Cultural Paradigms 05/02/2019 - Week 5

It was by watching the videos that something inmediatly appears on my mind. I was giving a class about insects, and we (my students and me) were playing a flashcards game on the board, I wrote different insect names on the boards and one by one they had to paste the correct picture on the board, in this 3rd grade class I had a blond student from Venezuela, she was always a very participative student and she always loved to share experiences abut her life to the class, then  when it was her turn to look for the flashcard and paste it on the board she just didn´t do it correct, and the rest of the class started to make jokes about that, so she said touching her hair, "Students, look: I`m a blond girl and I am from Venezuela, what did you expect?" When I heard that, I was in shock. At first I didn´t know how to react to her sentence. So I stood up in front of the class and ask students to stay in silence because I was going to talk, then I talked to the whole class and told them: "What Victoria has just said is a "saying" I didn´t use the word paradigm because It was going to be hard to explain. There are some people that say that blond girls are not smart girls, and that people from some countries are less intelligent than others, but that is not true. I believe that Victoria have just said that because it was the way you wanted to defend yourself,  Your hair color or your nationality will never determine wheter you are smart or not, it was just a mistake that you had today you  on your answer but I assure you that you will never have the same mistake ever and you will know what a grasshopper means in spanish. So I remember she showed a shy smile and thanked me and by the end of the class, when all students left she talked to me and hugged me and thanked me and she said that she didn´t think all blond women are not smart, but it was the way she could defend herself. I once again told her that we do not have to classify people because of their hair or skin color, neither their nationality. We all are beautiful people and We all have brains and for learning something deep inside us, we must make mistakes.

So, what would you have done in a similar situation during you class?. We need to take out that paradigm chip from our minds. If we are going to be part of a group of students (in my case, elementary children). We must be ready to deal with this kind of situations during our classes.  Did you ever expected to face a paradigm situation during your classes? because, I honesty was never aware of this issue until now; that we are talking about this subject.