Differences in Manners

Claudia Acosta

5/29/17

Differences in Manners

The cultural issues in manners can create an anger because of a great misunderstanding.

When we don’t know the cultural manners of other places, it is difficult to be able to adapt or to understand the reason of the behavior of a person and we can come to think that he or she is a bad person.

Some of those different cultural manners that we have been studying like blowing nose on the table or erupting, for me and in my culture is rude and disrespectful.

My personal experience

Living in the United States I have lived some cultural ways different from mine that the first months being here I had very difficult to adapt.

Together with some moms here in the neighborhood we created a schedule to take turns to take our children to school.

I take my turn to take my daughters and their friends to school, they are all American. My daughters' friends got into the car and did not greet anyone. They could have said Hi, Hello, Good Morning, but they did not, I felt so bad, I felt like I was the taxi for them.

The next day the same thing happened again. Then, I discovered that this was something normal and natural, which I did not like at all, but I could not change them, it was their customs, their cultural manners.

Later, when it was my turn to drive the girls to school again, I decided that I would be the person to greet them when they got in the car, and I did. The result was incredible!, they responded me by returning the greeting very kindly.

I felt so better.

I think that despite the different cultural ways we have never been able to share with other cultural good ways, maybe some people will accept them and maybe some people will not accept them, but I think it's a good attempt.

Conclusion

As an ESL teacher I think it is good and maybe I could say that it is important to teach students the different cultural manners that exist in this country where they are studying, in order to help them gain knowledge and respect those differences that maybe we do not like

In the same way I think it would be an interesting class to teach if the students took turns to let us know the cultural manners of their own countries.

This activity will help us to know each other and learn to respect those cultural differences.