D sounds kind of intrusive, but I don't think it would be more intrusive for kids of Mexico than somewhere else. I'm going to guess A, but I'm not sure why.
I don't even know how you tell face shape without whatever tools face scientists use.
Oh god, I bet it's D because everyone from Mexico has brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin so they can't learn about how blue eyes are recessive. That's amazing. Am totally unrelated to culture. Incredibly racist goes without saying. (And factually incorrect, of course.) I hope I am completely and utterly mistaken here, but it's very "one of these things is not like the others" for those choices. Please let me be completely wrong about this.
There was a question on an earlier practice test that Jammies missed. It was something like, "Kai is from Brazil and no one at the school speaks Portuguese. What is the best option for the principal?" and offers up four different ways to help Kai. They're all good measures, but which one is best? If you pick the one that Jammies picked, it's wrong, and it tells you that the school can't afford to do that. So it's not the best, because you should have known that you were supposed to consider the school's decimated budget in your teacher certification exam.
5: "Was speak Spanish but loudly and slowly" one of the choices?
4: Not convinced. What was your SAT score again? (Kidding, obviously.)
There was also this one, which I posted to my personal blog last week:
Which of the following sentences is an example of a British dialect?
A. "Give me an order of pancakes with extra syrup."
B. "Get me a pop and a beaver tail from Timmies, eh?"
C. "Do you want a sarnie or bangers and mash?"
D. "Vegemite toast for brekky!"
Jammies got it right, but we are unable to figure out why this is a useful thing to test.
In order: Ohio, Canada, England, Australia.
If a student says any of those things to a teacher, they're kind of demanding.
Crucially, all the knowledge acquired in getting certified to assist students who are learning English as a second language should not apply to any of those places of origin.
Oh, right. That escaped me for a second. I remember my British roommate being livid that the state of Ohio made him pass a test to prove he could speak English before he was allowed to teach at The Ohio State University.
He's now teaching in Wales. I wonder if they made him take a test first?
Also, I read Ydnew's answer to Jammies, and we're going with it. Will report back.
In the next five minutes? I'm trying to decide if I should stay awake and wait or see tomorrow.
I think they're looking for A or C on grounds of obvious stereotypes. How is the course defining "cooperative learning group" and "work independently"? B is obviously irrelevant in Texas. D implies a a homework assignment which is to my mind useless.
Drumroll please!
D is wrong, but they did not give us the right answer.
BUT in a sneak twist, Jammies reports that this is the second time he's had this question. Last time he answered A, and that was also wrong! So it's B or C.
I'm guessing A based on it seeming more likely that there's some stereotype explicitly in the curriculum about Chinese students being all buckle-down-with-books to the exclusion of "cooperative study" than that there's the opposite about Korean students.
Its the Australian peer tutoring thing. Australians are bad at peer tutoring because they eat too many blooming onions.
C.
In A the student is working in line with the "Asians are cooperative / mindless ants" stereotype. In C the student is working against it and will have trouble. Options B and D don't seem to be working with or against any expectation (by "Americans") about "culture". But this question is really something!
Ha! Just read 19 and it flips my reading. But the Q seems to depend on stereotypes about cultures. Eesh!
And now having read 18 (I'll read in order now) I feel more confident about my answer.
Then it has to be C, because the student in B is being asked to tutor so their ability to learn is not really at issue. Don't know why though. Maybe the clue is that the student "recently moved," and so they haven't had time to learn the English language or alphabet sufficiently in order to work independently? But if the country of origin is important (and it seems to be, since each student is from a different place), then should we take into account that in South Korean schools learning English is usually compulsory?
re: 14
Quite possibly.
My wife is considering applying for teacher training. She has a university degree she earned in Britain. Yet .. she has to either prove she has a GCSE in English (you'd do these exams about age 15) or take an equivalency test.
"I have a degree in a reading/writing intensive subject, that I earned high honours for, at a British University, done entirely in English." does not count, apparently.
Also, in Wales, I think it's increasingly hard to get certain teaching jobs in certain parts of Wales without Welsh language skills. A friend is Welsh (and a Welsh speaker) and has considering moving back to Wales with his wife (who is a headmistress) but they are blocked because she's not a Welsh speaker.
My wife is considering applying for teacher training. She has a university degree she earned in Britain. Yet .. she has to either prove she has a GCSE in English (you'd do these exams about age 15) or take an equivalency test.
