Caveat: Confident about…

I have this really smart class called Eldorado 2a월.  The students had a debate speech test today, and so they embarked on a project to try to keep me distracted and conversational in hopes of delaying the inevitable start of the speech evaluations.

Somehow, we were talking about self-confidence.  Unlike most of my classes, there was no need to spend time explaining what self-confidence was, conceptually.  Someone asked, "Are you self-confident?"

"I am in some things, and not in others," I offered.

And rather to my surprise, one student asked, "Do you feel confident about teaching?"

It was a penetrating question from a 6th grader.  It was not being asked in a hostile tone, so I answered honestly:  that in fact, I don't always feel confident about teaching.  I said that in teaching, I was always feeling I could do a better job.  Yet in that moment, in that class, I felt really pleased with how things were going.  I wasn't "fishing for compliments"…  and none were offered.  They just nodded as if they understood.

The tone felt a bit serious, so Candy lightened the mood.  "I feel really confident about eating," she said, with a wry smile and a dry tone.

"Yes, me too," chorused some of the others.

Caveat: Panopticon

A lot of people seem to comment about how the internet seems to be increasing the insularity of societies.  I don't really think that's the case.  I think what happens is that the internet makes visible (to outsiders) the preexisting insularity of societies.  Prior to the internet, the only window we had on other societies and social groups was whatever they made public via the mass-media.  But now, we can "look inside" each society's internal "conversations," and this, inevitably, reveals their fundamental insularity vis-a-vis other social groups and societies.  This is especially true across linguistic boundaries.

I've commented before about how South Korea somehow manages to be one of the most internet-connected societies on earth yet also manages to remain alarmingly xenophobic and uninterested in the "world outside."  But that's an example where I myself have fallen into this trap of imagining the internet would somehow broaden minds and level differences.  It doesn't do that, especially across language-barriers.  Instead, it only "makes visible" preexisting differences.  It puts us all inside Foucault's panopticon, but it doesn't really change how we act as social and fundamentally "tribal" beings.

Back to Top