Teaching abroad is an odd, challenging and infinitely interesting experience. One of the first things I noticed when I was substitute teaching at middle schools around Wellington was that students are mirrors of their culture. Imagine my surprise when an excited group of 11 and 12 year old students asked me if I've ever seen WWE wrestlers walking down the street. "You mean in their outfits?" I asked. "Yeah," they practically shouted back, unable to contain their interest in a person that brought a *very* tenuous connection to their favourite "sport" right into their classroom. Of course I answered no and said that if the wrestlers were walking the streets in regular clothing I would have no way of knowing what kind of work they do. "Oy," they complained and then went back to more important things like launching pieces of rubber eraser across the room with their rulers.
Who knew that wrestling made it onto TV down here? It was the last piece of American culture that I expected to see. Nor did I expect the honesty of these young students. I liked to play up the foreigner concept and bring news articles into the classroom. I'd read about things going on around the world (non-American and non-Kiwi). Students were very curious about the world and frequently brought a New Zealand perspective to concepts. On the subject of the proliferation of high fructose corn syrup and a mono-corn agriculture the students had a hard time with the idea that anything made from vegetables could be bad for you. Typical kid thinking, right?
But this is New Zealand, where old ways die hard. Take the drinking culture for example. There used to be a time when Victorian morals applied to everything, including when and how certain goods could be bought and sold. Until a few generations ago pubs and bars couldn’t sell any sort of alcohol after 6 pm. Working class folk all over the country, jonesing for a chemically-enhanced feeling of relaxation, would flood the pubs at 5 and drink as much as their bodies could could hold before 6 o’clock rolled around. Once the 6pm rule ended, though, the bingeing didn’t. As a result New Zealand has a very real national problem with binge drinking and drunk driving that has managed to survive. This relaxed attitude toward alcohol also manifests itself in other laws: the purchasing age for alcohol is 18 and it is legal to consume alcohol under that age if approved by a guardian or older family member. Kiwis learn to drink early and to drink poorly.
There is a growing discussion in the media about these problems and I decided to do a little discussion/debate issue with a group of 13 year olds. What did they think of all the fuss about young people drinking? They couldn't seem to grasp the idea that drunken, brawling 17-year-olds are not just "boys being boys," but instead victims of a drinking culture run amok. While adults begin to question the effects of their role modelling on young New Zealand, the children are blissfully ignorant of the change in perceptions around them. They see the norm not as something to change and question but as just the way things are. For the most part they don't implant "question thy elder" chips in the kids here.
So what’s the most common question Kiwi students ask visiting Americans? Teens most commonly scrunch up their faces and ask, “You're from America? What the hell are you doing here?” For the younger crowd it’s, “Do you own a gun?” Both groups, without exception, always look disappointed when they find out that no, I’m not currently packing a six-shooter nor have I ever owned a gun. Their disinterest quickly grows to epic proportions when they find out that I think New Zealand just as interesting as the States. Maybe they were expecting a cross between Annie Oakley and an Oakland Raiders cheerleader.
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With those discussions about high fructose corn syrup and drinking culture, do you think that 13 year old Americans would've said anything different? I don't know. Part of me feels like the kids here are programmed just as much, but about different things. Yesterday a kid told me that fruit wasn't that healthy because it has sugar.
I also think a lot of American kids are programmed to know when you're "supposed" to disagree e.g. they would know in the drinking discussion that the teacher is fishing for someone to say that binge drinking is a serious problem, whether or not that's what the kid actually believes. So different programming, still problematic result.
Your definitely right. Kids are mirrors of their culture. It's just interesting to go "fishing" for something and not get what you expected. The students' comments about the drinking culture were one big signal to me that their programming was decidedly different from mine in a way that I wasn't expecting. "Fishing" is blatant and obvious and cheesy, but a good way to get 13 year olds to learn the rules of discussion, sharing opinions respectfully and using sources of information to support opinion (verbal logic and all of that kind of stuff). Obvious/well-used topics good for this because the kids already know a healthy amount of information about it; a few may pay lip service but for the most part they want to develop their own opinions. They see right through you-for those kids you bait them with some loose logic and watch them come down on you for being "the voice of the institution". Heh heh, always gets 'em talking. The benefit of the discussion is not the final opinion so much as it is the process of verbalising in a group situation.
While this group still went through the process of expressing ideas and using other people's ideas to inform their own, which was the goal of the activity, the final decision made by most of the group was surprising to me. Here I was expecting to be the voice of "the man" and I got it all wrong.
On the issue of content, I often wonder if the reactions I get from the kids here regarding alcohol use and general health are what US kids would have said in the '80s or early '90s, before the daily news about the obesity epidemic and after school specials on teen drinking became the voice of morality. Ideas and attitudes are changing here just as they did when we were in school, but at a different pace.
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