[Cultural Autobiography] I Can’t See My Own Culture; I Think This Will Make Me A Better Teacher (Made 2022 Fall Semester)

 

I Can’t See My Own Culture; I Think This Will Make Me A Better Teacher

Elliot Maxwell Sibert-Sweeney

Ball State University

EDMU 205: Introduction to Multicultural Education

Gilbert Park

December 12, 2022

For many people culture is a natural part of their lives, it’s nothing strange or unusual and even noticing it’s there is difficult without something to compare it to, this much I know, this much is usual, at least so far as I am aware. However for me culture feels far more elusive and far less tangible, far less important. I know it’s there, I can logically see where it could or has come from and how it has made me who I am and how I experience it. I never think about my own culture, I never have, it doesn’t ever really come to my mind, further I feel as though my cultural experiences are nothing special at all; I think of myself as having had the usual life one would expect from a middle to upper-middle class white person aside from the fact that I my parents are gay. I have german heritage, one of my mothers is gen x the other is a baby boomer, one grew up in Maryland and the other grew up here in Indiana in Kokomo, both of their cultures have surely affected me but everywhere I look it seems like I haven’t experienced anything outside of your usual cookie-cutter white, middle class life. When I watch a movie with an average middle class white family it looks basically like my life has. I wasn’t raised religious, my parents didn’t ever harp on this or that social issue, I have never partaken in any special cultural activity, I feel as though I am just average. It feels like culture is something that exists elsewhere, that happens to other people, something that passes me by and leaves me unravaged. Still, I am consciously aware of the fact that this cannot be true, that this “average” life is still steeped in culture, that I am still built from the culture I have experienced, but it’s still so hard for me to really think about my culture, about the culture i experience and live in. So I have decided to, instead of trying to piece together the culture that is “normal” as far as I can tell in this country, I’m going to focus on the things that seem abnormal or important to me. One need only watch some mediocre 2010s movie to understand the rest of my life since my “normal” is not that different from the “normal” oft depicted. One might consider this lazy or to be an incomplete view of my cultural makeup, but it is the only way I can think of to describe my culture satisfactorily, so it is the path I’ll be taking in this paper. So, where does my abnormal begin? Where do I deviate from the “average” person portrayed in media, familiar to everyone familiar with any movie or show or book or what-have-you? I think the deviation begins with my parents, unsurprisingly.

The most common family unit across the world is that of a man and a woman and one or more children. This is considered “normal” to many and I certainly consider it just as normal as any other family unit, but I never had this. I am the result of artificial insemination from an unknown donor; I grew up with not one, but two mothers, and without a father at all. I never considered this abnormal. I saw that people around me didn’t have two mothers but I suppose it never clicked that my family wasn’t the usual, nor did I realize for quite a long time that my parents weren’t married since, legally, they couldn’t be until after they had separated. Betsy is my non-biological mother, she is a Gen-X nurse born and raised here in the Hoosier state by wonderful parents who I adored growing up while they were still alive. Jennifer is my biological mother, she is a Baby Boomer nurse born and raised in Maryland before spending too long for any sane person in Florida and eventually coming here; currently she’s living in Maryland to look after her father since he can no longer properly do so himself and the horrible rest of her family is unwilling to help the man who raised and loved them. Jennifer worked day-shift while Betsy worked night-shift so it’s perhaps unsurprising that I have more clear memories of Betsy than of Jennifer growing up, but they were both always there and always caring for and loving me. Neither subscribe to any religion and saw no reason to raise me religiously despite having me circumcised, and neither had any cultural activities that deviated from the American norm. It’s highly likely that having these two rational and amazing women as my parents helped shape me into the open-minded man I am today; it’s hard to be bigoted when your parents are from a discriminated against group and, obviously, never encouraged any form of discrimination in me and simply encouraged logical and compassionate thinking in me. My parents also had no real care for gender-norms, showcased by the fact that one of my favorite and most memorable toys growing up was an American Girl Doll, Kaya, the only Native American doll in the line. I absolutely loved her and she wasn’t the only doll I played with, although I did mostly play with stereotypically male toys, these more stereotypically female toys are incredibly important to me and were a big part of my childhood. One might expect gay marriage’s legalization to be a big deal to me, and it is, but it didn’t really matter to my family as when it was legalized my parents had already split up and were’nt planning on getting back together, but this did allow Betsy and my step-mother Rochelle to get married, not that I knew they actually got married until embarrassingly recently. Another big part of my childhood was where I went to school, and that definitely had a large impact on my culture, or, more specifically, my lack of experiences with cultures outside of your generic middle to upper-middle class white American culture.

