whiny pants

The conundrum of the day and evening is whether I ask my newspaper teacher for a chat to discuss the fact that she continually elevates the other team's newspaper while making "joking" comments about our team never getting our paper out on time and suggesting that we do a lot of complaining. (We have gotten our paper out on time, and we did it weeks ago, before the other team did.) And I'm not a terribly competitive person, but it pisses me off that it doesn't matter what we do or how hard we work, we still get these comments.

On the one hand, it doesn't matter much, because in a week and a half, we'll never have to listen to her comments on our newspapers ever again. In fact, we won't ever make newspapers in this context ever again. But on the other hand, I'm a big believer in the idea that if you continually shit on a certain person's or group's work or on them as people, their confidence will go down and their work will get worse as a result.

Did you ever see the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes film/documentary? Well, what happened was, there was a teacher (this was maybe in the 1960s) who wanted to teach her young class (probably 1st graders or thereabouts) about racism. All the kids in her class were white. So what she did one day, without any warning to them, was start making comments about how brown-eyed people were so much smarter and better at their tasks than blue-eyed people. When a blue-eyed child made a mistake, she'd say something like: "Well, what can you expect from someone with blue eyes?"

The day went on, and the blue-eyed kids participated less and made more mistakes. In addition, the brown-eyed kids started being very cruel to the blue-eyed kids. The next day or week, the teacher switched, and the blue-eyed people were better, with similar results.

I know my stupid newspaper class is not like racism, and not really much like this experiment either. But it's what I've been thinking about. And I am having a hard time focusing on the reading I have to do for an essay for another class, when I am thinking about this problem. I suppose the solution is to wait until tomorrow, at least. If, when I wake up, I am still bothered by it, I go have a chat. I explain that I realize perhaps that the other team is better at making newspapers. I can live with that. But I don't think it helps us to improve when all positive criticism goes to them, and none to us. Maybe we are the complainy team, but who ever got his or her point across without being a little complainy once in a while?