke, and then debate those ideas, what would be wrong with that?

If I just told a sexist joke for humour value, then moved on, I would run the risk of appearing to endorse the view implicit in the joke. Not good. But properly used, I really believe that "offensive" material can serve a legitimate educational purpose.

It's really not about the material, but about whether you use it to further your purposes as a professional educator, or merely to amuse your students. And that is the difference between being a professional teacher, and a trained monkey.

Regards,
Justin

[Guy Courchesne]

Good points JT...I agree

[dmb]

[Cdaniels]

I think JT is really onto something with presenting gender roles as teaching material.

Deborah Tannen wrote a book, "You Just Don't Understand!" which made me understand how differences between men and women, and how they communicate, will always be a topic of interest.
Finland was one of the first (the first?) country to grant women voting rights. Some speculate that the gender equity in their culture has to do with the language. (which I beleive has no gender) Yet there is an old Finnish saying relating marraige to a rowboats: "the woman rows, the man steers."

[Guy Courchesne]

[Justin Trullinger]

I'm not sure about the first country to give voting rights to women- I've always heard USSR (1917) but I have no idea when it happened in Finland.

Has anybody here tried to learn finish? I had a Finnish colleague once, who told me that, in addition to lacking gender, it lacks a lot of social conventions which seem to be common to all the languages I have studied. (Please and Thank You, for example)

Regards,
Justin

[dmb]

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Henry_Cowell]

[Guy Courchesne]

This site says the US was first, for woment to stand in elections. But not to vote?

http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/suffrage.htm

[Henry_Cowell]

[Cdaniels]

Apparently the first European country to give women the right to vote as part of universal suffrage (over 18, no landowning or literacy requirements)
http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25734
Finnish is not an Indo-European language and is related to Hungarian (yes, Hungarian) and to the Sami (Lappish) language. Soumi is the Finnish word for Finland. I got as far as learning "perkele," a Finnish swear meaning "to the devil" It was apparently originally a name of a local pagan diety. I've heard competitive skiiers shout this when leaving the gate! BTW "The Cuckoo" is an excellent film about a Finnish soldier, a Russian soldier and a Sami women who meet in wartime, and are unable to understand eachother. Tolkien's "Elvish" is based in part on Finnish and the national epic "Kalevala" inspired his writings. The Moomintrolls are from Finland, although they never became popular in US (or anywhere in North America?)

[dmb]

[ls650]