02/21/2019 - Culture and Psychology

It is very interesting how culture intersects with personality psychology.

Just to mention an example, there are some irrational elements in my home culture that are irrationally causing students self steem goes down. The elements that appear in my mind are:

*People from the andes area are more hard worker with their hands but don´t have enough ablities to understand school subjects. (It´s hard for them to understand school subjects because they are from the andes area)

This situation happened during one of my classes, a student from the andes zone was always excusing himself about his low grades in different courses, because in his own words:  "he was born in the andes and not in Lima (the capital city)" The first time he excused himself this way during my english class I was really in shock, I couldn´t believe what I was listening to, I didn´t know how to act or what to do, so I wait until the bell rings and decided to talk to him in private, I told him that inside my body I have blood from the andes side and from the coast side, too, but that it had nothing to do with my learning development. That I felt proud of my both side roots, but at the end it was only myself: "Yanira" the one who was there during my school time classes, it never mattered if I was born here in Lima or if my mom is from the andes side and my dad is from the coast side. That He had to take that chip away from his head and avoid that excuse, I`d rather listen to you telling me: Miss, I didn´t study than excusing yourself because you were born in the andes. After that I tried to use psychology to work on his side, I told him that some of the best soccer players and runners are from the andes area, that andes people is excellent for typical handycrafts and that many people from all inside Perú would want to have that gift. I  could finally notice He felt proud of his roots when I saw a proud smile on his face. 

Psychology in our brain is so powerful that can motivate or unmotivate us

So, I believe the key here to work with culture and psychology is to always motivate students by letting them know how special their "weakness" are, and when I say weakness I refer to the things that discourage them.(race, religion, roots, etc)

We must be aware that most of time; cultural factors influence on human behaviour. 

How would my home culture affect students in a TESOL classroom?. Fortunately I am a "always happy teacher" (even if I have a bad day I never show it to my students). I`m always happy to be a peruvian teacher, I`m a very friendly person, easygoing and I always like to show love by encouraging words, by a smile or by a hug if necessary. That`s a plus of being an elementary school teacher. 

During this lesson I learnt that I have to be very respectful and tolerant to other cultures, because my students won´t be culturally uniform, and that is great because having a cultural diversity class means I´ll have a whole world in just one classroom and it sounds great, isn´t it?