Adventures in Mind Control

I wrote about this briefly before, but I want to expound on it today.

As a university teacher in China, I was coming to the cultural game about 20 years late; my students all shared the same cultural background, and because culture just 'is' in China, not very often do they explain or expound upon cultural reasoning or traditions.

So sometimes things like this would happen: I devised a lesson plan for my English major students to help them feel more comfortable using the subjunctive tense, i.e. 'If I were...., I would....' and so on. I made the theme 'Superheroes', something I thought they would enjoy talking about, and asked them to choose what superpowers they would have and how they would use them for the benefit of humankind.

After giving them time to prepare, I asked a few students to share their answers with the class. "If I were a superhero, I would have the power to read minds so I knew if anyone was going to do something bad, and then I change their thought so they wouldn't do it." The second student I called on stood up: "If I were a superhero, I would read minds so I could stop people from doing bad things before they did them." Third student: "If I were a superhero, I would read minds so I could change their thoughts and stop all the bad things." And so on.

After about the 5th student, I asked them, "Did all of you choose the power to read minds and stop bad things before they happen?" 35 head nods. "No one wants to fly, or change into an animal, or become super strong?" 35 confused faces look back at me; how would these things help humanity, exactly?

The uniform answer my students gave surprised me, because I was thinking like an American: I was giving them a choice. And their answer was to take away choice. My students were not accustomed to choices, and for them, this was probably the hardest part of my teaching style to adapt to. It's possible that mind control was the only logical answer for them to give, but it's more likely one student had this idea and the others decided to co-opt it as a safe choice. There was no need for them to have different answers; it's American teachers who want diversity, not our Chinese students.

My students have not been raised to make choices. Asking them to form groups of their own choosing met with blank stares, until I taught them how to do it. Asking them to sign up for a time to take their oral final exam prompted the question "Why don't you just tell us in what order to take it, like our other teachers?" (My answer: "Because I'm an American teacher and we like to give choices.")

I often felt that this issue of choice was the biggest dividing line between me and my students: I asked them to do it, knowing they'd dislike it, and they liked me as a teacher despite my insistence on occasionally asking them to make choices. But my second year, I changed the theme from Superheroes to something else.