"I have a degree in a reading/writing intensive subject, that I earned high honours for, at a British University, done entirely in English." does not count, apparently.
But this is just normal government stupidity. The Army brought in numeracy and literacy standards a few years ago, and any soldier who didn't meet them had to get remedial teaching. The requirement was at least a C in Maths and English GCSE. That wasn't the minimum; that was the requirement. Some of my soldiers hadn't seen their GCSE certificates in about 20 years. Because who keeps that kind of thing? In vain did they point to (actual examples here) their PhDs in epidemiology from University College, London, their masters' degrees in English from St Andrews, their first-class honours in Mathematics from Cambridge. If they couldn't prove they had at least a C at GCSE, they would be put on compulsory remedial numeracy and literacy classes.
The answer is D. Mexicans don't believe in the existence of eyes and consider even the word itself to be offensive. Instructors should instead refer to "front ears".
Or possibly it's B: Australians, with their robustly egalitarian and classless outlook on life, would be insufficiently deferential for the role of peer tutor. Peers expect their tutors to be humble and subservient. They don't want some leather-skinned jackaroo putting his feet on their walnut side table and telling them to bloody buckle down and learn the bloody irregular verb endings so they can take the arvo off and crack some tinnies.
I read these to SPouse who works with a lot of ESL kids (although not many Asians, mostly Laintx). She initially thought A on the OP but when told that was wrong said C, thought D was wrong and didn't understand what B was based on. She thought that the British dialect question was reasonable. ESL learners have often picked up bits of English from other parts of the world so it's useful to recognize that. Our kid said trousers instead of pants for a while because they taught British English in his class when we lived in Spain.
Latinx. My phone is still learning that word.
Latinx. My phone is still learning that word.
29: A peer tutor is fellow student, generally slightly more advanced, who tutors a student supplementally to their classes. This might be only an hour or so a week; it's much less intensive than what I think tutoring means in the UK university context. I peer tutored mathematics when I was in college. I had to take a short course to get certified in it, but it was pretty easy and the extra income was nice.
Of course it's not A. Chinese are communists. It's got to be C. Korea is an East Asian collectivist culture. You can't expect them to work independently.
Gawd.
28: Since those are national exams, is there no central record they could request them from?
I'm relieved to be wrong. I found this article that I think has it:
https://asiasociety.org/education/south-korean-education
It says classes in South Korean schools are run exclusively in lecture format and interviews an American teaching English:
Regarding instructional methods, this teacher has tried small groups and other nontraditional approaches to teaching but felt his students did not respond well, being unfamiliar with such methods and uncertain about how they were expected to perform. He therefore returned to lecturing, which he attempts to enliven with frequent questions.
We recently tried playing Taboo with the kids. "Front ears sensitive to bright pictures" sounds like something from that.
I have to say, I've seen people from Korea work independently. Unless that doesn't count because were they really independent if I could see them? Anyway, sounds like bullshit.
I am remembering classmates from Korea who absolutely excelled academically, and did not seem to be flustered about the fact that the vast majority of homework requires one to work independently. So weird.
BUT I have NO memory of Australian peer tutors. Hmm. I'm coming around to B.
I once worked with an Australian but it turns out he was actually born and raised in New Zealand.
How could you ever hope to be a peer tutor when you're actually from New Zealand?
He went to medical school and the indignity of living in Cleveland for many years.
This 2017 Pearson Nursing chart is astonishingly racist - how different cultures experience pain. Also I'm offended that they've described me so accurately.
Based on local experience they sounds have added "while riding on the bus" to the second one.
"Pain is considered a test of faith while riding on the bus."
42: Only Westerns have the independence to work without quantum entanglement.
"Roadhouse bouncers are likely to minimize the amount of pain they are experiencing because they have been known to claim that pain don't hurt."
Stupid new keyboard, and lack of proofreading. Our belief in the uniqueness of our intellectual curiosity and little saloon doors are what make our culture distinctive.
42: Of course it is BS. Did you ever watch the NBC coverage of the Beijing Olympics? A whole lot of bogus opining about Chinese culture.
48: There is actually a movement to work on this. There's a lot of BS out there about how Black people experience pain. Also there are official decision aids which seem to harm non whites. The most famous is the calculation of kidney function eGFR.
https://medicine.uw.edu/news/uw-medicine-exclude-race-calculation-egfr-measure-kidney-function
I haven't looked into the scientific explanation for why they modified it for Blacks, but basically it amounted to: black people are more muscular.
