Sunday, February 21, 2010

Who Works More: Student Responses

In the listening comprehension part of my Spanish language course, there was the following statement: "Teresa's father works as much as her mother." When answering the question "Who works more, Teresa's mother or Teresa's father?", only 20% of students got the answer right. Academically, it tells me they are still not very comfortable with the Spanish expressing "tanto como" which in English means "as much as." This is no big deal because we have a lot more time until the end of the semester to get this construction right.

What is a lot more disturbing, though, is the sexist nature of the answers coming from the students who did not recognize this construction and decided to guess the correct answer. Every single one of them guessed that Teresa's father works more than her mother. Even though there was absolutely nothing in the text to lead them in that direction. If it were a matter of simple, ideologically untainted guesswork, at least some of the 80% of students who got this answer wrong would say that the mother works more. Somehow, the students' vision of men and women still revolves around the father who works hard and the mother who does a lot less. This makes me very sad because in the low-income families these students for the most part come from, women in all probability work full-time jobs and contribute as much as men. Their contribution, however, is overshadowed by the ideology that presents women as working less than men.

5 comments:

V said...

I would suspect that in your area the kids who are well off enough to go to university may have a housewife mother with quite high probability.
That was one of my biggest surprises about the US - how many women are housewives. The family can be not rich at all. The husband could work two jobs... It is not about warning enough (for whom?) or not, it is about their value system.

V said...

"earning", not "warning", of course...

Clarissa said...

You know, we'd been covering the topic 'The Family' with these students right before that, and we talked a lot about their families. (For those who are sitting there, eagerly waiting to accuse me of being inappropriate with my students, that's how we learn languages. By talking. So just suck it up and go troll somebody else).

So to continue, most of the students said their mother works. I can only remember one whose mother never worked and one whose mother doesn't work because she is retired. But that was it. So it must be the television where they are getting this.

NancyP said...

No, they get it from church - where it is preached that men are intended to be the breadwinners and women are intended to bear children as often as possible, and then home school them.

It amuses me to see how naive Easterners are about the beliefs of exurban and rural Midwesterners.

Clarissa said...

That's why I'm here, NancyP. To learn new things. :-) I don't know whether my students are learning anything, but I definitely am. :-)

I think you are right about the church influence.