Week 5: Response to "Culture Paradigms" - 10/14/2021

    For the first of the new three entries from this week, we were assigned to discuss Culture Paradigms.  We saw a lot of examples of how paradigms differ from country to country. But they also differ from different places in the same country in a country big as Brazil, and they also differ from one generation to another.

    It's my understanding that culture changes along the way, and when we discuss it we must have this in mind. We can't take our knowledge about a different culture for granted. We can follow this change in our media/entertainment industry. During the '60s was completely acceptable a commercial with a happy wife showing how her house was the cleanest in the neighborhood due to her new vacuum cleaner acquisition. Nowadays the same commercial will suffer an attack from part of the modern society. I don't want to dive into such differences between cultural paradigms across generations, but this is one thing that we need to have in mind as we discuss this topic. 

    From Brother Ivers' video, I want to mention what captures my attention. He taught us that: "Culture creates false needs and false problems". I ponder about it and this makes a lot of sense. After in the National Geographic video I saw how this is true and powerful! Brother Ivers' also mentions that: "most embarrassment is done in a cultural context. Is based on a paradigm that makes no sense in another culture." At the beginning of the National Geographic video those men never had flied before, never saw an apartment building, never had used electricity! They even thought that would be difficult to use electricity!!! And as I watched the video became clear how our paradigms can affect our way to see and understand the world and our position on it. Seeing their American experience, we can understand how these paradigms can cause false problems. For them not so false, pretty real. The production was warned that some complaints were made because they were going together to stores and the locals were afraid with it. The possibility of going to jail due to their paradigms from their country, and the paradigm that the locals have about them was real. This could happen for a woman walking alone outside the tourism places in Islamic countries for example. And can talk about other real problems caused by the cultural paradigms.

    Less problematic but still inconvenient are those moments when the cultural paradigms cause us some embarrassment. As teachers, I think that we are propensity the most to do this last one. And we need to be aware of it. It's important to our students to understand and recognize those "patterns" As more they can do it deeper will be their mastery of the learned language.