See also this excellent summary with a link to a recent New England Journal article.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/17/racial-bias-skews-algorithms-widely-used-to-guide-patient-care/
When I was young - before I was on Unfogged - I taught in China for a couple of years. I'm going to guess A, because at that time group work was a bit of a novelty in the schools I taught at. I don't know if this is still true or not - I know a Chinese grad student and we have chatted a bit about my experience of Chinese high schools and universities versus what theirs, and they always just laugh incredulously and tell me that I have to visit again to see how things are now*.
But it's a stupid question because it's really reductionist. First off, every foreign teacher always had people do group work and it really wasn't a big deal. If anything, I'd say that since Chinese schools in the big cities were ridiculously competitive, people tended to do group work Very Seriously and with a fine attention to detail, which was not my experience as an American student.
Second, if a kid is young and in a new country, the biggest impacts on learning IMO are not going to be "I don't understand what it means to work in a group".
I admit that negotiating American laziness and noncompliance around group work could be hard for a kid who grew up trying to do well in school, but that was true of me and I practically grew up in a John Hughes movie, horribly enough.
It seems like the flattening of rich human experience is the problem, not the "acknowledging that people from different places will have encountered different classroom styles" thing.
*I wish I could. Even leaving aside the "maybe my lungs will fail and I'll die in the pandemic" part, I can't imagine it will be possible to go to China for fun again in my lifetime. It's just so grim. The pandemic has made me realize that China basically isn't real to most Americans - like, in retrospect it's obvious that most people didn't understand that China has enormous sophisticated medical infrastructure and still struggled to contain the pandemic - most people were basically thinking of some kind of China circa 1949, barefoot doctors, etc and assuming that of course the US could mop the floor with an epidemic that would flatten China. I wish I could go back. I mean, until the pandemic it was always a possibility - I could have just chucked everything and gotten some kind of teaching job.
Why didn't you consult Ogged, the world's foremost authority on ethnic stereotypes? The answer is surely C.
Also, Texans don't know nuthin'.
*I wish I could. Even leaving aside the "maybe my lungs will fail and I'll die in the pandemic" part, I can't imagine it will be possible to go to China for fun again in my lifetime. It's just so grim. The pandemic has made me realize that China basically isn't real to most Americans - like, in retrospect it's obvious that most people didn't understand that China has enormous sophisticated medical infrastructure and still struggled to contain the pandemic - most people were basically thinking of some kind of China circa 1949, barefoot doctors, etc and assuming that of course the US could mop the floor with an epidemic that would flatten China.
I don't buy this. People didn't think the virus from China would spread here because in the past, they haven't, except for the annual flu strain. SARS being the main example. You don't believe it can happen until it happens. And people know China is a very advanced society. Without having been precisely told so by anyone in authority, I think the typical US public opinion among people under 60 is that the US is in a cold war with our scientific and technological equal, which has less freedom but more ability to accomplish large projects, China.
I remember back in February people were saying "This panic about the virus is xenophobia because people are afraid of China and afraid of Chinese viruses. Calm down everyone." Then it switched to "People didn't panic enough about the virus because people never think about China and think it's another planet."
59: No, I think lots of people assumed it would be contained like SARS. I certainly did until it started to spread outside China, because it seemed so well-contained and the epidemics outside Wuhan seemed well-constrained.
But I've met way, way too many people who still think China is super-low-tech to buy that there's any serious understanding of events in China. People who are Very Online and/or keep up with the news, that's one thing, but those are outliers. A lot of people think of China as one big maquiladora zone.
If it helps, I think of China as dystopian society of social control and technology.
The best of those, at least around here, are made by people from the ROC.
Really, China is the land of the baozi and extremely solid thermos design. Whether you want an old-fashioned granny thermos with a glass liner that is basically so big and solid that it has to just hang out on your desk or the very highest tech one, Chinese design has you covered.
I mean, not to knock dumplings, I like dumplings as much as the next person, but you can't go wrong with three or four baozi for lunch on the go. Dumplings on the go is a recipe for disaster.
