FULL TITLE: Three Texas school teachers under investigation after racist question about Chinese culture used on quiz Screenshot It makes people uncomfortable to talk about racism and tension between races but the only way to resolve problems is to talk about them. Nobody is trying to play "victim". People just want to not be the target of insensitive and hateful rhetoric. People just want to not be maligned. People want to not have their culture minimized. People just want to not be scapegoated. What do you think?
. I think multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious countries are the problem... and the total geographic separation of the races is the solution.
Chinese are known to eat anything but cats? Dogs can be on the menu but that's dying out with westernization, but the negativity these teachers were conveying to children about Chinese is reprehensible. I hope they get the Wu Tang flu.
How so? It seems to me that if you want to teach norms, a good way to do it is by challenging your own by presenting the norms of other cultures. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about eating dogs or cats, compared to many other mammals. We just don't do that in the west so we think it's gross as weird or disgusting. Other cultures don't have those hang ups. Why so intolerant?
they DO eat dogs there, so you’re upset because the teacher was honest? when you ask why we’re in the predicament we’re in remember there are those who flat out hate honesty.
Why do you hate honesty? None of the answers were correct and the answers were calculated to disgust middle schoolers and put Chinese in a bad light. Do you hate my honesty?
#2 Sounds like something they would do in North Korea... Maybe something the CCP would do. All this eating dogs makes me want to assault asians! it is a really irrelevant question... Maybe it was to make the test interesting or something. Also, I thought it was a Vietnamese dish though maybe Chinese at some point too.
While we are, of course, seeing this question out of context, yet it's hard to imagine the context in which the multiple-choice question, above, was not derogatory, insulting, & reinforcing of the idea that the Chinese are a strange lot (cut off a person's lips, for restaurant-burping?). Still, the thing that is most reprehensible, in my mind, is that this moronic question is considered 6th-grade level material, rather than being a 1st-grade quiz. @Lil Mike makes a good point, as well, that to learn about a different culture is less serious study, & more propaganda, if we censor which info we include, based on how it will seem to the students. But, if I can extrapolate from that one question, this was not part of any serious study: it was covering the topic with cartoonish superficiality (which is not to say that most cartoons are this simplistic). The fact remains that, when we look at other cultures, there is the potential to be both fascinated, as well as shocked. So, if we are dealing with students who are too immature, or who aren't capable of the required objectivity, or with a class that is not going to dedicate the time or effort necessary for a more comprehensive examination, we are left w/ something of a dilemma. It might actually be a more interesting, & beneficial, thought experiment to have students think of how our own culture might seem to someone who was unfamiliar w/ it, whether that be an E.T., someone from our own society's past, or a present-day citizen in a much different, foreign culture. The typical solution, though, is to only expose students to small tidbits of information, which may entice one or two to dive deeper, in the future, but may be formative of the image most will hold of that culture for the rest of their lives. While I don't regard that method very highly, nor is it at all surprising: this is the way many subjects are treated, in our schools. Case in point. I was at a sporting goods store and, to pay for my item that was, let's say $6.85, I gave the cashier $12.10 (or something along those lines). She was completely dumbfounded for a number of seconds, before I finally explained that, rather than singles & loose change, I preferred to get back $5 bill & a quarter. She asked my forgiveness about needing to use a calculator to figure it out. Like ALL of us, this young woman had done at least 12 years of math, including probably at least a year of algebra, & yet could not do this very simple, subtraction problem-- even being given the answer-- in her head. And this young woman was in no way unusual, in this regard. Giving me my change, she explained that she was an ENGLISH Major, in college, which is why she didn't see much advantage to herself knowing math. I pointed out to her, just before I left, that her attitude was analogous to a MATH Major saying that he saw no point in learning how to speak good (in being at all proficient in English). While, certainly, most people, presented with a quadratic equation, or with a diagram including incomplete information, in which one is asked to solve for the degree of a particular angle, will only prove how much of our school experience was wasted time, nevertheless that is no excuse for incompetence at addition, subtraction, multiplication, and simple division, in our heads, after all the time we've had to master these, and how useful it can be to all of us to know them (in case of emergency, when one's phone is not available). Perhaps it would be best to focus more on fundamental skills, and logical reasoning, for those who don't feel drawn to more specialized learning in a given area, so they would graduate at least with some basic knowledge & proficiencies. We could then even shorten the school experience, and/or add more areas of specialty (akin to trade schools) in later years, such as in computers, or mechanics, or construction/carpentry and reading blueprints/drafting, chemistry, maybe even in music & visual arts, as well as classes in real-life subjects, like doing income taxes, home budgeting, investing, & so forth. I'm off on a bit of a tangent, here, but what I'd intended to suggest, if the school schedule didn't allow for a thorough look at Chinese culture, that it might be better to only bite off a small piece of it, to learn about. Then again, since the fake answers on that quiz question involved restaurants & candy, maybe this was part of a unit of study just on Chinese cuisine.
I have no idea why you don't value honesty. in parts of china dogs are still used as food. that's a fact.
