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blackguy-n-Asia
Joined: 21 Apr 2004
Posts: 201
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 Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2004 4:34 pm Post subject: Stereotypes anyone? |
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Importing stereotypes of Western culture should be forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
Many teachers seem to have a need for teaching 'other cultures' by showing classy movies that are regarded as entertainment in the West. They should be careful.
An example would be:
"I teach about African culture in America by showing movies like Friday, Boyz in the Hood and Shaft. We then talk about guns, violence and drugs."
or
" I try to bring Italian culture to my students with movies like Casino, Goodfellas or showing The Sopranos."
We then have a discussion on the Mafia, cement galoshes and words like bada-bing"
or
"Watching Braveheart got my class in tune with Scotts"
Please be careful what you teach your students, there may be a budding Adolf Hitler in the class, just waiting to learn about your biased opinion of others. |
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Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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| Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 4:23 am Post subject: |
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blackguy-n-Asia Wrote:
| Quote: |
Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2004 4:34 pm Post subject: Stereotypes anyone?
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Importing stereotypes of Western culture should be forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
Many teachers seem to have a need for teaching 'other cultures' by showing classy movies that are regarded as entertainment in the West. They should be careful.
An example would be:
"I teach about African culture in America by showing movies like Friday, Boyz in the Hood and Shaft. We then talk about guns, violence and drugs."
or
" I try to bring Italian culture to my students with movies like Casino, Goodfellas or showing The Sopranos."
We then have a discussion on the Mafia, cement galoshes and words like bada-bing"
or
"Watching Braveheart got my class in tune with Scotts"
Please be careful what you teach your students, there may be a budding Adolf Hitler in the class, just waiting to learn about your biased opinion of others.
Dave's ESL Cafe's forums are powered by phpBB 2.0.10 � 2001, |
That is a very good point. I believe Hollywood is not the best to find realistic sources for culture.
Documentaries are good but they tend to put the students asleep.
Any suggestions? |
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Rice Paddy Daddy
Joined: 11 Jul 2004
Posts: 425
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 6:45 pm Post subject: |
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Now that I think of it....
Yesterday, 3 or 4 of my students agreed with each other in saying that they believed Americans always kissed each other on the cheeck when they met each other - even for the 'first time' or 'breaking the ice.'
So, I asked why they had this notion of Americans kissing each other when they meet and all told me that they had seen it in American movies and, thus, believed to be normal behaviour. LOL!! |
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Rice Paddy Daddy
Joined: 11 Jul 2004
Posts: 425
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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Now that I think of it....
Yesterday, 3 or 4 of my students agreed with each other in saying that they believed Americans always kissed each other on the cheeck when they met each other - even for the 'first time' or 'breaking the ice.'
So, I asked why they had this notion of Americans kissing each other when they meet and all told me that they had seen it in American movies and, thus, believed to be normal behaviour. LOL!! |
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logician
Joined: 15 Jan 2004
Posts: 70
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| Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2004 10:12 am Post subject: Re: Stereotypes anyone? |
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| blackguy-n-Asia wrote: |
Importing stereotypes of Western culture should be forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
Many teachers seem to have a need for teaching 'other cultures' by showing classy movies that are regarded as entertainment in the West. They should be careful.
...
Please be careful what you teach your students, there may be a budding Adolf Hitler in the class, just waiting to learn about your biased opinion of others. |
You will be happy and you will be horrified.
You will be happy to learn that my classrooms thus far have been primitive affairs, even lacking overhead projectors, much less TVs for the display of movies.
You will be horrified to learn that these low-tech conditions have thrown me back upon the resources of my unenlightened childhood, when I was forced to memorize evil, racist poetry.
You will be horrified to learn that I exposed vulnerable nine-year-olds to several lines of Vachel Lindsay's horrifically racist poem, "The Congo." (Even mentioning Vachel Lindsay in America would probably get me sued by the local authorities.)
I did stop and ask comprehension checking questions to make them tell me why many people would think it was mean to refer to black men as "bucks." (The answer I elicited was that because "bucks" can refer to male non-human animals as well as humans, the poet's words are ambiguous.)
The lines in question:
FAT black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
�
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
�
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
�
Pounded on the table,
�
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
���������
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
I have no doubt that in ten to fifteen years my former students will have invaded at least one sovereign state in Africa and committed war crimes that make the Rape of Nanjing pale in comparison. Whatever chance they had at free will or human compassion has been swept away by Vachel Lindsay's hypnotic brainwashing.
Thank God I didn't screen "Dead Poets Society." They would have burst from the classroom, overthrown the government, and invaded Manchuria. My reign of terror is not yet over, though: I may still burst into the psyche of innocent Asia and inflict upon them some horror of bygone centuries of hatred and oppression -- I may yet force students to read Kipling's "Gunga Din." |
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blackguy-n-Asia
Joined: 21 Apr 2004
Posts: 201
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| Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2004 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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You could do well to read Mein Kampf. Our good friend started on his journey with his 'education'.
Some children have no other outlet to the 'real' world than through their teachers.
Some cultures put an enormous amount of respect on teachers. What they say is golden.
Lastly, children start to discriminate between races and 'which ones are good and bad' by the age of 10 or 11. This behavior is taught by their parents, teachers and peers. What they hear and see guides them.
