Teachers. Everywhere.

I've spent the last couple of days at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis. This was an international conference with teachers from all over the United States and Canada.  It was awesome! But it was also obvious that there was a culture of teachers, everywhere.  The clothing, the bags, the acronyms: all these things gave away to an obvious culture. While walking through the vendors, they were able to not only identify us as teachers, but they were also able to often identify the level and subject matters we taught just by looking at us. I saw this as not only identifying a culture, but maybe a little bit of stereotyping, too.

Dirty laundry and ethnocentrism

I am a big fan of the show The Amazing Race, and due to life getting in the way, my hubby and I have fallen a few episodes behind (no spoilers please!).  Last night we were curled up on the couch watching an episode, and I found myself guilty of ethnocentrism.  One of the challenges had to do with doing laundry in India.  Individuals would bring large white bags full of scarves to a beach where they would put the dirty scarves in large kettles, stir them up with soap, rinse them in the nearby river, and then lay the scarves out to dry on the sand. I couldn't help but wonder how this was actually cleaning the scarves. I found myself asking questions aloud and even judging their techniques based on how I'm used to doing laundry. BAM! Ethnocentrism.  I even paused the tv to email myself a reminder to blog about it later. 

One of my favorite things about The Amazing Race is seeing how other cultures live, eat, and do things differently, and sometimes ethnocentrism gets in the way of learning. 

Source: http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx9/xangatheamazingracecaps3/The%20Amazing%20Race%2027/Episode%209/TAR2709-1142.jpg

Source: CBS.com

 

 

Source: CBS.com

 

 

Source: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/85/c5/f8/85c5f8fd2255b5408184c8249024133f.jpg

 

Words that echo through time...

Before Kindergarten, I attended an in-home daycare run by a family friend of my dad's.  My "daycare mom" had a short name, Pat.  I don't have a lot of memories of my time there aside from cold cereal for breakfasts, episodes of Scooby-Doo and The Price is Right, and playing outside in a driveway on small bikes and Big Wheels with other children.  I also remember some words, vividly.

I was a confident child with a high self-esteem.  I would often dress in pink and announce that I was pretty, or pretty like a princess.  Every time I would announce this in the presence of my "daycare mom," she would follow with an insult.  It would go like this:

Me: I'm pretty!
Her: Yeah, pretty ugly. *chuckle*
Me: No, I'm pretty! Pretty like a princess!
Her: Yeah, pretty. Pretty ugly, just like I said.

Those words were damaging, because I eventually believed them.  I struggled with low self-esteem and poor self-perception for years, from pre-kindergarten into my junior and even senior year of high school.  Even as an adult, I can still hear her in my head some days, but I've worked hard over time to change that perception using mostly affirmations and corrections when I get hard on myself.