5 - Thick Accent and Stereotype Threat

After a year of doing really well in English Literature at DVC, I decided to take a class in tutoring students in the English language. It was my first attempt at teaching.

However, I soon found that even though I was eager to speak in my other classes, and I was excelling at grammar, in my Tutoring class I had lost my tongue. Literally. I could remember Italian, but English words just refused to come in my mind. The other trainees, used to tongue-tied foreign students, were unfazed by this phenomenon and just started to talk to me veeery slooowly.

I felt like the protagonist of Flowers for Algernon, one day so intelligent, and the next day finding, to his horror, that he had reverted to a low IQ and could not communicate.

What had happened? Simple...I had just reminded myself of my thick accent. Preposterous! A middle aged computer programmer who spoke like she had just gotten off the airplane, and she wanted to tutor native speakers in English!

In any case I did well in the class. At the end of the semester one of the students gave me a box of chocolates, thus proving that tutoring could be a rewarding, and fattening, experience.

However, I decided that in the future I'll teach the Humanities, not the English grammar. I can see myself explaining Dante's Inferno, or the librettos of Verdi's operas.

I had made myself the victim of STEREOTYPE THREAT, a concept psychology researcher Dr. Claude Steele explained in his book, Whistling Vivaldi. When people do well in a subject but their group is stereotyped as doing poorly, the high-performers  feel under pressure: they don't want to risk confirming the stereotype. They are fighting on two fronts, trying to do well in a test and trying to convince themselves that they can do it. And this impairs... the short-term memory. Just the one I needed when talking in class (I did fine with written essays).

Our professor mentioned a study by Anne Maass, a German psychologist at the University of Padova. In a test, she reminded women chess masters of the stereotype that women are not good at chess. Then she had the women play chess through a computer with a man of equal ranking. When told that their opponent was a man, the women played defensively and lost much more frequently than when they played again, WITH THE EXACT SAME OPPONENT, but were told it was a woman.

 This happens only when people are very motivated, are good in their field, and are operating at the height of their ability (when the frustration level is high). People who are not very good or not motivated, in contrast, tend to fail both when the stakes are high and when they are not.

This finding is extremely important, because it refutes the argument that at high levels of performance, underrepresented groups fail because they just don't have what it takes.

I'll be forever grateful to my teacher for explaining this. We all place ourselves into some sort of a minority group when we take risks, so these concepts are important to all.