Week 4 – Comments on Cultural Stereotype and its Perils

I would like to say that I really enjoy reading the Kuma’s book and like the stories which he cited in each chapter. In chapter four, the air crash certainly reflects the cultural deference to command authority of Korean. Also the “melting pot” from Ford company, which I heard before but know very little details about it. So after reading the story, what impressing me is language is not innocent at all. I have such idea because of the examples from the passage concerning the stereotype. Before I come across with the word “stereotype”, I didn’t realize it has such a broad influence of our life, culture and education. Both the negative and positive function of stereotype can help me better understand the cultures around me.

The stereotype reminded me another word “cookie cutter” that I met in the former reading. Cookie cutter refers to the same style students who are taught by the same teacher using the same materials and methodology, influenced by the same culture ideology. Stereotypes represent the outward expressions of hidden beliefs and values of the members of a particular society, or a community within a society (p51). By influenced of stereotype, people will first stereotype others and then see them; this will probably bring the misunderstanding and prejudice and may even cause serious problems. This situations always happens in the classroom, the teacher will classify the students into different groups with special labels on them and neglect the improvement and achievement they made. My mom is a P.E teacher, once she told me about her dissatisfaction with the students’ P.E class criterion. The standard required the students to achieve the same level of each activity without thinking their individual health conditions or other physical qualification. That seems impossible for some shy and weak girls to run as fast as the boys who are strong and likes playing football games.

In the part” obedience to authority”, I saw the prosperous thoughts from Confucius like, “jun jun chen chen, fu fu zi zi” and “yi re wei shi, zhong sheng wei fu”. It is true these kind of saying influence the Chinese people not blind obedience to teachers and elders. But what I want to point out is, although it advocates the obedience to the authority it doesn’t mean infatuatedly admiring. It just stands for the central meaning of respecting to the elders but not the thoroughly implement without consideration.

But Chinese students really have the problems with lacking of participant in the class, especially when they are doing as L2 learners. So sometimes it is quite difficult to distinguish which situations are they involved in. Being the class leader, you have to consider the students’ willing of learning and then set up the communicative activities to get them involved. That’s what I mentioned in the beginning of the passage, stereotype can really help if the teacher can define his objects accurately.