Elizaveta Friesem
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Reflection on this semester

12/12/2015

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Now that this semester is (almost) over, it is time to reflect on what I myself have learned as I was teaching about 80 students in four different classes across three educational venues in Connecticut. During this semester I was thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish as an educator. I want my students to become more self-aware, I want to help them notice complexity in the world around them, and to see the value of having a dialogue with people who are different from them. I am pretty sure I chose these goals because they are something I myself am striving for.
 
I do not need my students to leave the class with identical sets of facts in their heads. I do not mind if everybody remembers different things from our discussions. Facts come and go. But an ability to ask how we know what we know will stay with us, and allow us to decide why and how certain things become “facts” in our lives. As much as I want to be more self-aware about what I think is true, I also have a long way to go identifying my biases and dealing with them. Most probably it is a life-long journey. I want my students to appreciate this journey too, and to always be able to question beliefs that guide their actions.
 
Questioning oneself is not easy. I know that from experience. It is very human to want to be sure about things, to look for clarity and certainty. But the world is not black and white. Kind people do bad things, smart and rational people commit terrible mistakes that ruin their lives and lives of others. Labels fail to describe life, no matter how carefully we choose them. This semester I felt again how resistant students are to accepting this complexity. But I do not blame them, because I myself want things to be simple and neat. I have to mentally pinch myself once in a while to remember that I often tend to fall in the same trap that I am hoping my students will avoid.
 
Finally, I want students to able to talk with others about this complexity. I want them to engage in a dialogue with each other, respecting diverse opinions, accepting that usually the answer is not either/or but both/and. Do I myself know how to do that? I would lie if I say that I am an expert. I want to do what I preach, but I do get sad, frustrated, annoyed when I think that somebody does not understand me; I feel the need to be right, to show them that I know.
 
They say: “Physician, heal thyself.” Can I really teach students to do things that I myself might take the rest of my life to learn? While I do not believe that I can bring them to a state when I can step back and say proudly something along the lines of: “Now, you are whole,” I hope simply that I can learn with them. And perhaps if I do my job well enough they will be encouraged by this experience to find their own ways to learn, and their own ways to make the world a better place. 
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Ok, it is true that we need boxes and labels...

4/28/2014

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I have decided that I need to add some explanations to my previous post. It is absolutely correct to note that putting people in boxes and labeling them is necessary for human communication. We categorize not only people, but everything we encounter in order to be able to quickly process information and react to things happening around us without delay. The ability to use previous experience and secondary sources is our brain’s strength. Categories that the mind creates help us focus on key characteristics of people and objects. Without this ability humans would not be to create culture the way it is.

What I was getting at in my yesterday’s post is that by focusing on key characteristics in every object or person we encounter, our mind necessarily simplifies things. In a way, every category is a model of something we have experienced or heard about. And as every model, categories are imperfect. One of the reason boxes and labels are problematic is that key characteristics that we choose for people are subjective and specific to our personal understanding of the world. Which means that we could have chosen a different set of key characteristic and created a different model – about pretty much anything – but we did it the way we did because of a whole bunch of factors and circumstances. It is like with models in science. You can create a lot of models for the same thing, based on what you decide is important for you. Every model is correct, and every model omits something. If you want to know a phenomenon it its complexity, you need to be able to switch between models, and to admit that each of them is imperfect and shows you only one part of the phenomenon you are trying to understand.

All that said, it is important to realize that we cannot not use model or categories. We cannot not put people in boxes and cover them with labels. What we can do, however, is understand how this process works, and what limitations it has. We should understand its negative consequences, such as prejudice and prejudgment. We should be aware of the fact that we put everybody in boxes, and we should all the time take people out and look at them again, and move them into more and more sophisticated boxes with more and more sophisticated labels. 

Ideally, we should be always able to re-evaluate what we know about somebody, we should be open to new information that can help us to re-evaluate, and in some cases we should actively seek for this information. It does not mean that we should not trust anybody and be in the state of perpetual confusion. We should be just open-minded, plain and simple. 



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Don’t put me in a box...

4/27/2014

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...Don’t cover me with labels. Because if you do, with time you will not see me anymore. You will re-read the labels once in a while, adjust the box on the shelf, and keep thinking that you know me.

That’s what we people do. It is easier to interact with each other this way. If you don’t know somebody well, you don’t have to waste your precious time and your brain energy to get into details. You just put this person in a box - one of many categories you store in your head to sort people out - and
 get the whole list of instructions on what to expect from such people and how to deal with them. Instructions are attached to the box - neat and simple. 


Some of these boxes were created through your previous experiences. Others emerged because you learned things from secondary sources: friends, books, television. We all have certain stereotypes about people: cops are like this, Italians are like that; all old people are *blank*, men usually do *blank*; he is religious, so he is so-and-so, she is a politician so that it what I should expect from her. Somebody reminds you of a school friend, or of a school bully, or of your mother, and – bam! – the label is ready. If you don’t know somebody well, and you put them in a box, chances are you will never know them well enough to be able to say who they really are.

Our tendency to put each other in boxes has been the root of many conflicts. Sexism, racism and homophobia, and any kind of prejudice, exist because we are too lazy to learn more about people around us. Oftentimes we have certain expectations about somebody because we are sure we know the category of people this person belongs too. But any so called “social group” exists only in our head. It consists of people that have one randomly prioritized characteristic in common; but they also have a myriad of traits that make them different, traits we simply ignore.

I know that people have labels for me: I am a woman, a Russian, a scholar, a PhD student, a person who listens, somebody who knows several languages, somebody who has recently started a blog, a person who left their country (a traitor), an ally, a feminist, an anti-gender-ist (I like this one), weak, strong, stupid, smart – and god knows what else. Labels are bad not so much because they are wrong (although many of them are!) but because they never let you see the person as a whole. And also because after a while people think they have put on somebody a decent enough amount of labels to be able to say who this person is. Then they stop, being sure that this somebody is not a mystery anymore.

We think that labels and boxes make people transparent. But they just obscure things. So, please, don’t put me in a box, however pretty and neat it is. 


Never finish the journey of discovering people. Because this journey is amazing. 


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