When+We+Go+Beyond+The+Joke



Use this page to write your ONE-PARAGRAPH answer to our first day question. Remember, this is not only my first chance to see your writing, but your classmates will be reading your thoughts too ... so write with care! Please sign your name as well as specify your class 'color'.

According to the cartoons, our education system values time and productivity. The ways in which we maximize productivity and save time are assumed and joked about. We save time by skipping parts of works that are assumed to be of little importance, instead of cutting the material to learn; in other words, we prefer range over depth, according to the cartoons. These cartoons would not work as well for other cultures because of the differences in languages. For the first joke to be understood completely, dropping vowels must be illustrated and proven to somewhat work (you should still be able to recognize words), and for the Chinese language there are no apparent vowels to drop when you are reading and writing characters, and when radicals are dropped the words and meanings change completely. -Jeffrey Lu in Yellow class

The main point in the cartoons is that our society's education system holds efficiency and saving time as keys. Even though the parts we are skipping out on are important, we do ignore those parts and as a result are left clueless on the actual meanings; this is shown in both the broken up words and the "every other word" in a novel. Both of these cartoons display a purpose of "saving time" but in the end our schools in the society do not comprehend anything because the sum is only as great as all of its parts put together. Many members of other societies would certainly disagree with this because while the Western perceived education value is efficiency, many other societies focus on getting the job done fully to the extent it requires. This is not only present in education, but also in work where many other cultures will do one movement repetitively without skipping steps because doing too much to them is more beneficial than doing too little. -Calvin Gong in Yellow Class

The cartoons seem to say that taking shortcuts are okay because they save time. Saving time through shortcuts seems to override the importance of doing things correctly, making it seem as though people are rushing through life. Americans understand this concept, for it is unfortunately common in their everyday lives. However, one would rarely see shortcuts like these being taken in Chinese education (though you see them in other aspects of Chinese life, like production). To the Chinese, education is much too important to be rushed, making it so that the comics would seem more ridiculous than funny. (This is assuming that those reading the comics understand English.) -Haley Beebe (Yellow Class)

These cartoons suggest that in western education, comprehension takes a backseat to completion. Teachers care more about their students being able to say, “I read Moby Dick,” as opposed to, “I understood Moby Dick.” Therefore, teachers often strip material down to its core ideas so students receive information quickly without understanding it. The teachers in the cartoons parody this process by taking it literally. By cutting out vowels and words from homework, they save their students’ time but render the work impossible to comprehend. While western audiences would easily relate to and crack a smile at these cartoons, others, such as the Chinese, would have difficulty understanding them. The Chinese follow a thorough, cover-to-cover system of learning, and therefore are unfamiliar with the abridgment of course material. Also, their use of a character-based (as opposed to alphabet-based) language removes much of the humor in the idea of skipping vowels and words. - Jimmy Zhao, Yellow Class

I think most people can understand the message of these cartoons well enough. That is to expose one of the major flaws in today's education: Teachers are more willing to remove chunks of the curriculum in order to make the 'timeline". (The timeline can be before the end of the semester or the end of the year etc) As students are still learning the core of the material, people think it is alright, that as long as the major chunk is taught, the rest are disposable. In the case of cartoon 1 it would be the vowels. However the vowels are just as, if not, equally important as the part that is kept. A very simple example would be to tell you one side of the story only, thinking that the one side is enough to allow students to analyze the story critically. But that is not true, you have to give information about every aspect; the details are important. I see lots of my classmates say that the cartoon would not be able to mirror the Chinese education system. As a former student who studied at a local chines school for 6 years I believe that after each year, the grade below us will learn less units than did our year. For example, in my fifth grade year we had to learn 60 passages, however, for 5th graders a year after us they only had to learn about 30 passages. So the Chinese education system is transforming as well. Although students are still required to do more memorizing and repeatedly practice problems than those in western systems, they are starting to remove the "extraneous" material leaving the system with only its skeletal frame work. -Daniel Lin (Yellow)

