Korean Job Discussion Forums

[RACETRAITOR]

Over half of the smartest kids in my school had brown eyes and black hair. Of course, they were all Asian.

[krats1976]

I also have eyes that change color with my wardrobe or mood (tend to be more green when I'm tired or angry, for example).

Kinda fun.

[Lao Wai]

You people are all retarded...er..mentally challenged...er...special needs..er...exceptional learners. Yes, I think that last term is the accepted term nowadays. You are all just so 'exceptional'.

[billybrobby]

oh, so all the stars with eye surgery and the plastic surgery ads are part of a giant experiment to see what happens when double-eyelids are promoted over single eyelids?

i wonder when it will end.

[heydelores]

Here's part 5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXcO0Ah64rM&NR

[ella]

Star-belly Sneetches...

[jmbran11]

One of our teachers did this activity for our (adult) students for Culture Day at our company. It was a lead in to the history of the American Civil Rights movement.

I believe he separated them out by birthdays somehow. It really pissed them off, but I imagine it had the intended effect, because Koreans don't have a history of discussing racism (or sexism, bias against religions, etc.) in the same way Westerners do. I would try it for a university class.

[EFLtrainer]

Keep in mind, as you do the experiment, that the problem with it was the ethics involved. Experimenting on people without their knowledge can be quit dodgy. Perhaps particularly for a teacher.

[heydelores]

At the end of Part 5 (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXcO0Ah64rM&NR ), the teacher advises that the activity probably shouldn't be done in every classroom and certainly shouldn't be carried out by every teacher. I think it's pretty sound advice.

[superacidjax]

I think Gangnam has a clinic doing eye transplants for people that want blue eyes.

[Young FRANKenstein]

[grainger]

I had a grade 10 english teacher who did a similar type of experiment with us. As a way of teaching us how easily we can become willing participants in our own discrimination. Kind of like how the blue eyed people who never spoke up became willing through inaction.

He had most of the class wearing card board collars by the end of the period because that was easier than resisting, standing up for ourselves, and facing the consequences of doing so. He used it as a way to explain how things could possibly get as bad as they did in Nazi Germany. I can't remember the book but the man was brilliant.

There was also another experiment done after world war two in which psychologists put a person on one side of a screen with a device that they were told would deliever an an increasingly painful shock to the person on the other side of the screen whenever they got the answer to a question wrong. What the subject delivering the electric shocks didn't know was that the person they were supposed to be shocking was really just an actor pretending to be shocked. The actor would eventually pretend to go into cardiac arrest but the person delivering the shock would keep on shocking them just because the authority figure, the psychologist, told them they had to. Some of the subjects were in tears but they kept on pressing the button.

I can't remember what consequences were set in place for disobeying the authority figure, monetary I'd imagine, but no one did. The experiment was conducted to try and figure out why the German soldiers would follow orders making them responsible for the deaths of countless innocent Jewish citizens.

It was an eye opener to how people are programmed to submit to an authority figure.

It really opened the door to a discussion of ethics in psychology too. This and Dr. Watson conditioning babies to be afraid of bunny rabbits. That was pretty bad.

[maya.the.bee]

[KOREAN_MAN]

[Ya-ta Boy]

The PBS series Frontline has a documentary about the teacher, Jane Elliot, and the class activity.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/


I'm sure you have all noticed that it happened in Iowa.