Pride and Arrogance

I was socialized to be a Presbyterian. My parents took me to church and I thought that I believed in God when I was young. While I was learning history classes and came to know about the world, I realized that religion was created by humans and sometimes it was used as a method to control others. In addition, I recognized that the most cruel and worst wars in human history happened under the name of religion. At least, justification for a war was people’s religion. We have lots of examples such as The Thirty Year’s War (1618-1648) in Europe, Bosnian Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), and Kosovo war (1998-1999) in Kosovo and Serbia. Or we can think about Israel and Palestine. They still have conflict with each other. Suppose that you live in your house, which is from your father and great-grandfather. One day, one stranger comes to your house and tells you to get out of your house because God said that your house was the stranger’s house. Are you willing to leave your house? This is an old story but Israelis and Palestinians still can not solve the problem. The more knowledge and information I am getting about religion, the less I am sure about God. My values of God and religion have changed. How can God exist in this horrible, unfair world where immoral actions are done in the name of God? The world I believed in is different with the world that exists in reality. I have experienced transformative learning about religion and the world. Transformative learning has given me different perspectives that I could not see in the past.

There are many more female teachers than male teachers in kindergarten through high school in South Korea. As Dr. Carter said, education is never neutral and always biased because a teacher affects a student a lot. So it is one of the problems which the Korean education system has. One day, I read one article about the same problem of the ratio of male teachers to female teachers in the U.S. I made two assumptions at that time. One is that the money from a teaching job would be enough for a woman’s job but not a man’s job. The number of male teachers would increase if the government gives more money to teachers. The other assumption is that women like the job of teaching more than men. Gilligan (1982), a psychologist, found more females than males prefer the care orientation and more males than females prefer the justice orientation in her moral development theory. I remember what I learned in a social organization class in my undergraduate study in a South Korean university. It was that female bosses care more about the relationship with employees than achievement or goals and they make the relationship with employees equal. On the other hand, male bosses focus on their goal more than the relationship with others and they make the relationship hierarchical. The moral orientation and the characteristics of a boss depend on gender in the work place but we can tell that women focus on caring and establishing a relationship with people more than men. If teachers take Pratt’s Teaching Perspectives Inventory, female teachers will have the caring perspective much more than male teachers. However, I have the second lowest score in the nurturing perspective.

     While I was taking the LSI and was writing educational biography, I came to know about myself more than before and realized that I had not thought seriously about who I was and I am. “What each learning style means” of the Assimilating style reminded me of a sentence in a book even though I do not remember what the book was. “A person who does not pay attention to others usually pays too much attention to their own possessions.” I had thought that it was me in the sentence. The Assimilating style also says “…you are less focused on people and more interested in abstract ideas and concepts.” These two quotes are not the same but they have a very similar ides. Prabably many Koreans are either of the Assimilating or Diverging style but I found one classmate whose kite was almost the same as mine though we were not in the same group in discussion. I thought that my kite of learning style was pretty normal as a Korean but hers might be little different with other Americans.

     In section 2, we can approach how to solve problems in the society because we recognized our learning style. The section 2 explains how to apply the learning style at work and home. Additionally, we learn how to get along with others who have a different learning style. At first class, Dr. Carter said, “Learning is changing our own behaviors” I hope that learning Kolb Learning Style Inventory makes me change my behaviors in the society.

     Learning meant just formal education for me. It was to give knowledge and information. Learning from experience or concrete experience? It sounded like giving wisdom or enlightment. In Korea, the young are taught to respect the old because not they are just old, but they are wise with their lots of experiences. In Buddism, everyone can be like Budda with their own enlightment in meditation. We talked about four kinds of learning styles in Kolb Learning Inventory: Concrete Experience, Active Experimentation, Abstract Conceptualization, and Reflective Observation with learning from experience. I was surprised that the word “learning” could be defined in many different ways.

     I should be a full-time student as an international student.  I can not get a job legally in the U.S. except jobs on campus. So my reflection will be about what I thought with reading assignment and the discussion in the class and my volunteer in the Red Cross.  

     I have thought that education institutes the changes of the society later than other fields. This might be because students learn unchangeable facts first then changeable theories. Perhaps the government does not spend money for absorbing the changes in the classroom. Maybe the characteristic of education is not changeable. We discussed about demographics, globalization, and technology as the changing context for learning in the class.

     The demographics of the U.S. are changing for two reasons. As medical science is getting more developed, people’s life span is getting longer. In addition, more immigrants from Asia and South America are moving to the U.S. The change means that the target of consumers for education is changing. When producers meet the appetite of consumers, the market place is more stable. However, we should consider that education is one of businesses but it could be more than that. So education satisfies the goal of learning and also should lead people to positive direction.       

     I go to the Red Cross once a week to volunteer. My job is a kind of a general assistant but sometimes I am a translator into Korean. Most of them in the Red Cross are whites and there are some blacks. However, there is also diversity. I see two Indian-Americans, one Laotian-American and some Chinese Interns. Even I met one Palestinian-American woman in the Red Cross. She said that she went to Gaja area once a year to see her grandmother. Now the job I am assigned is two. One is to check the brochures translated into Korean. The other is to persuade one Korean church. The Red Cross asked the Korean church to offer the building as a shelter in an emergency because the Red Cross has no shelter in the area of the church. The church gave a negative answer because they just open the building for Koreans. At first, I was ashamed with the answer as a Korean. I thought “What are their Christian values or why don’t they know how to share?” I told Sanchita, the manager, about what I felt about the answer. She said that the Red Cross did not explain how important it was to the Korean church. The Red Cross sent just a letter to ask a shelter in English. I know that the Koreans in the church do not speak English well. If I go to the Korean church with Sanchita and explain the importance in Korean, they would say “Yes.” So I am preparing a presentation about what the Red Cross does and why it is important to share in the Korean church.

     As the demographics is getting more diverse in the U.S., diverse work-force is needed. Education should meet the need of the consumer of education.