wk1 Reponse - Tia Foster

Original Post by Tia Foster:

The first thing that I began to think of when I started this book is a question that no one has been able to successfully answer for me yet. How do I know that my “green” is the same is your “green”? (Green can be replaced by pretty much anything that is perceived.) I know that we perceive the same object as being “green”. However, the way that I learned “green” as a child is because someone pointed to something and called it “green”. Since we all learn in much the same way, how do I know that what you see inside your head is the same thing that I see in my head when someone says “green”. Are our perceptions the same? Now that I am able to get that off my chest, I will continue reading the first chapter.

Ok, I didn’t get very far into the first chapter, but I have to comment again. These experiments in neuroscience are exactly what I was describing. Our senses bring us information, the brain constructs its own simulation, and then we have a conscious experience. Do our constructs match? Does it matter if they don’t match? Slightly further on, on p. 11, the authors state that our perceptions have to do with our survival, including the “ability to distinguish friends and foes.” I have noticed this phenomena somewhat in my school and daily life. I currently teach in a school where about 98% of the student body is African-American. However, my family is from a town that is about 85% white. I have always been very observant of people and didn’t have a lot of trouble learning to recognize each child in my class and the differences in each of their appearances. None of the children in my class (or the other white KK teacher’s class) in future years have gotten me confused with other white teachers at the school. However, many of the African-American teachers have gotten me confused with the other white teachers as well as the kids who were not in either of our classes. Granted, two of us both have dark brown hair, and two of us wear glasses, but those are the only similarities between the three of us. I have never had another white person from our social group to get either of us confused. On the other side, when I talk about all of my students in my pictures, my family from back home can never keep any of the kids straight. They say that they all look alike, which to me they look drastically different. It all depends upon how familiar you are with the different ethnicities and the idiosyncrasies of features. The people with whom we are most familiar would be classified as friends and foes only need to be recognized almost in the abstract. Details are not really all that important if you just need to know whether to stay or flee (in an evolutionary sense). In reference to my paragraph above, people who work with color see a much more nuanced “green” than people who do not. The details are much more important if it has more bearing in your everyday life.


One thing that stands out to me as I read “The Practice” is the assumption that I made when I first started teaching at my school that everyone speaks English. That assumption was true because everyone was speaking English; however, everyone was not speaking the exact same dialect that I was (which I also assumed). One of the questions that we had to ask the children was if they knew their address. I thought I could just ask it like someone would ask me, and I would get a valid answer. “Where do you live?” Mostly, though, all I got was blank stares. I did get a couple of Memphis, but no one would narrow it down. Then I thought, I’ll just ask for their address. More blank stares and a couple of very entertaining stories about dresses that they wore to church. Finally after observing the other teachers, I realized that the question that had to be asked was, “Where do you stay?” That question led to a child giving me their street address (if they knew it). This experience led me to realize that even though we share a common language, we do not necessarily use it in the same ways--even more so than I had ever understood. 

Which leads me back to my original questions--are our perceptions the same and does it matter. More importantly, does my perception of something change the way that I am able to express myself to others, such as on an assessment. If my perception of something is different (but still valid) from the person who wrote the assessment, will that skew the results of the assessment? Is my perception less valid because it cannot be shared in a traditional manner?




Response by Rebecca Day:


Tia,

When I read through your first paragraph, I was absolutely thrilled because there is someone else out there who thinks like me!

I am an only child, and thus spent a lot of my childhood playing alone and thinking to myself, sometimes out loud.  One of the things I thought once (and many times since then) is whether or not what I literally see is the same thing that someone else literally sees.  For example, how do I know that the sky is really blue?  Because someone pointed up and said, "The sky is blue."  But what if my interpretation of blue is someone else's green or purple or red? 

Another example, I see a cat as having pointed ears, four legs, a tail, and fur and it purrs when content.  But what if this animal that I call a cat is perceived by someone else as having pointed ears, four legs, a tail, and fur, and neighs, the animal I call a horse?

So what you see in your head as green may be orange in my head...