I was talking to a colleague in history who expressed an opinion that all the best language students are female because women are better at learning languages.
This is, however, one of the many issues where culture beats biology. My best students are always male because women in this culture are afraid of making a mistake, so they never speak. And if you don’t speak, you don’t learn. Language is all about accepting that you won’t be perfect. If you can’t accept that, you won’t succeed. You have to be fine with looking like a fool in public and see that as an acceptable price to pay for learning.
Ethnically, my weakest students are always Hispanic, even though you’d think it should be the opposite because they don’t have the language barrier.
My best students are usually black. This is a culture where people aren’t trying to be perfect all the time and aren’t afraid of being performative. Right now, a third of my students are African American, and they are all doing fantastic. With black students, the male-female differences that I see among whites are erased because black female students have no problem with being loud and active.
In language courses, I have to correct people a lot. That’s the whole point. I can’t teach if I don’t correct. White female students react to corrections like I have put their entire existence into question. And that’s a huge barrier to fluency.
Clarissa's Blog 
There’s also class differences. Once I started noticing those, the things feminism focuses on and the gender roles they claim still exist made a lot of sense to me, as did the behavior of some of my classmates from school. There really does seem to be an expectation in many middle class and above families that women keep themselves “small” (this does not exist in my family.) If you’re in a milieu where this is the case, I can see why “gender roles” seems like a pressing feminist issue (for working class women, this is not a major life concern even if you’re looking through a feminist lens.)
The time this is most annoying is when I ask a woman to repeat herself because I can’t hear her, and she repeats it still quite quietly. And I get the impression that is the loudest she can talk. Quite literally these women are being deprived of their voice.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s true. It’s definitely easier to talk to working class women. They don’t fidget internally quite as much.
LikeLike
Camille Paglia talks a lot about this– about how feminism as a movement had become basically a white-collar luxury belief system.
None of that stuff ever really applied to working-class women. I had a friend back in the day who concurred. She had gone so far as to get a degree in women’s studies at an elite women’s college. She did it with a lot of scholarships, and was the child of refugees. Said it was a really weird experience, because everybody’d talk about these weird things like “work-life balance” and shite like that… that was entirely foreign to the class, culture, and neighborhood she grew up in. As if you had a choice!
LikeLike