Danger of a Single Story

Danger of a Single Story

https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg 

Applications to Teaching:

• How vulnerable children are in reading a story (she wrote stories about a culture that she did not understand)
• Wrote about the white culture that is present in all of the “classics”
• When she read the African books, she finally realized that she did not have a single story to write anymore
• Do not portray any nation, territory, or individual with bias
• This is much easier said than done, we must also transcend this even into the genres of novels that we read
• Question everything and encourage my students to question everything in order for knowledge to prosper
• Work hard to keep stereotypes out of the classroom, to the extent that some common sayings include stereotypes and I should avoid using them
• Even if my field is in math, always integrate culture into the classroom as a way to foster accepting, diligent, kind, and worldly students

How to Become a Better Student:

• Never judge a person or other student based solely on their backgrounds, cultures, and most definitely rumors
• “She felt sorry for me before she saw me”
• “My roommate had a single story of Africa”
• “I did not think of myself as an African until I moved to America”
• “The character’s were too much like him, an educated and middle class man… they were not starving…”
• “Immigration became synonymous with Mexicans”
• Until she visited and became overwhelmed with shame due to her over-submergence to the media labeling Mexicans as criminals
• Showing and reading news about people as one thing and only one thing is never the right way to judge a person, it never truly crossed my mind that Africa was anything other than impoverished, and it saddens me to feel this way
• The noun that means “to be greater than one another” in her native language discusses how power overtakes the political system and further “brainwashes” others to start with the arrows of the Native Americans and not the invasion of the British
• It is so easy to be brainwashed and coerced into believing things, prompting me to always ask questions, “question everything” to promote further knowledge
• Never stereotype! It makes you ignorant, close-minded, and it robs other people’s of their dignity, emphasizing how others are different even when they are very similar