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i created a placeholder for this entry a while ago but i figure it’s worth filling in for when i go back and reflect on what LDC I was like for me.

the first class for the day was on communicating in a diverse workforce. i was pretty interested in this topic, given my “minority” status and the racial composition of the company. it’s interesting to me that over time i’ve become more acutely aware of racial issues. i mean they were in my face in middle school and high school, but i tend to think of them as more structural/institutional issues now. anyway, to quickly summarize the experience, i was disappointed by the distribution of attention to various diversity topics and i’ll explain what i mean below.

the class started off by listing different types of diversity, such as racial, age, sexual, financial, etc. i thought this was relevant, but i could also see them setting the stage to touch on the racial issue only to move on to other topics and that’s exactly what happened. our speaker was this short woman with an extremely loud voice. i’d say she was somewhat effective but you could tell that her abilities were limited to the topics she was presenting plus some tangential delta. in other words, i didn’t get the feeling that she could facilitate a relevant but only partially related dicussion that may spontaneously arise from talking about these sensitive topics.

for the racial portion of the class, we watched a very interesting documentary. in iowa, a teacher felt compelled to impart a lesson on diversity and racial discrimination to her 3rd grade class the day after martin luther king jr. was assassinated. the documentary showed footage from her third year conducting this lesson and reunited the students from that class some 10 or so years later to watch the lesson.

the premise of her lesson was as follows: for one day, all blue-eyed students are superior to brown-eyed students. they are smarter, more capable, more likeable, etc. the next day, the tables were turned and brown-eyed students were better. (all the students were white and apparently only had brown and blue eyes). it was interesting to see the nearly instantaneous change in the way students treated each other. the teacher did a phenomenal job reinforcing the guidelines that she set and setting the stage for the students to exhibit certain behaviors.

the children would be very brash toward each other, excluding the minority group from activities, calling them names and picking fights with them. the minority children disassociated themselves from the class and became very complacent. the most significant observation to me was the drastic decrease in performance on a sorting task that the children performed with some regularity. clearly, the role of self-confidence as a partial function of external perception affects performance as observed in the video.

the teacher closed out the lesson by bringing all the kids back together, reminding them the lesson was over and they were equals. immediately, the boys banded together in the back row, arms on each others’ backs in unity. the girls sat together in the front, much the same way the class had been prior to the exercise. our team coach brought up a good point about the sexual diversity issue, with boys hanging out with boys and girls with girls, but i disagreed with him on that point. they were only 8 after all, so the 60’s equivalent of cooties probably contributed to the sexual segregation

the portion of the video we watched was about 30-40 minutes long and was followed by the teacher asking us to chime in with our own observations and thoughts. there were some decent points brought up, but i was disappointed that there wasn’t an activity that followed to force us to confront a lot of the unspoken issues in the video and little was done to bridge the video to our present environment. the racial climate in the united states has change significantly from the 1960s. i’m not suggesting in any way at all that the problem has been remedied. in fact, in some ways it has become worse with more subtle and acute forms of racism. overall, i would posit the situation has improved throughout society, but i believe there are still pockets around the country for which racism is still business as usual.

in yearning for more discussion about the racial situation within the company, the speaker could have asked a simple question: “how does race affect your job?” and i think it would have sparked some interesting conversations. for me personally, the transition of leadership roles and responsibilities from the “good ol’ boys club” to a diverse workforce is a significant issue. i think the company has made great strides in hiring people with a diverse set of backgrounds, they key now is placing responsibility in their hands and i feel it will take a corporation-wide effort for this to happen. it is natural for people to feel most comfortable with others who are like them, but the current leaders of the company cannot afford to stay within their comfort zone. i’ll step off my soap box for now, but i really wish this had become a discussion topic during the “diversity” workshop.

after briefly touching on the race issue, (45 minutes of a 3hr class) we started talking about age diversity in a pretty harmless way. we identified the age groups of the people we relate to in different parts of our lives such as friends, coworkers, people who we cohabit with, etc. i don’t think there was too much value in this exercise so i won’t write much more about it.

we spent some time going off on a tangent about coworkers who cross certain boundaries. one person on our team had to deal with an employee who would regularly relate a sob story to him about her husband’s terrible health situation. it’s a general case of TMI and no good solution was offered for cutting back on the problem. i favor conversational evasiveness in these situations, talking about things that can’t possibly invoke their situation as a topic of discussion. i’ve had to rely on this not just with coworkers but other people at times too when i just feel too taxed to listen to their problems because it’s in my nature to always want to help people when they come to me with a problem. anyway, that was about it for the “communicating in a diverse workplace” class.

after breaking for lunch (progressively crappy food), we met for a team dynamics class. apparently this was the first time it was being taught and you could tell. there weren’t too many memorable take aways from the class except for the personality analysis.