that Latino-Americans value families and groups and hierarchy much less than individualism and personal glory and competitiveness.
I assume that you got this the wrong way around.
"Machismo" is Spanish for "privileging group interests above personal reputation".
I saw an interesting talk about research on Chinese, Chinese-American, and white American parenting that part of how individualism is taught to children is by asking them questions about their feelings and teaching them to report on their internal experience, as opposed to other aspects of things that happen. That has stayed with me, and now whenever I see people share memes on social media about how teaching your children to talk about their feelings is good parenting, I think, meh, you're kind of universalizing white middle class values there.
On the other hand, without a pretty well-functioning communally-oriented social group to provide both support and control, people probably do need to understand their feelings better in order to manage them. So maybe the memes are contextually appropriate. I just don't think they describe what works everywhere.
OP: Why do you think this might be a culture class? Have Pokey's teachers really had that little experience with white people?
Have you tried spending time around white people? It's exhausting.
Anyway, in my experience, which is from decades ago, southern people expect Yankees to be pushy assholes and confirmation bias is a thing
From the linked article, part of the disclaimer at the bottom:
No hard and fast rules about interacting with Latino patients and families are being offered because they would lead to stereotyping.
It's puzzling to me how to apply this disclaimer after having read a piece that looks like stereotyping.
I sometimes think of the cable written by a US diplomat who spent some time being a hostage in Iran in 1979:
Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism. ... The practical effect of it is almost total Persian preoccupation with self and leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one's own.
It was apparently a very influential document. But go through it and substitute "American" for "Persian" throughout, and you'll see that it remains completely valid. (Reading it again now, it's crystal clear that Donald Trump, by this diplomat's standards, is our most Persian president).
So we find out, in the link in the OP, that Latinos trust their families and "place a high value on demonstrating [respect] in interactions with others."
I get that different cultures are, in fact, different. But different people are different, too. The idea that Anglos don't value their families so much, or whatever, seems strange to me.
Sure, yeah, of course one must modify one's practices in a different culture. But a lot of this genre of advice, while completely valid, seems to me to be advice in how to deal with human beings rather than the denizens of an alien culture.
I hope 9 doesn't read like 4.
HE WISHES HE WERE PERSIAN. AMATEUR.
But just because he might be conflict-free in a peer group of mini-class-strivers
Given what you said about his competitive nature that doesn't seem likely. It's possible that the teachers in that situation might view the conflicts as less serious an issue.
The idea that Anglos don't value their families so much, or whatever, seems strange to me.
My family in particular seems to place very little emphasis on family, and it's always been distressing to me.
Why do you think this might be a culture class? Have Pokey's teachers really had that little experience with white people?
Depending on what schools they've taught at, it would be very easy for the majority of their classes to be +95% Latino. I know his kindergarten teacher moved from Mexico to teach at that school. (She was also insanely patient with him and never transmitted that she personally disliked him, something that I'm not sure about the later teachers.) Furthermore, his 1st and 2nd grade teachers are dual-language teachers, which is apparently the strictest test to pass. I'm pretty sure his 1st grade teacher has mostly taught exclusively in Spanish, I'm not sure about his 2nd grade teacher.
Maybe you should try to embrace stereotypes about motherhood and ethnicity?
Maybe you should try to embrace stereotypes about motherhood and ethnicity?
Given what you said about his competitive nature that doesn't seem likely. It's possible that the teachers in that situation might view the conflicts as less serious an issue.
This is a better way to put it.
how individualism is taught to children is by asking them questions about their feelings and teaching them to report on their internal experience, as opposed to other aspects of things that happen.
That's interesting. What would be the question in a different culture? Focusing on how it impacted the whole group? Not inquiring to the kid's input but telling them or something?
Maybe you should try to embrace stereotypes about motherhood and ethnicity?
"Fight Song Of The Other Tiger Mother: How Asian Mothers Are Tiger Mothers When Compared To White Mothers, But White Mothers Are Like Tiger Mothers When Compared To Latina Mothers"
What would be the question in a different culture?
Question? Why would you ask a kid anything? They don't know anything! Tell them! Shut up! Go to your room! Stop throwing your cereal at me!
22 should have been "Opinionated ______ Mother" but I wasn't comfortable slandering any particular ethnicity.
20: I can see if i figure out who gave the talk. But it wasn't that 100% of the questions were one way or the other for any group, but there were marked shifts in percentages. IIRC, the other questions were more like, Who was there? What did they do? How were other people interacting/treating each other? But I may not remember this perfectly; I mainly remember the focused on internal experience/not focused on internal experience contrast. But one sec I'll see what I can retrieve from looking at the program of the conference I was attending.
The idea that Anglos don't value their families so much
Medical and financial decisions in the US are I think typically viewed as individual and not family decisions. Cohabiting with relatives outside the nuclear family is (I think) pretty unusual.
Outside of my immediate family, I think most of my relatives voted for Trump. I think living with them would be unpleasant.
