If you want to save future students, fill out your course review, be honest, and go home to a good night's sleep.
If I'm not honest, that good night's sleep will be a long way away. I wish that this was something that I trusted him enough to tell him to his face (in gentler terms).
What did you think you'd learn? Or were you just planning to show off your intercultural expertise?
Actually, it's one thing to bash your head against a lot of intercultural experience the hard way and quite another to understand what the hell's going on. I was hoping to understand in a broad way those crazy-assed WTF? moments you have, because I've had a lot of them, but I only understand some. I wanted the tools to go, "oh, this is an in-group society, so since I'm not of their race I can't really expect to be included or considered equal no matter how much Buddhist practice I've done."
At the beginning of the quarter I was trying to augment what I was learning with a textbook, and it was a real eye-opener. I knew that Tibetans were immediately friends with any Tibetan, even if they'd never met before, more so than they were with me though we'd been friends for years -- but I didn't know why.
Some of these things have really pissed me off in the past, and I wanted to know where they were coming from. In this case, just the description of an "in-group" cleared it up, because I knew that Tibetans believe that anyone born Tibetan has a special blessing.
So I was expecting a lot of "aha!" and "ooooh, I get it." A course like this has a tendency to put things like this in very distant terms, so it removes the issue from the realm of the personal. I was also expecting to have a useful skill that I'm going to need in my travels overseas and dealings with Asian cultures here.
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branchandroot
Re: Who are you out to save?
Date: 2004-06-08 10:13 pm (UTC)If I'm not honest, that good night's sleep will be a long way away. I wish that this was something that I trusted him enough to tell him to his face (in gentler terms).
What did you think you'd learn? Or were you just planning to show off your intercultural expertise?
Actually, it's one thing to bash your head against a lot of intercultural experience the hard way and quite another to understand what the hell's going on. I was hoping to understand in a broad way those crazy-assed WTF? moments you have, because I've had a lot of them, but I only understand some. I wanted the tools to go, "oh, this is an in-group society, so since I'm not of their race I can't really expect to be included or considered equal no matter how much Buddhist practice I've done."
At the beginning of the quarter I was trying to augment what I was learning with a textbook, and it was a real eye-opener. I knew that Tibetans were immediately friends with any Tibetan, even if they'd never met before, more so than they were with me though we'd been friends for years -- but I didn't know why.
Some of these things have really pissed me off in the past, and I wanted to know where they were coming from. In this case, just the description of an "in-group" cleared it up, because I knew that Tibetans believe that anyone born Tibetan has a special blessing.
So I was expecting a lot of "aha!" and "ooooh, I get it." A course like this has a tendency to put things like this in very distant terms, so it removes the issue from the realm of the personal. I was also expecting to have a useful skill that I'm going to need in my travels overseas and dealings with Asian cultures here.
Icarus