Learning Journal #2

During our discussion on Wednesday, I couldn't help thinking of a clip from a TV show that I saw recently.  Here it is (it's just under a minute long): Outsourced - Home for the Diwalidays

Todd's response is so accurate—I reacted similarly the first time I watched the show myself. I really appreciated Ben's point in class that other cultures can be like a ocean wave that swirls around us, and occasionally smacks us in the face and knocks us off our feet. From what I've learned at the beach, the best way not to get hit really hard by a wave is to remain flexible. Granted, it's not a perfect solution all of the time, but it's a pretty good one. In the video clip, Todd clearly did not remain flexible. He had his feet stuck solidly in his understanding of Western symbols, and became offensive even as he was claiming to be a victim of offense himself. It probably would have worked better if he had been flexible, if he had asked someone about the meaning of the symbol and tried to understand it within its own context, rather than within the one that he had previously understood.

The first time I remember finding myself as a cultural outsider was when I was about eight. When I was a kid, my dad was in the military, so we got to move all over the place. We lived for a while in San Antonio, Texas, from when I was five until I was seven. Since Texans are very proud to be Texan, we learned a lot about Texan culture and read lots of Texas-ified children's stories. One thing that I remember learning from lots of those stories is how to pronounce the word "coyote." In San Antonio, the pronunciation was "ky-yo-tee." After leaving San Antonio and moving to a tiny little town along Red River on the border of Texas and Oklahoma called Burkburnett, TX, I remember taking my turn to read a paragraph of a story aloud in my class. I encountered the word "coyote," and pronounced it as I had been taught. Cue uproarious laughter. Every single person in my class made fun of me for that moment. "It's ky-yoat!" they said. I was embarrassed to have pronounced it incorrectly, but corrected myself and continued onward.

Fast forward three or so years. My family was then living in Panama City, Florida, and I was in the fifth grade. For some reason or another, I had the opportunity to read aloud to the class again. Apparently I had amassed enough bad karma by that time to guarantee the placement of the word "coyote" in my reading. I had spent enough time in Florida by that point to recognize that our particular region wasn't as much Florida as it was Deep Southern Alabama That Just Happens to Belong to Florida. In other words, it was Southern. And like any eleven-year-old, I assumed that Southern was standardized across the US, pronunciations of names of wild animals included. So when I had to read "coyote" out loud, I said it the way I'd been taught: "ky-yoat." Imagine my surprise at hearing laughter, and being told to say "ky-yo-tee."

What I'm really trying to get at is that, even with the very best of intentions, and trying to use what we know as best we can, we're still going to mess up from time to time. The trick is staying flexible, laughing at ourselves, accepting correction when it comes, and trying to learn from every new mistake we make.