Multicultural Stereotypes and Politically Incorrect Adolescents

Growing up in a multicultural environment, amidst people with unique backgrounds and varying cultural norms, means that one gets to experience relationships with a myriad of individuals. Most of us grow up among people who look like them and act like they do, and more or less live lives homogenous with those on their same city block. For others, myself included, how we look and act are not necessarily tied with that same bond of cultural peer pressure. The main lesson you learn from a multicultural experience is that people are much more complicated than they look.

I spent my high school years at CAJ, an international school filled with caucasian Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, South-East Asians, Indians, Aussies, Norwegians, and kids from various African countries. Despite our differences, such as whether we had parents who spoke English or not, we had a few things in common - for one, we lived in Japan and spoke English. Most of us spoke more than one language, and conversation that seamlessly integrated multiple languages was commonplace.

Most of us had also spent significant time in another country. Depending on the years spent in which country, the development of a classmate might gravitate towards a culture different from the Japanese culture in which we were all currently immersed. In other words, you couldn’t tell how a classmate was going to talk or act based on how they looked. You had to, at least briefly, interact with them to see what they were about.

For example, a minority on the campus were the American kids who only spoke English. They (probably) had American parents, spoke English fluently, and went out of their way to stay that way. This meant not taking Japanese language courses, eating only American food, paying for American cable television, etc. As a minority they no doubt felt a little self-conscious, as they were often excluded from the bilingual chatter that dominated the international school scene.

These kids were the rare exception where outward appearance meshed with their general behavior - how they talked, acted, dressed, etc. More common were the kids who had mixed identities, or who acted like they belonged in a culture even if they didn’t look the part. People are, of course, much more complicated than one-word labels, but adolescents, given the chance to create labels for each other, will inevitably do so. The following chart attempts to document the labels that I heard during my years as an international school student in Japan.

What You Were on the Outside vs. What You Were on the Inside

Some of these labels are humorous, others possibly offensive, and others might be just plain dumb. Why they are based on food, I don’t know. Most of them are blatant stereotypes but, as the old adage goes, stereotypes are created to mimic reality. And indeed, even in my small social circle, there were individuals who fit these descriptions to a T.

There were the Asian kids who listened to hip-hop and dressed in Phat Farm or FUBU, or the white kids, the Eggs, who spoke mainly in Japanese and followed anime and manga. CAJ, a school founded for missionary kids, was the cheapest international high school in Tokyo, thus spawning the division of Japanese kids, the business kids, whose parents might have cared less about the religious element of the school but still wanted them to have an English education.

My presentation of a neat chart like the one above obviously begs the question, “So, which one are you?” Like most people, I don’t think I fit neatly into one category. I think I’m somewhere in between American and Egg. Being an Egg was something I grew out of as I aged, and the longer I am away from Japan, the less egg-y I get. It’s not a permanent condition, though. Put me with a few other Eggs or a couple of Twinkies and I’ll be right back into it.

_DZ

Skateboarding In Schools? Who Would've Thought!

My commentary today is on another Pioneer Press article, this one written about the incorporation of skateboards into the physical education curriculum. A school has spent over $3000 on boards, helmets and pads for the kids to use to learn skateboarding in class. Educators cite the childhood obesity epidemic and kids’ perceived waning interest in school as reasons to bring something hip and fresh into the classroom. And skateboarding, no doubt, is hip and fresh. It seems that 90’s skate culture and the success of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of video games has finally wormed its way into the public school system. Skater punks who could be found grinding away on school property after school, despised by the faculty, are now being nurtured by the Man himself.

There’s no question that skating will result in more active kids. As more and more kids become prone to sitting in front of their HDTVs playing Xbox 360 instead of being active and social outdoors, skateboarding at least cracks open the door to a more active lifestyle. A main goal of the program is to introduce an exciting activity that kids can do even when their friends aren’t around. This is good. That being said, I do have some reservations about the program.

First, and probably least in the educators’ minds, is the cost of skateboarding. For any other sport you need a ball. Maybe a racket, net or stick as well. But for skating, you need a board, helmet, kneepads, elbowpads, and wrist guards. That’s not only a lot of equipment to buy , but it’s a lot to store and keep track of when not in use.

