Cultural Miscommunication 2/08/2019

By watching at this video, I could remember a past experience I had, before working at a school I used to work as a private english teacher, and I taught to an egyptian - peruvian kid. His name was Ahmed, He was like 6 or 7 years old, so after I taught him his lesson, his parents asked me to join them with an egyptian meal, so I pleasantly accepted, they served a kind of bread wrapped in natural yogurt or something, and fresh vegetables, and a beverage, so suddenly I realized that the parents started to look at me with an angry face, I felt really uncomfortable because I didn´t know what was wrong, and the dad raisoed his voice to me and told me, don´t eat with your left hand (I had the bread in my left hand) and the beverage was in my right hand. So He started to talk in arabic and the only word I understood was shayta`an (I know this word means the devil) I didn´t understood anything but I was feeling so uncomfortable I thanked them for the meal and told them I must go back home, so the wife told me that his husband is muslim and for them it is forbidden to eat with left hand and I was eating my bread using that hand on their table and it is a sign of a disrespectful behaviour. I told her that her husband really over reacted because I wasn`t being disrespectful, I am not a muslim person, I`m just a simple human being who doesn´t know anything about  that culture or religion, since that day they never called me back for english lessons again. But now that I think about that it was a cultural miscommunication, we were three people sat in the same dining room, happily enjoying a meal until I decided to eat the bread with my left hand. 

In another opportunity I was teaching english to a japanese boy, and his mother asked me to join them on the table for a hot soup because it was a really cold day, at first sight it was a weird soup, it was a big plate of soup with two long noodles on it. So I ate the soup and I asked for a fork to eat the noodles but they told me I need to sip the noodles, and they showed me how to do it, and the sound that they were doing weren`t good, at least not on a table, I believe my face wasn´t showing any happiness because they gave me a fork to eat the noodles. 

In these two experiences that I faced there was a lot of cultural difference, my culture and the muslim culture and then the japanese culture, there wasn`t any kind of miscommunication, but there was a lot of  culture shock. Now that I watched the video about this topic I realized that we must  get used to face this kind of situations in our daily lifes, just like the T.V spots showed us, we should never understimate the importance of local knowledge. This is why we must know students we teach, know their differences and individualities and learn to deal with these differences and the most important TO HAVE A DEEP RESPECT OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES. 

So, how do you think will you react when finding cultural differences in your classrooms?, or even in daily life? just as the examples I mentioned.