"If ignorance is the father of racism, hate is the stepchild' Hao, bu hao? |
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Xenophobe
Joined: 11 Nov 2003
Posts: 163
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2004 2:56 am Post subject: |
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| Try showing your older students a movie like Schindler's List. This helps clear up a few misconceptions many of the Chinese have about racism and race relations in Western nations. |
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lagerlout2006
Joined: 17 Sep 2003
Posts: 985
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2004 6:31 pm Post subject: |
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LOGICIAN---that's the funniest thing I have seen  in ages here. HAH... |
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BethMac
Joined: 23 Dec 2003
Posts: 79
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2004 10:10 pm Post subject: |
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| I like to show students the film Men of Honor. Generally, they are shocked by the racism they see in the movie. But it is a true story and it gives them a different perspective on American history and culture. |
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logician
Joined: 15 Jan 2004
Posts: 70
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| Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 8:37 am Post subject: |
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| blackguy-n-Asia wrote: |
You could do well to read Mein Kampf. Our good friend started on his journey with his 'education'.
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I think I had to read an excerpt in history class once. I have many demands on my time, but if it's available for free, maybe a text file online, I might read it.
I am happy to say that Vachel Lindsay and Rudyard Kipling have many of their poems online for free. Google is my source, I don't have the sites bookmarked.
Who is "our good friend"? Huey Long? Robert Benchley? Amelia Earhart?
I'm not sure if "our good friend" is supposed to be Hitler. I'm a little too thick to complete the enthymeme, I need to have it spelled out.
| blackguy-n-Asia wrote: |
Some children have no other outlet to the 'real' world than through their teachers.
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If teachers had access to the real world, they would live more enlightened lives. Teachers are not especially enlightened. They may be brainwashed by American/Western culture, but that doesn't constitute objectivity.
I love the culture made by American individuals, with souls and elbows. The mass-produced culture surrogate churned out by American corporations, on the other hand, disgusts me. Corporations have no souls.
I could do the politically-correct teacher gig and indoctrinate the Taiwanese with the mass-produced shopping mall propaganda. That would not the bringing the Taiwanese into the real world. That would be lulling them to sleep with a fakery that stinks of focus groups and market segments.
| blackguy-n-Asia wrote: |
Some cultures put an enormous amount of respect on teachers. What they say is golden.
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If my employers or students ever had any respect for me, I didn't notice. I think some of the students found me somewhat entertaining, but that's not what I call respect.
I think the Taiwanese culture pays lip service to the notion that teachers are respected, but I don't think what the Taiwanese offer qualifies as respect in my book. Maybe it's what they think of as respect.
| blackguy-n-Asia wrote: |
Lastly, children start to discriminate between races and 'which ones are good and bad' by the age of 10 or 11. This behavior is taught by their parents, teachers and peers. What they hear and see guides them.
"If ignorance is the father of racism, hate is the stepchild' Hao, bu hao? |
I am sorry to say that even newborns demonstrate discrimination based on visual input.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3631018.stm
The University of Exeter study reveals that infants are born with in-built preferences which help them to make sense of their new environment.
Newborns were shown two images side by side, one showing an attractive face and the other a less attractive one.
The researchers say the infants spent more time looking at the attractive face than the less attractive one.
"You can show them pair after pair of faces that are matched for everything other than attractiveness. This leads to the conclusion that babies are born with a very detailed representation of the human face," said Dr Alan Slater, a psychologist at Exeter.
Bottom line, if we're going to start referencing psychology and neurophysiology to make claims about how racism happens, we might very well reach the conclusion that racism is physiologically determined. I'm not a neurophysiologist but I had to read some of their journals a long time ago.
The little I know of human neurophysiology leads me to suspect that violence and hatred are physiological, just like altruism, martyrdom, eroticism, and other human behaviors which are mistaken for spirituality.
Cultural racism can obviously be avoided. Do not make your students write fifty words celebrating ethnic cleansing. Great, I think we can all say without fear of contradiction that we have never assigned a creative writing project lionizing ethnically motivated violence.
If you start censoring art for fear that it might be racist, you might as well drop art entirely. It's *all* dangerous. If, on the other hand, you have truly monumental art which is a fine example of English pronunciation, such as Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," demonstrate it for the students. And ask them comprehension-checking questions, as I did, on why the word "buck" got so many people angry.
(If I had the time and resources, I would have played recordings of Dead Prez and Public Enemy's more political songs -- at least samples. Both are significant to the history of English art, and both of them upset a lot of people. Time will tell if they will be remembered as long as Vachel Lindsay.)
But Dead Prez and Vachel Lindsay were actual human beings with souls and elbows. The education boards and textbook corporations which mass-market the "Celebrate Diversity" product are soulless.
I don't think students are well served by any kind of insincerity or dishonesty. I have seen a lot of mediocre teachers make mediocre attempts at avoiding racism. American kids can smell insincerity -- I suspect all kids can.
If you want to make your students better people morally, you have to give them an example of a moral life. If you want to make them egalitarian and respectful of diversity, you have to demonstrate egalitarianism and respect for diversity. The only way you can teach people to be better is by example.
And the supposedly anti-racist programs which attempt to respect diversity do not accomplish that goal.
Anti-racist programs, undertaken with a lack of sincerity, make racism much worse.
(It should be noted that your original objection was to Hollywood movies. I hate Hollywood movies also, and I would not show them in a classroom. Hollywood not only lacks sincerity, it is positively medacious.) |
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