Both cartoons seem to suggest that the emphasis on obtaining quality education is not there and instead we only worry about getting work done. The cartoons are both based around the idea of doing work faster to save time. This idea leads to people believing that being able to do work is the same as being able to understand the work that is given. Society is suggested of being a mirror of what goes on in our schools, and these being western cartoons, suggest that western society is always looking for ways to get a quality end product by doing the least possible work possible. Other education systems and societies may not understand the logic behind speeding up education. This is because they focus more on the individual content then the amount of content that is being given making it harder for other societies to understand why western society is so willing to skip content. -Justin Kuo (Yellow)

These cartoons portray that educators value the student’s efficiency over their education; they would rather ease the student’s burden of work than to make the work more extensive so the student can learn more to the best of their ability. By cutting out words and vowels, they lessen the workload of the assignment but at the same time, compromise the value of that work. I believe the cartoons only apply to develop nations where education once flourished but now have become lethargic. In addition to education, the value is also apparent in other areas. Cutting corners when producing food products in China is a rising problem because people are getting ill from mishandled food. The cartoon wouldn’t work well for any other languages that are character based (like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) because they don’t have vowels to drop and there are other qualities that these languages have that would make the cartoon unapplicable to its people. - Ingrid Yau (Yellow)

The cartoons are both saying that being able to go through the curriculum in time is more important than comprehending the information; they both say that teachers take parts out of the education so that they can teach everything in time, even though the students really aren't learning everything that they should be learning. These cartoons wouldn't work in other cultures partially because of language. For example in Chinese, there are characters and no vowels, and if you take out a stroke out of a Chinese character, there is a chance that the meaning would completely change. To understand these cartoons completely would require the audience to know what the Western teaching system is like, but the Chinese believe that understanding everything completely is top priority, so shortcuts shouldn't be used. Consequently, the humor in the cartoons is removed. - Dennis Xie (Yellow)

In both of these cartoons the main point is taking shortcuts. This is implying that taking shortcuts are allowed because you will still reach your final goal. The second cartoon clearly shows this because the students will have read Moby Dick, their assignment, but will not truly be able to understand it. Furthermore this exhibits the teachers do not care about their students learning, but would rather have them completed the assignment so they can move on. This idea is more western in its ways of thinking as most Americans do not care how they reach their goal, they just want to reach it, but Chinese society cares about how they reach it and the final goal. The first cartoon, I believe, would only work well in English speaking societies because of the language. In an English speaking society most would be able to read words written without the vowels, but in Chinese it would but much harder to read and understand the point the cartoon is trying to make. - Grace Hoffman (Yellow)

Both cartoons show that typically in western education getting the task done is more important than the actual accuracy of the work. In the two examples the teachers both suggest shortening the assignment, and therefore diminishing the extent of the learning. In most cultures outside of the west, taking shortcuts in education is extremely looked down upon. Students are expected to within a time frame to fully become proficient in the whatever the lesson is. Which differs from Western education in that, in the west the completion of the lesson holds greater value than the proficiency of the student in that lesson. The cartoons do also make the assumption that western cultures are more lazy and attempt to do as little work as possible, to the job done, which isn't necessarily true. These cartoons provide a common stereotype of Western education, that also holds some truth to it. -Noor Wazirzada (Yellow)

According to these cartoons, the education system is geared towards cutting corners. It discusses how the education system has to meet certain points and how if the time is limited, shortcuts will be taken in order to reach them. This demonstrates that our schools put a focus on saying you learned something, rather than taking the time to actually learn it. I don't believe this would translate into hard work asian cultures such as the Japanese, Chinese or Korean due to their hard working mentality to get the work done and to do a good job at it. I also believe the teacher in the second cartoon holding a notecard may refer to the lack of good teachers or teachers with experience. - Ryan Richards (Yellow)

The second cartoon uses irony to convey the issue of education: teachers never realize they assign too much homework. Now days, folks think doing more work is having better education. Thus, they have forgotten about mental development. For example, students in Chinese public school never get enough sleep as they have too many works to do. Their parents arrange them to academy for every holiday. This joke works well for every audience and in every culture since everyone has experienced having too much homework. Jeffery P.

