Sunday, May 23, 2010
P2P
For those of you not cool enough to remember the latest in technology buzzwords, "P2P" is short for "Peer to peer," a type of computing that has become so common that the word has been rendered more or less useless and replaced by words that are more specific.
I bring the term up because I've been thinking more about the concept of "peer" lately. Yesterday, I took a class at my tae kwon do school, and one of the instructors, a woman who runs the place on a daily basis, was giving me pointers on a specific type of kick that I was having problems with. This woman is a third degree black belt, and very good at martial arts. Needless to say, she is much more competent and informed on the topic of tae kwon do than I am so the conversation was very much between teacher (her) and student (me).
As the conversation continued and meandered, I became a bit uncomfortable because I thought that the fact that she was taking so long in talking about it with me (and we moved on to other topics) was indicative of me needing extra attention and therefore being incompetent. I had a hard time maintaining eye contact because I felt judged and bad about myself.
Then I realized that she was, in fact, talking to me as a peer. I'm in my mid-thirties, she's in her mid-forties, and we've both worked in software in one capacity or another. I was so hung up on the teacher-student aspect of the conversation, or rather so convinced that the teacher-student dynamic is inherently didactic and/or judgmental, that I couldn't see us as just two people talking. I've been noticing this more in how I perceive my interactions with people, especially at tae kwon do but also at work. I just can't shake this sense that inter-personal dynamics are predetermined or otherwise have some rigid hierarchy.
I bring the term up because I've been thinking more about the concept of "peer" lately. Yesterday, I took a class at my tae kwon do school, and one of the instructors, a woman who runs the place on a daily basis, was giving me pointers on a specific type of kick that I was having problems with. This woman is a third degree black belt, and very good at martial arts. Needless to say, she is much more competent and informed on the topic of tae kwon do than I am so the conversation was very much between teacher (her) and student (me).
As the conversation continued and meandered, I became a bit uncomfortable because I thought that the fact that she was taking so long in talking about it with me (and we moved on to other topics) was indicative of me needing extra attention and therefore being incompetent. I had a hard time maintaining eye contact because I felt judged and bad about myself.
Then I realized that she was, in fact, talking to me as a peer. I'm in my mid-thirties, she's in her mid-forties, and we've both worked in software in one capacity or another. I was so hung up on the teacher-student aspect of the conversation, or rather so convinced that the teacher-student dynamic is inherently didactic and/or judgmental, that I couldn't see us as just two people talking. I've been noticing this more in how I perceive my interactions with people, especially at tae kwon do but also at work. I just can't shake this sense that inter-personal dynamics are predetermined or otherwise have some rigid hierarchy.
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