Response to Cultural Paradigm
Oct 12, 2020 Week 5 Response to Cultural Paradigm
It was hot; stifling hot. Our train ride from Riga, Latvia to the beach was only an hour and a half, still I was hot. Before sitting down my son had lowered the upper window on the old Soviet train and still there wasn’t enough of a breeze to cool me down. Having traveled to Japan, I kept a fold-able fan in my bag. I pulled it out and waved furiously, cooling myself. It felt so good to have a breeze blow across me. Looking up at the older couple across from us, I noticed that they were watching me with a strange look. My son noticed me and helped me understand. He had lived two years in Latvia so he knew the customs. In Latvia they don’t use fans to fan themselves because it would spread germs around. That just didn’t make sense to me. In many other countries, especially where it is hot, they use fans a lot. Latvia is a colder climate country and doesn’t experience much heat. They don’t like the air to be moving around them. Looking around to the rest of the train, I noticed many of the windows had been left up. This thought that fanning the air around you would spread germs was something that just didn’t make sense to me.
Little beknown to me, I had just encountered a cultural paradigm. A paradigm is an example or a pattern. In a cultural paradigm these have been taught by our culture in examples from the people around us. Recently, in my TESOL 103 class Professor John Ivers explained “Cultural creates false needs and problems”. Professor Ivers went on to say, “There are simple paradigms like clouds, cars, rocks, houses, okay? And there are complex paradigms like hypocrisy. What is hypocrisy? What is beauty? What is graciousness? What is pride? What is humility? What is laziness? What is funny? What's flirtatious? What's loyal? What's polite? And you know something; those paradigms differ immensely from culture to culture.” It's interesting how culture can teach us so many things by example and we simply take them for truth.
A Ted Talk from Delali Bright was also part of our lesson. In the video, she was taught something about her culture that isn’t true elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Togo, West Africa. She grew up very thin and was taken to many doctors and therapist who tried to fatten her up. In her birthplace, if you are fat you are healthy but if you are thin you are sick and susceptible to disease. She was thought of as ugly. After moving to the United States, she found she was beautiful. In America, we try to be thin; it’s an outward sign of beauty. This is another example of a cultural paradigm. Her cultural upbringing made her believe an untruth. The simple truth is all people are beautiful despite what their culture may tell them. It had me pondering on the importance to seek truth in understanding. We need to look for the good and not judge. Mother Teresa said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” We all have the important task of being slow to form opinions of others and be open to the diversity around us.
As a soon to be ESL teacher, I feel it is important to be aware of students different cultures paradigms. All of us come from a different upbringing and way of thinking. Together we make a diverse community, each with something important to share and understand about each other. The opinions we form will affect the class and how we treat each other. We should try to be open and aware of others upbringing, slow to judge.
Looking back on that hot Latvian train ride to the beach, instead of just thinking how wrong the local people were in their belief of germs spreading by fanning. I wish it were possible to talk and get to know each other. I believe we would have found something we had in common and enjoyed each other’s company on that hot ride. But then again, in my culture as in theirs, we are taught to not be overly friendly with strangers. It makes me think that maybe this is one cultural paradigm that needs to be seen as false and changed.
Oh how right you are about cultural paradigms! I must just comment that living in the South of Africa, I can understand a little about Delali’s predicament, but it’s changed tremendously and I for one would love it if the fuller figure was still the ‘in’ thing. Also we are too friendly in my country, my children moan every time we go to town that I speak to much to all the strangers, but that’s how we were brought up. LOVE reading your post!!!
ReplyDeleteHi Alissa, I enjoyed reading your post. We have lots to learn from other cultures, and as we do this, we also learn to appreciate the good things we already have in our cultures.
ReplyDeleteHi Alissa, this was my comment but it has my wife's name because her account was active when I entered to your blog.
Delete