Both of these cartoons suggest that, in the constant societal struggle to “get ahead,” many educational systems are focusing on the quantity of material taught rather than the quality of it. In the cartoons, both teachers are trying to apply time saving techniques (presumably so they can cram in more work later) that are clearly unfeasible. “Real-life” teachers do not often cut vowels out of words or have students read every other word of a classic novel, but the cartoons imply that the corner-cutting methods many teachers do apply yield the same result as the cartoon teachers’ methods: nothing (besides confusion). While many Westerners would pick up the meaning of this comic fairly easily (especially Americans- these days there is hardly a discussion about American education that does not include its need for a “better” curriculum), there are other audiences that may not. Indians, for one example, put a high priority on their own education regardless of how good their teachers are. The general Indian’s reaction when presented with a situation like that in the first cartoon would likely be along the lines of, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying, but that doesn’t matter; I was going to study this myself anyways.” His/her reaction to the second situation would probably be to ignore what the teacher said in the first place and read the whole book instead. Other societies may or may not react differently to these cartoons and to this problem, but if they do not go about solving it they will find that their struggles to get ahead have actually left them far, far behind.

-Keshav Garg, Yellow Class

I would think that these cartoons would not work well for all cultures, in the sense that some cultures would not understand the joke as well as others. For example, in the US, some public schools aren't as good as other schools, slacking off is a reality (as demonstrated in the second cartoon) and teachers not putting enough effort into ensuring their students success (as demonstrated in the second cartoon) is also a reality. So these cartoons would be understood by the people in that community or culture. However in China, public schooling is more strict where a greater emphasis on making students work hard is placed. So the chinese reception of these two cartoons would be a little confused as they would not be able to relate to the problem however would instead use these two cartoons as a stereotype of other countries education systems, such as america. So in conclusion, these two cartoons would really only affect the cultures in which the examples in the cartoons can be related to in everyday life.

- Nathan Kappler, Yellow Class

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I believe that these cartoons address a major problem in at least the American school system. Over the years, as other countries in the world have improved their education standards and have begun to perform better than Americans at nearly all subjects, we have decided that if we overload schools, teachers, and students with loads and loads of work, that we will get smarter. This just puts unwanted pressure on the teachers to thoroughly develop the minds of young children. These cartoons would not translate well into cultures that are doing quite well such as the Scandinavian countries, but also third-world countries such as The Congo and Sierra Leone (I had been reading about it in a book, so it came to mind) that do not have a well-structured education system. =====

-Bryan Dickerson, Yellow Class

According to the cartoons, the values being upheld by society and schools may be quantity over quality and doing something just to finish it without expectations of benefit. The priorities of the target audience may be to simply be done with things, especially homework. It may be assumed that there is nothing worthy of learning, therefore completion is more desired. The cartoons may not work well for every audience because not every audience understands English and not every audience understands an alphabet writing system.

- Hugo Sin, Yellow Class

These cartoons are showing that what we hold most valuable in education is the quantity of what the students are taught. Both teachers are trying to speed up their class for fear of running out of time so they are teaching more, which is good, but the students aren’t learning more. The students won’t understand the concepts but at least they will have been taught it, right? In this way, our society is definitely quantity over quality. Mass amounts of students will have learnt what is needed but without one-on-one attention and someone to make sure they understood the concepts, are they really growing and learning? The priority is to be on top, to be the best. But if our society continues to focus on quantity over quality we will soon pay the price of lots of people with degrees but few people able to actually do the job. These cartoons may not work as well for certain cultures where the students do get personal attention to make sure they understand. The people of that kind of culture would not understand why anyone would teach so much if it’s not being comprehended. -Shannon Bailey, Yellow Class

Looking at both of these cartoons, the values that are portrayed in the comic shows the lack of work the teachers want to do. In the two pictures, the authors are showing the laziness of the western culture society on how they teach, when the teachers should be focusing on the quality of their lessons. This shows the priorities of our schooling system are to get through as much material as time allows, but not go in depth of the lesson. I don’t believe these cartoons would work well for every culture because everyone has their own language and rules that wouldn’t apply by taking the vowels out of words. This would therefore make it very difficult for other societies to understand the lessons they are taught in school. -Anna Hester, Yellow Class