My assumption, based on obviously very limited knowledge, is that when Americans say Latins have family values what they really mean is that Latins are authoritarian enough that they would vote Republican if the Republicans weren't so racist.
26: Inside of your immediate family, it's too dark to vote.
Further to 24, I can't find it. So I have to leave it as an interesting idea without much support.
27: I'm not sure that characterization was politicized, at least not in that way. For one thing, authoritarianism hasn't been much in the general discourse until recently, and even now only sort of.
Now, anti-abortion and general anti-reproductive rights/sex, that was definitely one of the implied things.
31: I meant what people mean in effect, even if not in those exact words.
So, I'm doing these dumb discussions on civility. I talked to the African-American professor about stages of identity development of black identity, and I got a nice paper by Beverly Tatum talking about Cross's developmental stages, and also a model of stages of white identity development. I talked to the feminist profs and got a model for feminist identity. I talked to Latin-American study profs, and they told me "No such model exists. First, the community in the US is too varied, too much churn and immigration. But also, the idea of development and models of linear progression is just antithetical to how the culture and community is analyzed by scholars." That it's not that it can't be analyzed, but it's more in terms of how various forces - degree of wealth, education, prestige, lightness vs darker skin color, etc - show up in different individuals and families.
I bring this up because it was similarly disorienting. You're telling me that there's this whole different framework that is being used, but the description leaves me feeling like I'm missing something basic about what's going on in the framework I'm used to that doesn't fit.
As long as we're only understanding people based on the peer-reviewed literature, I think we'll be fine.
I understand why Pokey does the things he does in the classroom
Could you give an example? A specific incident?
The part that seems to flummox the teachers the most is not necessarily the violence and anger - frex, throwing a ball at his teacher's face - so much as the snide comments, huffing, eye-rolling, and slamming papers around just a touch too hard. The kind of things that all 12 year olds do, but it takes them by surprise for a 5-7 year old. (I'm surprised that it takes them by surprise, which is why I'm wondering if there's some culture gap.)
(To be sure, totally obnoxious and I dearly wish he'd cut it out.)
I think enjoying the company of young children (which certainly includes elementary school teachers, but also I think includes a lot of parents), not only doesn't positively correlate with enjoying the company of teenagers it actually has a strong negative correlation. This is one big reason teen/parent relationships can be so fraught. At any rate, I'd expect elementary school teachers to be unusually bothered by teen-like behavior.
The question is, is there anyone who DOES enjoy the company of teenagers?
38 is what I've suspected. Especially those teachers on the younger side of elementary school, and possibly especially coming from a boy.
I'm not sure I have anything useful to add, but I'm following with interest because a lot of the ways that my 4-year-old is getting in trouble in Pre-K are sounding a lot like Pokey. Though mine also just always wants to be the center of attention.
39: I do. I genuinely like teenagers. I find them easier than kids in a lot of ways.
But go through it and substitute "American" for "Persian" throughout, and you'll see that it remains completely valid.
To me the test of this sort of thing is whether there are places/cultures for which this isn't the case.
That is, you often see smirking comments about statements along the lines of "Iraqis are very honor-driven," as if other places don't care about being disrespected. But cultures really do vary, even if descriptions of them are usually overblown (and are often nothing more than dumb stereotypes, but set that aside).
The specific example I think about was whether that guy who threw a shoe at GWB was doing something extra-insulting. I have no idea! But a lot of people joked about how throwing things at people is pretty universally a sign of disrespect. But it's nevertheless true that, as an American, having a shoe thrown at me, relative to anything that isn't related to bodily fluids, has no salience. Maybe it's BS that an Iraqi would care, but if it's true that they do, then that's an interesting fact.
I'm actually trying to think of anything that somebody could throw at me that would add insult to injury, but wouldn't be universally considered so. Like, bag of shit, that's universal. Dildo, that's gotta be universal. I can imagine a hyper-masculine guy being offended by, I dunno, a purse*, but I don't think that's an identifiable "thing". Like, drunk sports fans don't throw anything culturally coded at disliked opponents, do they?
*like, thrown by a man as a sign of femininity, not just a woman hucking her most throwable possession in anger.
(To be sure, totally obnoxious and I dearly wish he'd cut it out.)
Perhaps you should have considered this before naming him Pokey Geebie. I think that would lead a lot of kids to act out.
For Iris' 12th bday, she had a slumber party, and we all had dinner together. Dinner with her and 4-5 other 12-y.o.s was absolutely delightful.
She now has a mostly-different, much larger friend- group (she's 14 now), but they're all still pleasant and charming. She herself can be stereotypically teenagery at times, but is mostly a great person to have around.
I'm actually trying to think of anything that somebody could throw at me that would add insult to injury, but wouldn't be universally considered so.
A pie.
In fact, I recall that when we were discussing the GWB shoe-throwing incident at the time, someone here commented "at least it wasn't a pie" and it struck me (so to speak) as a perfect example of this cultural mismatch phenomenon.