I really hate geopolitics. It really gets me down that literally when I was in my twenties was probably the golden age of China-US relations and of China-Xinjiang relations and that era isn't coming back.
|| Speaking of answers to questions, we now know that states can punish unfaithful electors, and that robocalls to collect government or government-backed debt are banned. What's left? By my count there are (a) the Trump discovery cases; (b) whether employees at religious schools can bring Title VII claims; (c) contraception mandates under the ACA; and (d) how much of Oklahoma is "Indian Country." That sounds like kind of a lot for any single day, so maybe we'll have two more days of opinions? This week, maybe? |>
China-Everyone relations, really.
|| Oh, another question answered: what do you do when Native nations have shown that the government failed to follow environmental rules in allowing a pipeline crossing under a lake upsteam from their reservations? Shut the damn thing down. Should be a fast appeal, and a request to stay the ruling pending appeal. Which may end up depending on the luck of who gets drawn for the panel. Turns out, though, that 'fuck it, let's just do it,' while apparently what lots of people want in a president, often isn't the right way to get governmental goals accomplished. |>
"Let's just do it and be legends", assessed as advice for life, ignores the fact that, as many anthropologists will attest, many legends are actually distorted and incomplete folk memories of events so catastrophic that they left no written accounts or surviving witnesses.
I feel I should share that someone's just mentioned a pitch for a children's TV series about a crew of pirates who decide to give up actual piracy and go instead into intellectual property piracy. They sail the seven seas recruiting public domain characters and adding them to their crew - abducted characters still in copyright are clapped in irons below decks (thus ensuring they never have to actually appear on camera).
We're 3/4ths of the way through season 5 of Vikings. Lots of 'let's do it and be legends' which never seems to work out as planned.
69 Do it with vikings instead. Blood eagle for infringers!
"Let's just do it and be legends", quoth Oedipus, Tantalus, Atreus and so many more. It always works out so well.
I'm going to vote D b/c family genetics and family history in Mexico can be a very fraught subject b/c of layers of discomfort and pride and stigma about the ways the Spaniards and the Indigneous and the Mestizos mix and overlap.
Oops, I guess I'm wrong. I guess I'll go with C b/c of the South Korean lecture thing, though of course as someone who has taught plenty of South Korean ESL students, that's simply not true.
Anyway, Jammies is headed home from the testing center now, having completed the actual test. We'll find out the results of the multiple choice, online test in one week, because the scantron must be printed out, chiseled into stone, made a crayon engraving of, and then sent my telegram to Greece for grading.
(Come to think of it my reaction to D is also based on having taught a student from Oaxaca with blue eyes who melted down once after one too many compliments from her classmates and told me she hated having blue eyes and wanted to look like her siblings.)
On the plus side, blue eye color correlates positively with alcohol tolerance.
Don't they give answer keys for practice tests?
I've never had an alcohol tolerance test, but I have had practice tests.
Greeks are good at standardized testing because no one actually uses computers to read Scantrons, they send them to Greece for grading using cheap labor. This is why the EU had to bail them out because it would have slowed the results of all testing in Schengen countries.
79: I think this 3rd party company recycles questions from a test bank, so it only tells you right/wrong. There was sometimes a little explanation, I think, of why the choice was right or wrong, but I don't know if there was for this one.
I remember when getting married there was a test we had to fill-out with #2 pencils and send to Omaha for grading. If a Catholic marriage breaks up because of different ways of dealing with finances, the problem is in Omaha.
The answer is "all of them".
If you mean 'negatively impact', D is the most likely correct answer, because it is asking about traits that are culturally assessed as negatives or positives, depending on the answer.
D. A student from Mexico is asked to survey family members about genetic traits such as hair color, eye color, and face shape.
What!?! Well, yeah, I guess being subjected to a racial purity test might affect a student's ability to learn...
B. "Get me a pop and a beaver tail from Timmies, eh?"
The cadence here is basically correct: Canadians really do typically end a request with an "eh?," as a means of softening the blow of that request. But the content here is not quite right: no Canadian that I have ever known in my entire life has ever gone to Tim Horton's for a pop (a soda; a soft drink) and a beaver tail. You go to Timmies for a coffee and a doughnut, fer God's sake.
85.2 not all canadians.
but seriously, it's a central/east thing.
JPJ undersells how absurd the quiz question is. "Go to Timmies for a beaver tail" makes about as much sense as "go to McD's for some Chipotle". Beaver Tails is a chain. No Canadian not reading that quiz has ever uttered that sentence.
I thought it was just a type of donut.
I'm a little surprised at how hard people are finding the original question. It's obviously C, for the reasons that have been described.
But wow, what a phenomenally racist test.