ESL WORKSHEET - The concept of normalcy

LESSON PLAN FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS

WEIRD OR NORMAL?

LinguaHouse
Dec. 13, 2023

Level: Upper-Intermediate (B2-C1)
Type of English: English for Teenagers
Tags: Challenges; Psychology; Education and Learning; 16-18 Years Old; 13-15 Years Old; Speaking; Video Talk; Vocabulary Lesson
Publication date: 12/13/2023

The topic of this lesson is normality and the fact that no one is actually ‘normal’. Students will listen to two friends discussing study participants who are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and will then learn vocabulary connected to a video on normalcy. The language point is on homonyms and homophones. There is an opportunity for students to discuss the topics and an optional homework task where students can discuss quotes on normalcy and determine a norm in their class (by J. S. Fox).

Note: the video contains flashing images.
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• CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet in American English.
• CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan in American English.
• CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet in British English.
• CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan in British English.
• CLICK HERE to download/listen to the audios (Am/Br English).

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Speaker A: So, I have some bad news for you. We are weird.
Speaker B: I always thought we were fairly normal.
Speaker A: I don’t mean strange, I mean W-E-I-R-D. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. I just read a book about it by a Harvard biology professor, Joseph Henrich. He says that some of the things we think are perfectly normal have actually come from studies of one group, the WEIRDos. So many of the things we assume are universal, aren’t.
Speaker B: Okay, but I don’t understand, who are the weirdos again?
Speaker A: So, they did some analysis and they found that 96% of subjects in studies of human psychology and behavior were from Northern Europe, North America, or Australia. And 70% of them were American undergraduates. And that all of them represent only about 12% of the world’s population.
Speaker B: Wait, did you say that 70% were college undergrads – Do you mean teenagers?
Speaker A: Yeah, pretty much. Around 18 to 22. They are convenient for the researchers, I guess. But it’s a big problem when they generalize human behavior based on a bunch of teenagers. And sometimes the results of the same research on people in other countries got totally different results. They found big differences.
Speaker B: Can you give me an example?
Speaker A: Sure, so weirdos differ from other populations in terms of moral decision-making, reasoning style, fairness, and visual perception.
Speaker B: Visual perception?
Speaker A: Yeah. How we perceive what we see. So, get this. There’s the Muller-Lyer optical illusion where you have two identical lines, but they look like different lengths because of arrows at the end. Americans, for example, really strongly see the illusion. But for some other cultural groups, it isn’t even an illusion. They can immediately see the lines are the same.
Speaker B: Huh. Interesting.
Speaker A: And we think of things in terms of left and right. But some other groups, for example, describe things as east or west of each other instead. And then there are the Piraha people of Brazil who can’t count to 10.
Speaker B: What do you mean?
Speaker A: They just don’t have numbers in their language. So the idea of counting just doesn’t exist.
Speaker B: Weird!
Speaker A: I think I just told you we were the weird ones.
Speaker B: That’s right. We are!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Yana Buhrer Tavanier: In 1945, two sculptures meant to represent the average man and woman in the United States went on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Based on measurements taken from tens of thousands of young men and women, they were called Norma and Normman. That same year, a contest launched to find a living embodiment of Norma. Normal is often used as a synonym for “typical,” “expected,” or even “correct.” By that logic, most people should fit the description of normal. And yet, not one of almost 4,000 women who participated in the contest matched Norma, the supposedly “normal” woman. This puzzle isn’t unique to Norma and Normman, either — time and time again, so-called normal descriptions of our bodies, minds, and perceptions have turned out to match almost no one. And yet, a lot of the world is constructed around a foundation of normalcy.
So, what does normal actually mean — and should we be relying on it so much? In statistics, a normal distribution describes a set of values that fall along a bell curve. The average, or mean, of all the values is at the very center, and most other values fall within the hump of the bell. These curves can be tall, with most values inside a narrow range, or long and flat, with only a slight bias towards the average. What makes the distribution normal is that it follows this curved shape.
Normal doesn’t describe a single data point, but a pattern of diversity. Many human traits, like height, follow a normal distribution. Some people are very tall or very short, but most people fall close to the overall average. Outside of statistics, normal often refers to an average — like the single number pulled from the fattest part of the bell curve — that eliminates all the nuance of the normal distribution. Norma and Normman’s proportions came from such averages.
Applied to individuals, whether someone is considered normal usually depends on how closely they hew to this average. At best, such definitions of normal fail to capture variation. But oftentimes, our calculations of normal are even more flawed. Take the BMI — or Body Mass Index. BMI is a measure of weight relative to height, with different ratios falling into “underweight,” “normal weight,” “overweight,” and “obese” ranges. Generally, only BMIs that correspond to normal weight are considered healthy. But BMI is not always an accurate predictor of health, or even of what’s a healthy weight. BMI doesn’t take into account body fat percentage, body fat distribution, levels of physical activity, or blood pressure. And yet, those who fall outside the so-called normal range are commonly advised that losing or gaining weight will improve their health.
When we apply a standard of normal to all of humanity that’s based on data from a non-representative slice, we’re not just choosing one point on the distribution, we’re choosing it from the wrong distribution. A lot of behavior science research draws from samples that are pretty WEIRD — meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. These features can skew norms even in research that doesn’t have an obvious link to them.
Take the famed Muller-Lyer optical illusion: it’s normal to think one of the two lines is longer, when they’re actually the same length. At least, it is if you’re an American undergraduate. A team of anthropologists and psychologists found other demographic groups were much less susceptible— members of the San people of the Kalahari weren’t susceptible to the illusion at all. When these limited or inaccurate definitions of normal are used to make decisions that impact people’s lives, they can do real harm.
Historically, such concepts of normal have been hugely influential. The Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century weaponized the concept of normal, using it to justify exclusion, violence, and even extermination of those deemed not normal.
To this day, people are often targeted and discriminated against on the basis of disabilities, mental health issues, sexual orientations, gender identities, and other features deemed “not normal.” But the reality is that the differences in our bodies, minds, perceptions, and ideas about the world around us — in short, diversity — is the true normal.

Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/esl-lesson-plans/english-for-teenagers/weird-or-normal. Accessed on January 29, 2024. © 2008–2024 LinguaHouse.com. All rights reserved.