Infallible Perception of Rudeness?

If I were to attempt to argue about how the world must be on the basis of some behavior I've seen recently, behavior by my colleagues, I'd wind up saying we have immediate incorrigible access to the property of rudeness....

That's quite odd, considering this property of rudeness gets manifested in conversations between monolingual English speakers speaking to Native Korean speakers who have only partially achieved fluency in English....

The truth is that I do not believe my colleagues. I believe that they cry "rude" when they feel that their authority is threatened. They think it is rude if a student asks "too many" questions. That's a belief I have about them, one I've been forming. This morning I had another chance to confirm my theory...... (well of course it's hardly so objective or scientific as that, but....still)

I found one of my students, 15 years old, sobbing.... crying uncontrollably. Another teacher had been, she said, "rude" to her. He didn't have to talk to her "that way".

When I spoke to the teacher, he said the student had been "rude" and told a story with the upshot that he'd been only doing his job.

Listening to him recount what had happened, and hearing her explanation, I could hardly reconstruct the entire story, but it did become clear to me that there was a common factor--a factor I've noted before, and about which I commented on this blog.

My fellow teacher did not like the way in which the student asked questions before she followed his command... ("talking back" is, I believe, what it's called in colloquial American..)

And it reinforced my conviction that among my fellow American teachers there is a sort of authoritarianism running not too far below the surface....

I've also had the thought (and not more than once) that the Adminstration at the Pretty Good International School does tend to confuse obedience with responsibility. All in all not a healthy picture....

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I return to the vignette sketched above. Key considerations are that an adult in a position of authority has power of the younger person. This means a sort of sensitivity is required. From the conversations I've had, I 'm not sure that most of my colleagues are aware of this fact. Secondly, "politeness" is surely something subject to important variation in the way its expressed, even if such drastic theories as Whorfianism are wrong..... But, again, any appreciation of the possible complications is absent....

NOTE: This rant needs to be supplemented by a reference to some of the literature about how we perceive non-native speakers. Intonation patterns vary between languages. Additionally, there are variations between speakers. There is a literature here which should be cited. It would only support the conclusion that judgments about rudeness are very fallible when they are made by a native speaker about a non-native speaker.