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About me: I'm asian, 32 years old. Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my
by fersho311 7y ago
About me: I'm asian, 32 years old.
Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my to make friends with them.
Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.
Later, as I became friends with them, I realized they are very self conscious about their intelligence. (I know I'm generalizing here, but 100% of the black students I mentored felt this way). I realized my asian background and hyper-competitiveness and high expectations made the situation worse. This realization completely changed me as a person.
This eventually let to me starting a coding bootcamp at our public library and I try to create an environment to make students feel safe and not judged. I don't have this down to a process yet, if anyone knows please let me know. How does one create a safe environment so students showing up will feel emotionally safe enough to start asking questions without fear of being judged?
Say we measure the time from when a student walks in to the time when he/she starts asking questions whenever they have a question. Are there any activities to do that can reduce the comfort time to the minimum?
- tchaffee 7y agoI don't have an answer, and I'm curious to hear ideas. I wonder if a "stupidest question" contest could be a good ice breaker? First question of the day earns some privilege for the rest of the class?
- fersho311 7y agoWhat japhyr said above is a small change but very profound. Asking “what question do you have” instead of “do you have any questions” is a big deal. “Stupidest” or “first question” gamification haven’t given me much success, I suspect is because it comes off a little insincere.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoI wonder why a lot of asians have this racial inferiority complex. I (being asian myself) grew up in an affluent asian dominated neighborhood of Cupertino. I had black, white and asian friends growing up and I never thought too much of racial issues. Maybe because in my schools asian americans were largely the majority. Again, I had the same experience going to school at UCLA which was largely populated mostly by asians. However coming back to the bay area a decade later and making a lot of friends with local asians who grew up in San Francisco I am seeing huge racial inferiority complexes among asian males and females. It's disgustingly huge. Among asian males racism manifests itself as hatred against white people for their white privilege and they talk openly about being scared of black people because they're all criminals. It's nuts. Note that this attitude mostly manifests itself among the native asian SF crowd who grew up here, not the tech migrants from outside of the city. The other thing is racism manifests itself differently among asian females in the most pathetic display of inferiority I have ever seen in my life. The majority of single asian females in SF prefer dating white people over their own race. It's not even a superficial taste fetish either, literally a huge amount of asian females view their own race as too inferior and too weak to date. I don't know whether to blame the asian males or asian females for this level of patheticism. I read posts from asians above and I'm astonished... I'm literally thinking what planet is this guy from? Then I realize that I'm from cupertino, I'm the guy who grew up on a different planet.
- xenihn 7y agoThis post reads like it was copied from /r/asianmasculinity
- crimsonalucard 7y agoDidn't even know that channel existed. Man, shakes head.
- zozbot234 7y agoReally? I think even many white people, and folks of other races besides, would feel quite awkward and embarassed at being considered "the only people worth dating", over and above the very ethnic background that these women know best! It's something that should strike everyone as strange and awkward, not just Asian males.
- KoftaBob 7y agoI've never understood this argument regarding dating outside of one's ethnic group. The effects of actual racism is one ethnic group benefits at the expense of one or more other groups. What you're describing is something else entirely. Who's getting harmed when Asian women have a preference for white men when dating? Who cares? To each their own, no? Are you implying there's some maximum percentage of women that can prefer another ethnic group when dating, and anything above that is problematic? Edit: I should've specified that I'm talking explicitly about their commentary on asian women's dating patterns, not anything else in their comment.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoIt is problematic to asians as a whole. It's pretty obvious when asians discriminate their own race and view white people as superior. There's really no argument for you here. Definitely not problematic to white males who are dating asian females though. Honestly, among white guys it manifests itself as Asian women being "easier" and there's nothing wrong or racist for taking advantage of it, but it definitely won't appear to be a problem from your perspective even though something deeply wrong is happening.
- jpster 7y agoI think the previous commenter is on to something re icebreakers. Also, please check out Carol Dweck’s work on Growth Mindset. Her book shares examples of how researchers and teachers successfully primed underprivileged students to stop thinking of intelligence as a fixed trait. Some interesting mindset “hacks” that eventually helped them outperform students w/better resources.
- haihaibye 7y agoWith a pre-registered, much larger sample size, Growth mindset replicated but the effect size was tiny: https://psyarxiv.com/md2qa https://psyarxiv.com/md2qa On a 4-point grade metric (“A” = 4.0, “B” = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment effect was 0.03 grade points
- fersho311 7y agoThank you! I added it to my reading list.
- japhyr 7y agoI like that your focus is on people being comfortable enough to ask their own questions. That's a clear, concrete goal that gets right to the heart of the issue you describe, in the library setting. One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions. When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented. It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions. I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.
- freediver 7y agoHow did you start the coding bootcamp at public library? Can you give more details, structure etc
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- memling 7y agoI would recommend cultivating ignorance as something of an asset. the fun problems don't have clean answers, and it's common that we have to explore areas about which we are not knowledgeable. that process is incredible once you embrace your ignorance as an indication that you can learn something new.
- sangnoir 7y ago> Are there any activities to do that can reduce the comfort time to the minimum? I'm not an educator, but I think the goal is to normalize asking questions. This can be achieved by initially forcing everyone to ask a question (no matter how silly/not related to the topic of the day). You could give them time to write down the questions first, then everyone gets their turn to read it. Later, you can relax it so that questions become voluntary.
- fersho311 7y agoI like this, a little hard to enforce, but I don’t see any issues. Only way to find out is to try.
- mmsimanga 7y ago> Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my to make friends with them. > Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them. Speaking as black person this is an astute observation which I have observed. In Africa sometimes this is due to English not being someone's first language. In a meeting with people from different races I have noticed my black colleagues are way less vocal than when we are talking in Zulu on our own. They have a different demeanor and come out as more forceful and confident in Zulu. In English meeting they are less forceful.