St. Richard’s Episcopal School is a private Episcopalian school directly attached to a church and expensive to attend but quite good academically speaking. I went there from Pre-K to 5th grade and up until third grade I really liked it. The people there were almost entirely white with the only black student I had any real contact with being the son of one of the teachers there, and I’m fairly certain my family was one of the poorer families at that school given how expensive tuition was. It’s safe to say I was quite isolated from cultures different to my own bland-as-can-be culture while I attended that school but it instilled in me a lot of knowledge of Christianity, if not as much as they probably would have liked, through church services students were required to attend and other things like that, and I also learned quite a lot there at a rate somewhat faster than public school’s, which led to me having a strange time when I switched from this school to public school for 6th grade and found myself ahead of the other students. I also joined the cub scouts while at St. Richard’s and had many interesting and fun (and unpleasant at times) experiences there. This school also hurt my love of school quite a bit thanks to 3rd grade and everything that came after, with the quality of the school going down in quality and me having horrible teachers, but I would find myself enjoying school again years later. When I switched to public school I suffered from serious culture shock, going from a stale-bread white and affluent private school to a rowdy mostly black mostly lower class middle school was not a fun experience and I had a lot of trouble settling in, especially during the Vine era of all things. Still, I would come to enjoy my new environment to an extent and when High School came around I absolutely loved it, aside from a few bad teachers ruining things for me here and there. I fell in love with learning again and I also incorporated a lot of black culture into myself in mannerism and ways of speaking as well as in an expanded understanding of the world and the people and cultures in it. This was a very important time for me as it’s what really made me who I am, showing me options outside of what I had previously experienced and giving me time to actually enjoy myself. I’ve already mentioned that middle school wasn’t great for me and this was for a variety of reasons, but one quite important one is that in the midst of puberty I found myself battling mental disorders I didn’t know I had and trying medications to help them without even having the full picture. Truthfully, I think that my mental health is the part of my “culture” that has affected me the most.

When I was in middle school I repeatedly had mental breakdowns during school which eventually led to me going in-patient at a childrens’ psych unit for a while and outpatient after that. While there I was properly diagnosed and medicated in a way that to this day has allowed me to go about life in a somewhat normal way. My struggles with mental health, however, are a major part of who I am, especially since my Depression and Autism specifically are prevalent throughout my entire life and color everything I have or will experience, often in ways that I quite frankly despise. I think my mental health is one of the reasons that understanding my culture is so difficult for me. My mind isn’t really geared to notice these things, it tends to be overly rational, to ignore irrationality in many circumstances, leaving me oftentimes feeling disconnected from the culture around me.

The final part of my culture I want to talk about is my status as a member of Gen-Z. I exist at the cusp of Gen-Z, my step brother is 10 days younger than me but, given that determining one’s generation is more of an art than a science I’d definitely call him a millennial before calling him Gen-Z. One way or another I experienced the portable tech boom, grew up with access to early smartphones and those big early 2000’s laptops and desktop computers, watched reruns of 90’s cartoons while being engrossed by the shows of the time as well, experiencing YouTube in it’s youth without really joining YouTube properly in the way many others did until past the phase of “edginess” had largely died down. It was a strange time to be born and it’s certainly left me with a weird patchwork of traits that one would associate with both Millennials and Gen-Zers. The experiences I had growing up at this unique time have stuck with me and molded who I am, surrounded by technology and adapting to it as I grow.

Thinking about myself truly is strange, and this entire paper has of course ignored my privilege as a white man in this world and the privilege brought about by my parents having a good deal of money; I grew up in a suburb with two-story house, a big backyard, and a pool inside that big backyard. I hardly had a common childhood, the culture surrounding me has hardly ever been common, and yet it’s so hard to think of it as anything else. Yet I move forward in this world and keep experiencing new things, coming to understand other people, coming to know more and separate myself further from these past experiences. And truthfully that is what my path in life has been I think, it’s been me moving away from culture and attempting to enter a more rational and simple life apart from it. It’s impossible and I’m not really intending to do it, but I think a large reason thinking about my culture is so hard for me is that I, subconsciously at least, try not to let my culture affect me, I try to be free from it, to walk amongst culture rather than within it, if that makes sense. My entire life I’ve been raised rather neutrally when it comes to culture, only really taking in the general culture of white middle-class America and never really touching anything else, simply observing and coming to understand it. And all around me I do observe culture, even not really partaking in much of it at all, though I suppose that could in and of itself be culture. Around me I see suffering and oppression, I see how I am benefited by it and my circumstances, I see a world that doesn’t make sense, I see culture ignored, racism forgotten, history ruined by lies and a refusal to actually think. It hurts me deeply, but my definition of Multicultural Education is education that takes into consideration the cultures of others in order to create an environment and curriculum that leaves nobody an outcast and no history or culture or way of thinking ignored, a form of education that uses who you are to enhance itself and to ensure you are included, not just superficially, but inherently and compassionately. As a teacher I honestly think that my poor understanding of my own culture is going to be useful, at least once I’m able to move past the obvious hindrances. I can hardly suffer from much ethnocentrism when I don’t care about my ethnicity and culture any more than any other or when I frankly think other cultures do things in ways I like much more; though it is important not to let something like that color things, at least aside from telling me what to focus on when, after all equity achieves equality, not vice versa. Being able to be an observer first and foremost, conscious of culture but largely unaffected by it, at least in any strongly discernable way, able to look at things from a top-down perspective, I legitimately think that I might be in a better-than-average position as a teacher. I want to teach the truth, I want to teach it compassionately, and I want to teach all of it, fully and unabashedly, and being weighed down by a strong culture might put that goal in jeopardy. It might make it easier, but I suppose I’d have to experience that to understand it. One way or another I think I’m happy with my culture or whatever this mess that has made me who I am is, and I think it puts me in a position to teach effectively, whatever trouble it might cause me, so long as I am cautious and conscience and conscious of myself and what I do know to be true of myself and my culture and of others.