learning the right lesson.

When I came to Japan, I remember being really really shocked at the train culture. Everyone packs in and pushes each other and shoves and stands really close and pushes. In America this is pretty rude. And I couldn't figure it out because I thought that Japanese people were supposed to be so polite. So I came away from it thinking that Japanese people were really rude. My eventual reaction was to reciprocate what I was perceiving, which was rudeness, and I became quite rude on the trains myself. Then I was with a very close Japanese friend of mine and they pointed this out, that I was being really rude. And I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I thought, me? Rude? Do you SEE everyone around me?!


I've heard many explanations for why Japanese people act like they do on the train: packing in together is actually polite because they're making room for others. Japanese people just don't mind and aren't as sensitive about personal space as we are, and so on. Maybe you can give me more explanations. But some of these alternative
explanations must be right, because this many people in Japan just can't be that rude.


So. At first, I was learning the wrong thing from an experience. I think this tends to happen a lot. We are always learning something from what's going on around us, or making judgments. If you go to a western country and realize that we're a bit stronger minded than you are, you might walk away thinking we're aggressive, and then you'll try to reciprocate it and turn into a nasty person, like I did in Japan. But assertive is a better word to use for Westerners and the difference is really subtle. Basically aggression is rude but assertion is not. Or, if as a child you hit a big dog and it bites you, you might become afraid of dogs. But dogs aren't really that scary, you just shouldn't hit them. So the lesson you learned was that dogs are scary, but the correct lesson is that you shouldn't hit dogs.


I think a lot of times our first experience with something is when we will learn the most from it. For example, if I have a great father as a child, no matter how many horrible men I meet in the future, I will still probably have somewhere in my heart the idea that men are pretty good. But if I have a horrible father as a child, no matter how many great men I meet, I will still probably always have it in my heart that men are bad, and I may not be able to trust them as much as I would have if I had had a great father.


I'm actually kind of formulating this idea as I write, but it's starting to make more and more sense. So it makes me think that I want to be really aware and careful when I experience something for the first time. If you give yourself over to emotional reactions instead of sound reasoning, it could be pretty dangerous and you could end up with a really warped view of the world. Of coarse more experiences of the same thing will basically balance out your views, but maybe not completely. I think it's hard to escape from first impressions, especially if they're strong ones.


Ok, so when you are studying for a test, if you bomb it the first time you should be really careful to learn the correct lesson. If you are constantly getting a certain type of question wrong, you can never get the probability questions on the SAT or you can never get vocab questions on the TOEFL, it doesn't mean that you're useless at that type of question. If your failure is constant, it probably means that how you're studying is faulted, or how you try to answer is faulted, or something else. It probably doesn't mean that you're brain is faulted.


So don't get so discouraged. Think of it like a puzzle. There's a truth behind most things (everything, I believe), a correct reason behind most problems and you just have to try to find it. But there are many wrong reasons to every problem. Make sure you don't believe them!


▼▽▼▼【講師】Amberly先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━
・【Neva Givu Apu!!】2009.07.15 (Wed)