Collective Personalities

I have been teaching for a while now. It was clear early on that aside from the personalities of individual students each class has its own distinctive set of behavior patterns collectively.  Most groups do although in all cases it takes experience and contemplation to discern them.

With any group the temptation is to identify the group with the members of the group that are most vocal. They provide a good deal of data quickly about the group but it is by definition not representative.

Ideally I get to work with a number of student outside of class and get to know them a bit even if they are quiet in class. That adds to the overall picture and helps it be better informed. The same process applies to larger groups, such as the subset of the faculty that attends our faculty meetings. If you don't talk to the non-speakers outside of the meetings you have a non-representative sample of their behavior if you just rely on what is said.

And yet, it is not the speakers in faculty meetings who determine the outcomes of votes, it is the group of voters. It is not the speakers in class who determine the learning that is going on, which ideally is the part of the personality that I as a teacher should care most about.

These characteristics can be mis-portrayed. "I didn't understand this concept" often is phrased as "Nobody in the class understood this concept." Very few students who say such things poll the class; it is a way of deflecting any perception of weakness.

This is done in a malign way in politics and in advertising on a regular basis. The desired characteristic of a group, desired by politicians, marketers, etc., is portrayed as being the group norm and if you differ well that's your problem, now isn't it? In this attempt to turn a lie into reality members of the group are encouraged to ostracize those members who differ from the official narrative even if they have doubts for fear of being ostracized themselves.

Decades ago I read a memoir by Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, about being an outcast in the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time of group-think when those who differed were punished on the historically traditional scale of unemployment, limited access to food, imprisonment, torture, death. Cheng was put on trial because she had been married to an employee of a foreign oil company and thus was tainted by external ideas. She wrote of listening to the charges brought against her in court, growing progressively more and more fantastical as the fervent prosecutors demonstrated their fealty to Mao's government. At a point when she, a middle-aged widow, was being portrayed as a "Bond girl", she lost her self-control and started laughing. Not chuckles, full belly-laughs.

They cleared the courtroom. There is nothing more destructive to an official narrative than deserved ridicule. Though I often fall short this has been my goal when faced with official narratives that are far from reality; resistance through deserved ridicule.