New Insights

The course taught me that small, consistent acts of redesign in a household, a team, or a classroom can add up

I came into this course thinking mostly in terms of personality and preference. If someone liked sports or books, if a family divided chores one way or another, if I chose the military over university, I read those as individual choices inside a neutral world. What I learned instead, is that everyday life is organized by norms, roles, and expectations that existed before me, and will continue after me. They do not simply describe what people do. They nudge, reward, and punish in ways that make some paths feel natural and others feel risky. Once I began to see the patterns, I could start to change how I serve, how I share a household, and how I parent. In this essay, I first describe how I believe culture operates as both a coercive system and a contested space, and how that insight changed my daily routines. Second, I explain how a clearer grasp of status and roles gave me tools to navigate the friction of being both a serving member and a student. Third, I reflect on how loosening the gender binary from my thinking strengthened long-held values and translated into practical choices at work and at home.

The most striking change began with culture. I used to treat culture as surface features like food, music, and holidays. I now see it as a system that directs behaviour through norms backed by sanctions and carried by institutions like families, schools, media, and corporations. That recognition reframed many small choices in my house. Praising constant productivity, defaulting to purchases to relieve stress, or slotting chores by gender, are not neutral habits. They are micro rehearsals of a broader script. One moment that stays with me is learning that Canada once criminalized the potlatch, a communal ceremony that redistributed wealth. That history made cultural imperialism concrete and revealed how power moves when cultural practices challenge accumulation. It changed how I hear words like ‘tradition’ and ‘normal’. It also made me look uncomfortably close to home. Although my wife and I hold egalitarian values, my schedule and deployments shift the division of labour and the mental load toward her. For a long time, I excused that tilt as inevitable. Now, I read it as cultural reproduction unless I intervene. We began to plan with a shared calendar, assign recurring tasks based on preference and skill rather than gender, and conduct weekly check-ins when my duties ramp up. Culture is not only coercive, but also contested. Naming my local board-game scene as a subculture helped me claim it as a meaningful space with its own rituals and symbols. Inside that scene, cooperation and strategy replace posturing and scorekeeping, which fits who I am better than the sports and outdoors norms around me. Treating that community as a legitimate cultural home rather than a guilty pleasure, widened my sense of where I belong. The course also pushed me to confront subtle ethnocentrism in my expectations about education and family life. I have become more intentional about keeping curiosity at the centre when we meet different ways of living.

Understanding status and roles provided the vocabulary for conflicts I had been feeling for years. I had been carrying “student” and “serving member of the Canadian Forces” as parallel identities. This course made it clear how context flips which status becomes master. On base, the uniform speaks first. While doing coursework, student leads, even when military habits shape how I speak and plan. That simple observation explained why an academic email can trigger a different posture than a message from my chain of command. It also introduced me to status inconsistency. My parents prize steady work over university. The Forces value rank and reliability. The university values critical analysis and achievement. When those hierarchies pull at the same person, it is not a sign of disorganization. It is a structural mismatch that produces friction. Seeing that allowed me to respond with strategy rather than self-criticism. Roles are not only descriptive, but they are also coercive through rules, scripts, and incentives. I once assumed coercion belonged solely to military discipline. I now recognize how subtler academic sanctions can steer behaviour just as effectively. Schools and units both rely on calendars, forms, and evaluation systems that script the day. I have learned to negotiate timelines, protect sleep as a resource rather than a luxury, and translate across hierarchies so deadlines at school and duty requirements are visible to both sides. I also revisited the emotional sanctions around education that I grew up with. Comments that framed university as pretension rather than development had more influence on me than I admitted. Naming those messages as socialization helped me stop carrying them into new settings. The result is a firmer commitment to education. As a first- generation student who is actively serving, I now see my path less as an exception, and more as a managed role conflict that can be navigated with tools and support.

The unit in this course that engaged me most personally addressed gender. I had a long-standing conviction that interests and labour should not be gendered. This course did not overturn that belief. It strengthened it with evidence and language, and it forced me to own the costs of binary expectations. Separating sex, gender, and sexuality, and seeing each on a spectrum rather than a tidy either-or, cleared a lot of fog. So did learning that brains are not cleanly sorted into male and female types, and that performance can change simply because a stereotype has been cued.

Those ideas turned into a mirror. As a boy, I was steered toward “male” chores like mowing and repairs, and away from domestic work I preferred. I learned to keep those preferences private to avoid teasing or disappointment. In my current trade, the majority of my colleagues are male, and the feminized work that women often do in the Forces or in civilian life is routinely devalued, even when the skill is equivalent. Seeing all of that as socialization backed by sanctions changed how I interpret both past decisions and present pressures. At home, my wife and I share responsibilities. She often does the yard work because she enjoys it, and I prefer laundry and tidying. That reversal is a quiet way to line our daily lives up with what we believe.

We are raising our son without imagined rules attached to activities or preferences. If he wants to join dance or fix a bike, he will always have our full support. At work, I have no illusions about transforming the culture overnight. I praise competence wherever I see it, especially in roles that are often dismissed. I volunteer for tasks that cross the old lines so that my actions match my words. The point is not to perform virtue. The point is to reduce the social, psychological, and economic costs that rigid expectations impose on real people, myself included.

Stepping back, the through line is a shift from an individual lens to a structural and reflexive one. I can still speak about taste, talent, and effort. I simply no longer pretend that they operate in a vacuum. Culture provides the scripts. Institutions enforce the cues. Status and roles set the stage. Gender expectations shape both the audience and the cast. Once I learned to see those elements, I stopped asking only whether I was working hard enough, and started asking whether the surrounding design made certain outcomes likely. That question changed my behaviour in modest and concrete ways. At home, we plan and share differently, and we curate our son’s environment to widen his options rather than narrow them. At work, I manage interfaces and challenge gender typing in steady, pragmatic ways. None of this is dramatic, yet all of it is cumulative. The course taught me that small, consistent acts of redesign in a household, a team, or a classroom can add up