photo by iheartlinen
One of the cross-cultural blogs I read is Cindy King’s. Cindy is originally from the Bahamas and has lived and worked in several European countries, including France, where she currently lives. Even though her focus is business, Cindy’s insights into issues of culture are very relevant to educators.
Case in point: here are two recent articles from Cindy’s blog related to time, a topic we covered a while back on CulturallyTeaching (here, here, here and here):
5 cultural differences in understanding appointments
Fun With Half Hours
Some cultures use expressions where a “half hour” can mean 30 minutes before the hour referenced and not after the hour. This can lead to confusion when “half nine” means 8:30 and not 9:30.
This can happen when a non-native English speaker uses literal translations from their own language which uses such expressions. But there are even native English speakers in some parts of the world who use similar expressions.
This type of mistake usually happens when speaking as most people write out the numbers.
Takeaway: Always be clear in how you say the time.
>> Read about the other 4 cultual differences in understanding appointments on Cindy’s blog here.
Cultural differences in understanding deadlines
My downfall came because people can use two ways of giving deadlines:
- Deadline December 23rd = meaning this is the last day for you to take action
- Deadline December 23rd = meaning you need to take action before this date. In this case your last day for taking action would be December 22nd.
And I navigate almost exclusively in circles where people use the first example with the deadline date given is the last day to take action. But there are people who give the date to mean the first day after you must take action. And this is what happened to me. I had left taking action to what I thought was the very last day, but I was already one day too late.
>> Read more about cultural differences and deadlines on Cindy’s blog here.
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