Nice analogies. I haven't been there because I'm not as brave as you. But there you go. The teacher should respect you for having a different idea and expressing it, and so should the class.
This reminds me of when we were talking about females in sports in GPEL (one of the few interesting discussions) and one girl said, "Well, girls are built differently so they won't be as good at football". And then the class exploded.
In my writing seminar, we were talking about how to describe this kind of Ethiopian music. Of course there was a pause where no one wanted to say anything, so I was like..."well, it sounded kind of surreal and otherwordly" and promptly got shot down because apparently the word "surreal" was not at all relevant. But if your classes judge you because of your opinions then they're the ones who should be feeling stupid.
:( While not knowing the music, I don't see why surreal (and many other adjectives) can't be applied to music. And that's true, but should and do are two extremely different things.
Also, this just came to me from what you said: I think people want a scape-goat or an antagonist. So the brave people who offer up ideas first may be negatively affected by this, because the response may not always be rational. If there's one person who is willing to express an idea, the class can feel better about not responding first by banding together to prove that first person wrong (or something related to the comments that person made.) I don't think this is every case (far from it), but I think this unconscious reaction may be true (in part) at times.
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This reminds me of when we were talking about females in sports in GPEL (one of the few interesting discussions) and one girl said, "Well, girls are built differently so they won't be as good at football". And then the class exploded.
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Now that's perfect for the killing puppies analogy. Ouch.
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Also, this just came to me from what you said: I think people want a scape-goat or an antagonist. So the brave people who offer up ideas first may be negatively affected by this, because the response may not always be rational. If there's one person who is willing to express an idea, the class can feel better about not responding first by banding together to prove that first person wrong (or something related to the comments that person made.) I don't think this is every case (far from it), but I think this unconscious reaction may be true (in part) at times.
Or maybe not.
(cute icon, btw)
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