I suppose that this is the first time that I stayed in class properly during lunch to take a break after like 2 full years in Polytechnic. The feeling of taking away food from the canteens and then bringing back to class to eat just brings back some of the memories in secondary school where we used to smuggle food like burger up to the class to eat which was forbidden. Looking at things now, I can even bring a proper packet of food up to the class and eat it in front of the lecturer without giving a damn.
Well, like I mentioned I was behind time for doing my reflection for WISP. So, we went through Stereotype & Prejudice again. However, this time was more indepth and the activities showed how badly we actually stereotyped people. The best activity was Who Lost What. There was a picture of a Middle East woman and the 4 out of the 5 groups in the class matched that she would possess a suspicious package. This shows how much the terrorism incident for 911 has made us stereotype as long people are from Middle East, they will be in some form or another involved in Terrorism. This tends to make things very dangerous as we will tend to miss out the real actual culprit who is plotting against us which there was another picture on the slide who is a caucasian young man.
The next activity that we had was to list out the places where stereotyping will happen. The most common place that was listed out was School. After much discussion, I will say that a lot of improper or stereotype values are inculcated into us since we are young even by some people we would never expect. They are actually our parents. There is a saying in Chinese, 上梁不正下梁歪. In fact, from young, if we were not corrected for the misconceptions that we have, I think that it will just follow us in our lives and eventually, we will all be caught in a vicious cycle? The best example would be even in kindergarden, we had learnt to stereotype Fat People. When we were playing competitive games, we would not want to have them in our team because we think that they will cause our team to lose due to certain factors e.g. being slow and stupid.
The assignements for this module is really interesting because I can even talk about the 3 taboo topics which I am not allowed to talk during Toastmasters which are Politics, Sex and Religion. Most probably I will do on the topic on Sexuality as I believe that it is one of the topics that has a lot of controversy over it.
Great, after typing so much, it is the end of lunch break... I wonder whether I should go for a run later. Hmm...
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