In this, the Iraqis are far ahead of us in America: they have their offense-to-throw item at-foot at all times, while we really have to go out of our way to have a good throwable pie ready.
Well, we say pie. Isn't it most often in practice a pie pan full of whipped cream?
You have really shitty bakeries in California.
Oh, sure. The set of good throwable pies has no intersect with the set of actually good pies. So you gotta smuggle the whipped cream, and the pie can, and those are respectively both kinda bulky in different ways, and then you have to prepare it. It's just such a production, while the Iraqi insulter just needs to have not tied their shoelaces too tightly.
Some of them wear sandals, even.
52: Yeah, but a hot-tempered Iraqi winds up with a closet of shoes without pairs.
43: I have a bunch of European colleagues, who fortunately have the decency to mostly stay in Europe. But in person, they are annoyingly huggy and kissy. Blech.
The Iraqi has only two shots and then has to walk gingerly home, whereas I'd bet the American can smuggle in many pie tins as easily as one.
Good call on pies. Aside from the messiness, there's the association with clowns and indignity.
I thought about tomatoes, but I think those aren't insulting from connotation, there's just a symbolic association. But getting hit with another, equally messy fruit or vegetable* wouldn't be any better. Like, you wouldn't say to someone wiping rotten kiwi off their face, "At least it wasn't a tomato".
Eggs are bad, but I think that's purely because getting hit by an egg would suck. It's bad because it's bad, not because eggs are extra-insulting.
Some piece of shit kids threw an egg at me when I was walking home from there bar.
Because of liberals, I didn't even have a gun to shoot at their car as it sped past an apartment building.
(Husked, of course. With the husk still on it would just be a hard, spiky projectile.)
"Your Honor, it wasn't attempted murder. My client just forgot to husk it.'
If you liked it, you shoulda put a husk on it.
Is there a term for the process of medley-izing multiple melodies in your head? Like how you'll be singing one thing and then it naturally flows into another tune?
As we see from Albion's Seed, there's Anglo and then there's Anglo. This might get washed out in the South, but lots of places you have white ethnic cultures that vary quite a bit.
That guy made a career out of distinguishing Norwegian bachelor farmers from German Catholics, and that's just Minnesota.
Forget using a categorization that includes Salvadoreans in Langley with Dominicans in Manhattan, I'm not sure you can usefully lump Mexican Americans in your part of Texas with Mexican Americans in Southern California. Or Mexican Americans in Chula Vista with Mexican Americans in Indio. That's class stuff maybe, but also its about length of settlement. Also, Mexico itself is big a culturally diverse, and you end up with there being something of a melting pot in Mexico City (I think) and in the US (I'm sure). I know practically nothing about nearly everything, though, so no point in even finishing this sentence.
Which is all kind of consistent with 33.
actually I rather like the company of teenagers.
21: it's like you've known me all my life! to my children's annoyance I often talk as if I am the chill mom, because (and this is legitimate) I am forcing them to do no musical instruments right now, and don't hassle them about their grades. this latter is false, as I looked at their grades last year and was like, "you get a chinese tutor to come to our house for 90 minutes on a school day, and you get a math tutor!" and then I thought, "what if you each had both!" and then there's the fact that girl x is doing 5 hours a week of studying in prep for the PSAT, which is arguably a bit much. I stand by my point that they do not have violin and piano lessons. or like, tea ceremony.
I hope everybody of yours in South Carolina was able to ride things out.
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alameida: I thought of you reading this recent article about Warren Zevon -- very good, and made me conscious of the fact that he was both more messed up than I had really considered, and also how odd it must have been to be Warren Zevon:
Zevon was a bit of a child prodigy -- he later claimed that he had the highest ever IQ recorded in Fresno. (Now there's a good Warren Zevon song title.) At 13, he impressed his junior high music teacher enough to warrant an invite to a recording session for the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who subsequently hosted Warren at his home several times.
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he later claimed that he had the highest ever IQ recorded in Fresno.
Lots of people have IQ scores of 103.
58. Tomatoes figure in the loony hijinks in "The Death of Stalin." (Highly recommended.)
For what it's worth, most of my wife's patients are Hispanic, and she often sees families together, and notes how respectful and well-behaved the kids are.
On the Pokey front, the behavior as described would be notable even in the achievement-focused mostly Jewish/White school my kids go to. Don't try to pin this on Whitey.
I don't know if we ever discussed this here, but I think a lot of achievement-focused American families at some point make a conscious or subconscious decision to let their kids be a little bit assholish, because being very polite and deferential is a slight handicap in Capitalist States of Amerikkka. There's certainly miles of difference between my Iranian "don't even think of addressing your elders with anything other than perfect respect" upbringing and my own admonishments to my kids to be assertive.
Welcome to the Ogged Academy of Interpersonal Respect. Since 2003.
69: I put Warren Zevon being tutored by Stravinsky up there with a young André the Giant getting rides home from Samuel Beckett.
Their drinking binges were legendary. Or maybe that was Beckett and Carry Elwes.