Learning Journal 25

I had an interesting experience yesterday that made me very happy!  Well, I don't know if happy is the right word, but it made me realize that some of the things that I have learned in this class are applying to my life already. I was in class and we were talking about gay marriage and the effects of having two gay parents on a child.  Normally, I believe basically everything that my professors say, especially about research and outcomes.  My professor was saying how having two gay parents can be harmful for kids because they need a mom and a dad, for different things like reasoning (moms) and emotion regulation (dads).  He was also saying how other kids can make fun of these kids because of their two gay parents.  But, I remembered reading in two of my other text books how research has shown that there are no actual negative effects of gay parents on their children. So, instead of believing what my professor said, I looked back at my books and at the studies they used.  And although there did seem to be some possible confounding variables in the studies used to validate these results, the research was there and it was used in the text books.  So how does this relate to Tonga?  Well we talked about the Ophellia syndrome earlier in the semester and about how important is to not wait to be spoon fed things and to question what people tell us.

I'm hoping that this little experience means that I'm becoming more prepared for the field.  I think that going out and studying what I question, is exactly what we will be doing in the field, so that little experience was a little bit of prep and helped me to see how much more I can learn what I try to find out more than what one person tells me.

I also watched the video about translation, something about "the babel fish."  Watching that made me realize how serious of an issue translation can be. My tongan is terrible, and I think I'm just kind of expecting that the most of the people will speak english.  But I know that this is probably not going to be the case, or atleast not for everyone that I meet.  I think it's really funny how somethings can be so misunderstood in other cultures, because of how different phrases are understood.  I definitely want to make sure that I find a good translator and make sure that I'm not saying things that would assume that they understand what I mean.  For example, instead of using a phrase that describes something here, I will make sure that they understand the concept of what I'm asking by using words that I know they understand meanings of.