For me this wasn’t clear until transferring to Baylor my sophomore year. Before Baylor I went to UTSA, a school that isn’t necessarily known for its academics. Out of the two semesters I went there, and 33 hours I accumulated, I honestly only had one teacher who really kept my interest enough for the information to stick with me post final exams. This was obvious to me when I had to retake classes that didn’t transfer, because although I was learning the same material, all of it seemed as if was hearing it for the first time. Basically the entire year was a waste of my parent’s money.

The difference I noticed between Baylor and UTSA is UTSA hired scholars rather than teachers. The classes consisted of sheer lecture without feedback. The professors showed no concern with student relationships, and because of it students showed the same respect for professors. Other than my writing class and mathematics courses, I never once had homework assignments, quizzes, or even in-class assignments to show my progress and understanding. We simply had tests and finals.

When I came to Baylor, at first I was overwhelmed by the difference. I was never expected to give feedback, voice my opinion, or take a quiz over reading. I had never been encouraged to come to a teacher’s office hours or stay after class just to chat. It was uncomfortable for me at first, but I started to notice how much it affected my overall intake of knowledge. I don’t have to study as hard for test, I actually retain the information rather than completely flushing it from my brain the hour after an exam, and I even enjoy the lectures. Here, I am actually interested in what I’m learning, even in the classes that I dread taking.

The point I am trying to make is a professor’s teaching style makes all the difference in their student’s learning and overall attitude in the class. If the teacher is truly interested in the subject matter, they will want the student’s to be interested in the subject matter, which will in turn make the subject itself more interesting for everyone.

On a more scholarly note, here is an article explaining how the relationship between teacher and student depends on a teacher’s nonverbal immediacy.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:XO4jIvdvNoEJ:www.unco.edu/keaten/NVI%2520Japan%2520Study.pdf+student+teacher+nonverbal+relationships&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShOin5Yy0vxoGQ_tdt4syGvT9PMUXcuY2ykDDpomUchfRaznH2OzIpcROpq8n5k8b8GViN9A3CIeRThumwU5dxFYuCjrBIQO9XV9v54aKW0D79dTD8t8f6tSl0PJn-iYBvDAOrr&sig=AHIEtbSSZWjsBetNgVtayBM28-snIyU5xg

Just to prove my point :

I am willing to bet more of you read my blog than this article, even though the article had much more information about the topic than my blog. Think of my blog as a teacher and the article as a scholar. Even if a scholar is an expert on the subject, they will be incapable of teaching unless they find a way to make it interesting to others.

When they found out I was a girl my mom was ecstatic. She couldn’t wait to dress me up, throw me tea parties, play with my hair, and all of those other fun activities that little girls are supposed to love.

However, not only did I have the influence of two older brothers, but I was also the only little girl on my block. Rather than wearing ribbons and bows, I was in tennis shoes and ponytails.

My knees were always skinned, my hair was always a mess, and you wouldn’t catch me dead in a dress. I was a master at video games, I would have picked a toy car over Barbie any day, and I was even a Ninja Turtle for Halloween.

This all changed, however, the day my mom signed me up for ballet.

Before Ballet I had tried softball, swim team and even basketball, but none of the three could keep my attention. Sure I was engaged when it was by turn to play, but I hated having the share the spotlight with the rest of the team.

Dance, on the other hand, allowed me to perform.

After my first recital, I fell in love with the stage, quit all other sports, and never looked back.

This is where I learned to be more feminine. Rather than running around outside, dance taught me discipline, manners and poise.

In my personal opinion, the majority of gender norms are learned behaviors.

However, according to PBS Parents, research has proven otherwise:

“Recent research about the brain has in fact found subtle but significant differences between male and female brains. Among the findings:

Male brains are six to ten percent bigger, on average, than female brains.

Female brains have more synapses (connections) than male brains.

Females have a bigger connecting area (the corpus callosum) between the two hemispheres of the brain. They tend to use both sides of the brain for a particular task more frequently than do males.

Gender-specific wiring can be found in about 80 percent of children’s brains. Interestingly, the remaining 20 percent have wiring that is more typical of the opposite gender — a finding that has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but which may affect a child’s interests and abilities.”

The then go on to explain that even as early as the womb, female brains have more neurons in certain areas, which causes higher levels of estrogen and enhances different areas of the brain.

Although every person is different, I think it is safe to say both nature and nurture play a role in shaping one’s gender.

First there was Democrat Obama, who is considered an African American. However, those who have done their research know that he is actually multi-cultural. His father, being a Kenyan immigrant, and his mother a white woman.

When Obama was interviewed about his origin on “60 Minutes,” Kroft asked him if he “decided” to be black.

“I’m not sure I decided it,” said Obama, 45. “If you look African American in this society, you’re treated as an African American. I am rooted in the African American community, but I am not defined by it.

“I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that is not all I am.”

Next there was Hilary, the other Democratic participant in the race. Though Hilary, like all past Presidents, is white, the difference is she is a woman. While she made sure to come off as masculine in her approach to presidency, women are still seen as more emotional beings, setting her apart from the other candidates.

Lastly was Republican John McCain, 72, who was in a category of his own because of his old age. Since each generation differs in their customs and values, each generation can be placed in a different subculture. However, realizing age wasn’t enough to satisfy America’s demand for change, he hired a woman, Sarah Palin, as his VP.

Though America as a whole may be viewed as a very ethnocentric nation, the 2009 Presidential Election also shows just how open to other cultures we are.  We are raised in a very diverse society, and taught from an early age to be accepting of others regardless of background. I myself, am proud to come from such a welcoming and multicultural nation.

