EDSS 531

 Journal Writing 4:  What are your biases and how do you mitigate your behavior when working with students?

Warning!  The next few sentences may be pretty ugly.  Blacks are dirty, lazy, noisy and stupid.  Hispanics are hard-working but so dumb they can’t even speak English.  Indians are drunken bullies. Asians are treacherous, just pretending they don’t speak English.  Germans are pushy and rude.  Poles are stupid.  Those are the stereotypes I was brought up with.  Lurking like a virus in my lungs ready to emerge in a moment of stress.  And as much as I to ignore them, they do affect my first impression of everyone I meet.  The trick is to keep them from affecting my ongoing interactions, particularly with my students.  The first thing is to ignore that first impression, which with practice is not too hard to do.  The second is to cultivate curiosity about my students.  Try to understand their thoughts and feelings.  The third is to care about them and let them know it, which, once you’ve got to know them a bit, is really almost unavoidable. 

That’s my approach.  I don’t know how successful I am.  There’s a big difference between modulating your behavior so as not to show bias and really not having any bias.  The first is relatively easy.  The second – well prejudice in some form at some level may be an inescapable part of the human condition.

Before I conclude though, I’ve noticed a new prejudice in my teaching, which surprises and troubles me.  When grading papers I’ve noticed that if I know the student whose paper I’m grading; that is, if I know their name and picture their face as I read their work, I am inclined to be more lenient in assigning grades.  As a practical consideration, that means that the more outgoing students, who I get to know sooner, will get better grades from me than the retiring ones.