Secondly, I don’t know that I like solitary activities being introduced in P.E. Phys. Ed was always about learning to do stuff as a team, fostering cooperation, and learning how to win as well as how to lose. I can’t think of any school sport that is not team based. Even sports like track, cross country, wrestling, and bowling are done in teams. Learning how to work in a team is something that everyone needs to learn how to do, and every minute spent skateboarding is one less spent participating on team.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, skateboarding is a blatant glorification of youth culture. You can skate until a certain age, and then you simply can’t any longer. And that age is usually in your late twenties. Of all the kids in my class who skated in middle and high school, I can’t think of a single one who is still doing it. The Friday night basketball games where men of all ages, from 20 to 60, can play and compete and have fun just aren’t possible with skateboarding. I know, I know, you can say the same thing about football, wrestling, and a bunch of other sports - that older people can’t play them. But at least in those sports older people can still demonstrate skills and techniques, even if they can’t do them at full speed. Coaching is still a very real possibility. I think it would be really hard to do any kind of serious coaching when you yourself can no longer even ollie.

A fourth issue that I will just briefly mention is that skateboarding has traditionally been a very rebellious sort of activity. The whole lifestyle, from board art to skate mags, is loud, rough, and raucous. Maybe this is changing, maybe not. I don’t know. But it is something we should consider or at least look into if we want to teach all kids how to skate.

I hope this program works out. I really do. A lot of money has been invested to the sake of the kids. But caution must be taken when presenting it to them as a viable alternative to traditional sports, because skateboarding is not that. It is an extreme sport, and rightly so. The culture is fast and furious, the rate of injury high, the entry cost significant, and the windows of participation intense and brief. Skateboarding certainly has fared better than rollerblading or BMX riding, but it remains a sport that I think should be undertaken at one’s own risk, and then only out of one’s own curiosity and interest.




_DZ

We Have Computer Education but No Automotive Education? What Is Up With That?

I had an entry last month about how I think that computers should have a very limited role in schools. I want to go off on sort of a tangent of that and ask the question, “Why don’t we have mandatory automotive shop class in schools? Why doesn’t each and every student have a basic understanding of how a car works by the time they get out of high school?”

I mean, we all use cars just as much as we use computers. They’re just as big a part of our lives as computers are. Most every American adult has one. They’re even the second-biggest purchase (after a house) that we make in our lives. So why don’t we know how they work?

I was twenty, TWENTY, years old before I knew the difference between a carburetor, an alternator, and a distributor. I also didn’t know the difference between gas and diesel, that brakes and power steering systems used fluid, and that car axles weren’t just straight metal rods that connected two wheels like in the cartoons. And those were things I could’ve learned in ten minutes! I had a drivers license since I was 16, but I bought my first car without even test-driving it, much less looking under the hood!




We spend thousands of dollars on laptops for kids, while an automotive course requires a battered car that a school could get for $500. $300? Free?

Car stuff is knowledge that all our students could use, male and female, yet it is being withheld from them in the name of “electives.” Why is a course in basic automotive mechanics an elective while computers are brought in for every high school English class? Why do we insist that kindergardeners know how to type but leave the exploration of cars to those only those who are self-motivated? Again, cars are just a big a part of our lives as computers are!

The result of this is a generation who buys cars for looks rather then fuel mileage or parts availability, and chooses to pay the 70-100% (!) markup on parts that their garage charges them (which they do) for things like brakes. Brakes! You know when you need brakes, so why not just go down to an auto parts store and buy your own brakes? They have parts catalogs there to help you find what you need and everything!

And we blow fuel efficiency way out of proportion. This article from the LA Times critiques the new Honda Insight, priced at around $18,000. A comparable car, the Nissan Versa for example, costs $9,999, but is not a hybrid. At today’s gas prices, the Insight is estimated to save you about $315/year in gas over the Versa. When will this make up the $9000 price gap? In about 31 years. The I can almost guarantee that it will be cheaper to fix the Versa as well! Good fuel economy is something to consider, but not something on which to hang a horrible financial decision.

I think that good education about cars and how they work, even if it's a single course in high school, can help a lot of these problems and help the coming generation make increasingly smarter decisions about buying and maintaining a car. As cars become increasingly more sophisticated and engine diagnostic equipment becomes cheaper and cheaper, it will be easier and easier to solve your own car problems. Hopefully we can take full advantage of that when the time comes.





_DZ

Outliers, a book about successful people like Malcolm Gladwell, by Malcolm Gladwell

I spent a large portion of my day today reading through Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, Outliers. In it, Gladwell takes a look at the underlying factors that contribute to the rise of what we typically call a “successful” individual. The book looks at the stories of several prominent people in todays world, among the Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the creator of UNIX, and The Beatles. Also critiqued are the Asians and their math skills, youths in Canadian hockey leagues, and the entrepreneurial tycoons of the late eighteen-hundreds like Rockefeller. Mr. Gladwell asserts, through these stories and others, that the rags-to-riches stories that we Americans love to hear are far and away simply untrue. Successful people, no matter how much innate ability or genius they have, are still the product of their times, their heritage, their circumstances, and a lot (Gladwell estimates at least ten-thousand hours) of work. Sometimes dumb luck helps, too. Outliers is essentially a collection of stories that reinforce this point.

