Inequality Issue..
It's honeymoon period in NIE now for my intake. Slack timetable, 3 or 4 day week, 1 or 2 lessons per day. The only thing that I'm sore about is the lack of avaibility of parking lots which means I've to pay $3 a day for parking. Today was particularly irritating as I specially left the house early confident that I would be getting a lot. But to my horror, the lots were all filled up by 8.15am. It certainly wasn't an auspicious start to the day.
Today's presentation on inequality got me thinking a little (yes, I hardly exercise my brain cells recently). I've been subconsciously practising inequality in the classroom. Or was it blatantly? I tend to favour certain groups of people over others. But come on, it's human nature to be biased. The only solution is to try to curb favouritism (hardly possible) or if not, make it less consipicuous to the students, which is quite difficult. After all students are not dumb and they can definitely sense it when teachers are treating them unfairly. How often have we heard students complain "Cher, not fair!". Even as a student I was guilty of it. But seriously, life is never fair. Yes, teachers should treat all students equally but sometimes, teacher's attitudes, expectations, upbringing as well as their stereotypical beliefs strongly affects how the teacher treats students in the classroom. And seriously, even if there's equality of treatment in the classroom, it doesn't neccesarily translate to equality of outcomes as evident from statistical studies showing that Chinese outperform other races in examinations and males earn more wages than females.
Listening to David Tao at home and Jay Chou in the car. I still prefer David Tao's style of music. It's much more soothing to the ears. Jay Chou's rap gives me a headache. And the fact that I can't make out what he's saying adds to my dislike of some of his songs.
Current addiction: David Tao's Finally and Marry Me Today. Btw, the latter is certainly not an indirect marriage proposal.
Today's presentation on inequality got me thinking a little (yes, I hardly exercise my brain cells recently). I've been subconsciously practising inequality in the classroom. Or was it blatantly? I tend to favour certain groups of people over others. But come on, it's human nature to be biased. The only solution is to try to curb favouritism (hardly possible) or if not, make it less consipicuous to the students, which is quite difficult. After all students are not dumb and they can definitely sense it when teachers are treating them unfairly. How often have we heard students complain "Cher, not fair!". Even as a student I was guilty of it. But seriously, life is never fair. Yes, teachers should treat all students equally but sometimes, teacher's attitudes, expectations, upbringing as well as their stereotypical beliefs strongly affects how the teacher treats students in the classroom. And seriously, even if there's equality of treatment in the classroom, it doesn't neccesarily translate to equality of outcomes as evident from statistical studies showing that Chinese outperform other races in examinations and males earn more wages than females.
Listening to David Tao at home and Jay Chou in the car. I still prefer David Tao's style of music. It's much more soothing to the ears. Jay Chou's rap gives me a headache. And the fact that I can't make out what he's saying adds to my dislike of some of his songs.
Current addiction: David Tao's Finally and Marry Me Today. Btw, the latter is certainly not an indirect marriage proposal.
posted by The Aspiring Chef @ 6:20 PM
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