Posts Tagged ‘deaf’
Deafness and blindness
Posted on: October 12, 2021
Unpack the two tweets below. The original tweet is below the response.
The original tweet highlights how selective hearing and reading can result in deafness to logic and blindness to perspective.
That tweeter started with a conclusion (our conditions are irrationally restrictive) and selectively cited policies in order to reverse engineer disgust with authorities.
The replier applied a dose of rare common sense to explain how enacted policies follow logic. For example, people who opt to travel now are subject to even stricter conditions and practices to ensure the safety of all.
We should not envy other countries that seem to have opened up despite not having as high a vaccination rate and/or having people that actively resisted masking and vaccines. Those places paid with disproportionately more lives than we have.
Emerging from a pandemic is not a race to be first. Singapore’s strategy has been to flatten the curve during endemic phase of COVID-19 so as not to overburden medical care or kill our vulnerable. This is a long game and some do not have the patience or the foresight to do this.
So they take to platforms like Twitter and Facebook to vent unhappiness or even spew hatred. This attracts likes because people can be stupid that way.
Consider another scenario that played out in the USA.
An unvaccinated woman was denied a kidney transplant and her supporters want to play up the narrative that she was being unfairly punished.
This simple explanation was designed to create outrage (just like the original tweet was). It also stemmed from being deaf to logic and blind to perspective.
A medical professional explained that organ recipients must take immunosuppressive drugs to reduce the risk of organ rejection. This leaves the patient vulnerable to disease.
The woman claimed to have SARS-CoV2 antibodies. But we do not know if she has antibodies to the delta variant or if she has enough to fight off infection.
The less simple explanations may not be as easy to understand, but they provide the rationale for effective COVID-19 responses.
Being open to such explanations starts with the decision to stop being wilfully deaf and blind to logic and perspective. If schooling has not open your eyes and ears, then you have not been educated.
Learning from students elsewhere
Posted on: May 15, 2021
The easy thing to do with videos like these is to show them to students who complain about going to school and telling them how grateful they should be.
The more difficult thing to do is to draw out meaningful questions, generate discussion, and educate our students on empathy and action.
Illiterate, blind, or deaf
Posted on: June 30, 2018
There are many fallouts from local shared bike company’s (OBike’s) withdrawal from the market. The one that seems to concern users is the inability to get a refund of their deposit when they first signed up.
I am not sympathetic to those users because the company offered to return the deposits last November. I know because I was also a user of those shared bikes, made a S$49 deposit, and got it back when I read the notice.
You would need to have been illiterate, blind, or deaf to miss that message. The offer was made six months ago and they have had all this time to get their money back.
Even more serious than the inability to read, see, or hear the news is an indifferent mindset. We have only ourselves to blame if the warning signs were there, but we chose to ignore them.
Something similar could be said of teachers and constant change. Rarely does a policy or practice sneak up on you. If you cooperate, collaborate, and communicate, you should sense the changes coming. You can then prepare for them by changing behaviours in advance.
We cannot expect our children and students to be have “growth mindsets” or to exhibit “grit” if we ourselves do not possess these traits and model them.
“I’m not deaf, I’m ignoring you.”
Posted on: May 27, 2016
If you have been (un)fortunate to receive my out-of-office automated email response, you know that I start with “I’m not deaf, I’m ignoring you.”
Now here is a message that instructors, particularly those that rely on lecturing, should not ignore: Students do not ignore you because they have technology. They ignore you because you are boring them.
If some people do not want to listen to or interact with other people, they will find something else to do.
The tweet above is funny because it is true. Before phones got our rapt attention, people focused on their needlework, newspapers, sketchpads, or anything remotely more interesting.
If a task is mundane or not meaningful, people will avoid it and find something more worthwhile to do.
If the people are students, they are not necessarily being anti-social or disrespectful. They quickly make value judgements. They decide if what you have to offer is worth their time and effort. If it is not, they are not pretending to be deaf. They are just ignoring you.
Are you deaf to their call or my message? Or do you choose to ignore us?
Another dot in the blogosphere? 