While the book is certainly well done and thought provoking, it does little to assist the reader in thinking about his or her future. The book is a look at history, and since we can’t know the effects of the present on the future, it does little to comfort those who are struggling to be successful. Main points to take away from it are:

1. Hope you were born at the right time
2. Hope you network with the right people
3. Know your history
4. Work really, really hard

These points apply to almost everyone I consider successful. Take guitar god Yngwie Malmsteen, for example. He was born in 1963, making him ten years old when Jimi Hendrix died. He watched the funeral on TV, and after seeing a clip of Hendrix performing, took up guitar. He practiced incessantly all through his teen years, aided by his mother who let him drop out of school after she recognized his talent. He took up an apprenticeship with a luthier which allowed him to get some practice in even while at work. He wasn’t a rich kid whose parents paid for expensive guitar teachers and equipment (not that that would have necessarily mattered). He got good because practically all he did every day for ten years was play guitar. He easily had his ten-thousand hours in by the time he was 21, at which time he moved to L.A. at the prime of the metal scene. Eddie Van Halen had come on the scene just five years before, and now every kid in Southern California was trying to shred like Eddie did. And then arrived Mr. Malmsteen, who had been doing just that for the past ten years. Of course he was going to be successful!

The thing that most struck me about Outliers, though, was the point Gladwell pushed to people like me who haven’t put ten-thousand hours into anything yet. That point? Identify what you are good at. Figure out what you’ve had success doing in the past, and pour more coal onto that. To that I would add, “Make sure that’s what God wants you to do, or otherwise it will be futile regardless of your effort,” but the point is still the same. To be successful, you need to know what you’re good at. Maybe it’s cabinet-making, maybe it’s computer programming, maybe it’s being a jack-of-all-trades that is useful to a degree in just about anything. Regardless, isolate that, and full steam ahead!


_DZ

Overrated for the time being!

    While browsing my del.icio.us RSS the other day I stumbled upon this article dealing with the hype surrounding a college education these days. It seems that more and more people are spending life savings on college only to graduate to a college-graduate-saturated job market, thereby suffering relegation to menial, high-school-dropout jobs. The article quite completely confirms my wariness of blindly stumbling into college at eighteen only because it is the supposed ‘next step’ in life. While this is my general feeling now, it wasn’t always so.
    I took a year off after high school not because I was wary of college; it was because I hadn’t taken the initiative to apply to any colleges during my senior year. That, however, turned out to be the best choice my laziness ever made for me. If you have read any of my entries from last year you know my current life situation -  i.e. working full-time at a real job to save for continuing my post-high-school education. I have decided that I am fine with however long it takes me to save enough money, provided I have a steady job. I imagine myself doing a job interview in the future and saying “Yes, it’s true, I don’t have a degree in business administration. I do, however, have excellent references from a company I worked at for four years right out of high school and was promoted three times in.”

This hasn’t happened yet, but I don’t think it far-fetched at all.

Back to the article, I was particularly struck by the idea that colleges promote that their graduates get good jobs. From the article:

     “Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.”

    This is me. In NO way  do I feel that not being in college now has forever barred me from returning to pursue a degree. The only reason I don’t return to college under a college loan is because I don’t know what I would use my education for. I don’t want to accumulate debt only to graduate and go flip burgers to pay my $700-a-month loan payments. Colleges don’t guarantee you a job. In fact, it seems more and more that a diploma just proves that you paid a lot of money for four years of organized education.
    This isn’t to say that the non-college-educated have totally equal footing when competing for a job with a recent graduate. Certificates still look good on a resume.

But, debt looks even better.

Think about it. College students with massive amounts of debt need jobs. They need jobs badly. They aren’t going to quit a job just because they don’t like it, because they have that loan payment coming up next month. If I was a manager, I would totally hire someone who was dependent on the position I gave them - no matter how crappy. Graduates also maybe getting married around the time they leave school, having postponed the wedding until “we’re out of school, babe.” A recent graduate who has to keep his new family financially afloat?

“We can get some good overtime out of him!”

    I have no beef with a college degree - I just don’t want it unless I need it. besides, I actually rather enjoy being totally independent at age 20, away from college parties and wanton pleasures offered to the normal, ‘independent’ college-aged coed.

    I went to college to learn stuff, but learning certainly doesn’t end now that I’m taking a hiatus. Heck no. I still learn stuff, read books, churn out essays, thoughts, and blogs, and have philosophical debates with friends. I do, however, look forward to the day where I have the means and the motivation to continue my pursuit of higher education.

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