My best friend from back home, for example, runs off of a clock that is not in synch with the rest of society. If she says that it is going to take her an hour to do something, anyone who is close to her knows that it will actually take two. I refer to this as “Hailee time”. (I.e.-“You need to be here by 7:00…so 6:00 Hailee time.”)

I’m sure you all can relate.

This brings me to the point of punctuality. By definition, punctuality is “the habit or quality of adhering to appointed time”. This means that punctuality is a learned habit that every person is capable of.

With that being said, it is no wonder why it comes off as selfish when a person is habitually late.

It’s a little cheesy, but this video emphasizes the value of time:

Even though punctuality seems so irrelevant to this video, I am trying to make a point that we should value other’s time just as much as our own. Every minute you waste of someone else’s time, is just another minute they will never get back.

Since we have such an individualist culture, America has perhaps the most closed off society, meaning we expect the most personal space. There is an unspoken law that creates a personal bubble around each of us, and when someone dares to break it, we will undoubtedly react.

This reaction is typically in a nonverbal and passive way, such as an avoidance of eye contact, or simply a step back, but still it doesn’t take long for foreigners to catch on to this unwritten rule.

For instance, Daily Life Science’s “Proxemics: the Study of Personal Space,” gives an example of a British man who recently moved to America. When he first got here, he used to casually touch the person he was talking to for emphasis. When he attempted to make friendships he was always rejected and didn’t understand why. Once he started to observe the way Americans interacted, the answer was clear: “Americans hate to be touched”.

Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and “the father of proxemics” even offers a number for this unwritten law in American society. “He defined the invisible zones around us and attributed a range of distance to each one: intimate distance- 6 to 18 inches; personal distance- 18 inches to 4 feet; social distance- 4 to 12 feet; and public distance- about 12 feet or more” (Leisureguy.wordpress.com).

Isn’t it incredible that as a society, we expect at least 6 inches of space between us and our intimate-other? For some reason, I felt this fit:

“Boundaries don’t keep other people out, they fence you in. so you can live your life drawing lines, or you can live your life crossing them.” – Grey’s Anatomy

Every morning on the way to school, my mother would listen to 104 KRBE’s morning show with Maria Todd, Sam Malone and Adam Smasher.

Since Adam was the young and funny one, I imagined him as a tall, dark and handsome guy in his early 20’s.

Maria Todd was more mature. I could tell that she was black, even as a child, just from her vocals. I imagined her too, as beautiful, like Halle Berry or Tyra.

Sam Malone, on the other hand, was far from good looking in my mind. His deep and serious voice left me no doubt that he was an old, grey, white man.

For years these images were fixed in my mind, until one day I finally saw a commercial on television with them advertising their morning show.

For Adam, my image was way off. Turns out he is bald, chubby, wears thick glasses, and has an untamed beard. Jokingly my dad explained to me that that’s why he is on the radio. He doesn’t have to be handsome. For the other two, however, I was surprisingly accurate! Maria is a heavier, attractive black woman and Sam Malone is white and old.

To this day I still put faces to voices unintentionally, and surprisingly, I am almost always accurate with their sex, their race, and even their relative age.

Well it turns out there’s an actual science behind this.  According to studies at Harvard University, “…information about a speaker’s traits can be conveyed by such paralinguistic phenomena as intonation, rhythm, tempo, and volume.”

In addition, our textbook goes as far to say that a person’s state of health, emotion and personality can also be recognized through their vocals.

When so much is revealed through a person’s vocal behavior rather than actual, spoken words, it is easy to see why the majority of communication is delivered non-verbally.

SO I end with this quote:

”The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” –Peter F. Drucker

Although facial emotions are deep within our genetics, we are able to manipulate our facial display at an early age. The following video demonstrates just how early we are able to control expressions:

If a baby is able to successfully mask its emotions, then are emotional expressions truly innate?

Well, according to Darwin, facial behavior is the same for all cultures and completely inherent. Anthropologists, on the other hand, argued that meanings of expressions are “specific to each culture, like symbols in language” (face-and-emotion.com).

In response to these discoveries, Ekman proposed an alternative: the “neurocultural” theory. The neurocultural theory suggests facial behavior is both biological and culturally influenced.

In “Inner and Outer Meanings of Facial Expressions,” Hager and Ekman provide a very interesting example of just how influential a culture can be on our emotions:

“Samurai women were reported to smile rather than to cry when hearing that their loved ones had died in battle (LaBarre, 1947). Although such observations were taken as evidence of cultural variability in the meaning of smiles, these smiles may not have been signs of grief, but rather could have been culturally required masks implementing the display rule to show joy and hide distress in this public situation (Ekman, 1973).”

Although the face is the “tell-all” of nonverbal communication, it is clearly and easily shaped by cultural norms.

So the question remains—How do you desipher what is learned from what is genuine in regards to facial expression?

http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/misctext/inner_outer.html

I find this video highly entertaining because of how accurately it portrays each of the characters on MTV’s hit show “The Jersey Shore”. However, aside from its entertainment value, this video is also a great example of nonverbal communication through physical appearance.

We are all aware that others will judge us based off of our physical appearance and style; it’s human nature. There is always some kind of purpose in meaning behind the way in which we present ourselves. This video is a perfect example of group identification. By watching children reenact the show, it exaggerates this point: physical appearance is intentional. These guys are well aware they are coming off as “Guidos” and “Guidettes” and in doing so, they become part of the group.

This video is also a great example of homophily. According to the textbook, homophily is “perceived similarity in appearance, background, attitudes and values.” Um, these characters even share the same dance moves. Enough said.