two whole hours
The cafe I ended up at today has a 10 peso an hour special, so I signed for two. Thus this should be a nice long post. We shall see.
Students are on break now but teachers aren't, so I spent the last week doing mostly nothing, sometimes with others and sometimes alone. The time with others consisted to a large extent of being fed. A common trait among host country nationals, as they're referred to in our manuals, is they feed you almost incessantly. Never exactly rotund, since I've been a bit more physically active and also let slip that my initial three months here entailed a loss of twenty pounds they have been ever more adamantly offering me whatever edible substances happened to be in their vicinity. Often this substances are more commonly identified as fruit, candy, or bread.
Round these parts, "bread" assumes varied forms but never differs much in terms of fundamental essence, which is soft, white, and sweet. Rolls, loaves, and those random sweet treats at corner bakeries that make you wonder if bakers have a bit too much time on their hands all consist of roughly the same texture and sweetness. Most of their wheat-based baking appears to have brought over by the spanish (well it damn straight wasn't the chinese!) and while I'm no expert on castillian breads, I doubt the whole panoply made it across the Indian Ocean. Flour may be an issue too, since I haven't seen any amber waves of grain during my morning jogs along chokingly polluted highways. The waves are pretty exclusively short and green and sitting in a few inches of standing water. So I'm guessing the flour is imported and that the market for whole wheat just never took off.
The time I've spent doing nothing alone has consisted primarily of reading. My main project this past week or two has been a second assault on Pedagogy of the Oppressed (many of you will assuredly recognize this title and a few of you would assuredly recognize the copy I'm reading. more on that later), but I've been casing the used book sales at the malls recently and found some real gems there as well.
Last week I was looking through a section of textbooks and found The Conscious Reader, which is a collection of personal writings, essays, poems and some fiction that is supposed to serve students as a sort of overview, very much in the western liberal tradition, of life itself. It's quite a collection and should serve to keep my brain from banging too forlornly against the pink concrete walls of my lonely little room. Speaking of, one of the selections was on solitude, and it made me smile a lot and be glad that I was spending a lot of time by myself instead of doing other things I'd rather have been doing.
The nice thing about being here as been I've had oodles of time to think and oodles of things to think about. The drawback is I've had few people to think with. Not that I've gone through life having had intense intellectual discussions with people every evening, but the language and cultural barriers are, for now, in my own cautious estimation, more or less prohibitive of really talking with locals, and time spent with fellow foreigners is usually spent commiserating. Also that time has tended to be in air-conditioned venues, which have recently been giving me stuffy noses and made extended discourse difficult. So I've kept my thoughts to myself and my journal and the occasional electronic communication.
The books which I purchased yesterday from an air-conditioned venue included one Inherit the Wind, the script to the play which was made into a movie, and another The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, by Douglas Adams, both of which I finished within a twenty-four hour period. Watching Inherit the Wind, the movie, in high school science class was a formative (and very enjoyable) experience for me, and I'd show it to my english class if I had a copy and a tv, and any say whatsoever over our curriculum. We could read the play but with only one copy students who probably would not practice the lines anyway, it would probably just end up as the same monotonous mumbling I can't hardly force myself to pay attention to that the other readings so far have. Anyway the play is a bit unsubtle in parts, but others are brilliant, hilarious, or insightful, and on the whole it's easy to digest but highly charged. I liked it, at least.
Douglas Adams, in a book I remember my dad speaking vaguely about some vaguely long time ago, never ceases to entertain and had me laughing out loud even more than Bill Bryson did a month or so ago with A Walk in The Woods, which was quite a lot. Adams's absurd but spot-on anthropomorphizations and cathartic complaints about everyday annoyances are hard to beat.
So after a brief hiatus I'm back to page 132 of 189 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I'm really wish I was reading for a class, because it's making me think an awful lot, but mostly in frustrating and inconclusive ways. Oh I should mention, the copy of the book I'm reading was given to my sister by my cousin a few years ago, and I don't think she made much progress toward completion before setting it on her shelf. I had thought it looked interesting during the initial gifting and saw it in her room and started reading it when I was at home and she wasn't a while ago. Then I wasn't done and moved away so I took it with me (sorry?), got about half way through, figured I had learned a lot already and would probably rather read something that I wouldn't readily equate with slowly ripping off fingernails (it's mostly the third chapter that's bad). Then I was all set to return it when I left on my Great Adventure, but it was recommended (for rereading, in its entirety) by my former supervisor who has some credibility in such matters as are relevant to the content of the book. So I brought it along and have eventually gotten around to it once again.
So because I don't really have anybody to discuss this all with here in real life, I'll try and articulate some thoughts here for those of you who may be familiar with Freire and his wild and crazy ideas. First of all, oppressor/oppressed seems like a great theoretical framework but when I try and apply it to my current situation my brain explodes. I feel like any attempt to understand my reality (or rather, the reality around me, I'm not sure it's really "mine" at all yet) using his ideas requires drastic oversimplification and a good deal of savior-complex on my part. But on the other hand so much of it seems to fit quite well. So that's confusing. The other problem is that I have no friggin' idea how to achieve anything near the dialogue he so thoroughly venerates. I agree that 'banking' education sucks in a lot of ways, but the contexts in which he is advocating his methods are vastly different than mine.
So that's all for now. Sorry to everybody I'm skipped replying to to write this post, but I'm nearly out of time and my fingers are sick of typing.
Students are on break now but teachers aren't, so I spent the last week doing mostly nothing, sometimes with others and sometimes alone. The time with others consisted to a large extent of being fed. A common trait among host country nationals, as they're referred to in our manuals, is they feed you almost incessantly. Never exactly rotund, since I've been a bit more physically active and also let slip that my initial three months here entailed a loss of twenty pounds they have been ever more adamantly offering me whatever edible substances happened to be in their vicinity. Often this substances are more commonly identified as fruit, candy, or bread.
Round these parts, "bread" assumes varied forms but never differs much in terms of fundamental essence, which is soft, white, and sweet. Rolls, loaves, and those random sweet treats at corner bakeries that make you wonder if bakers have a bit too much time on their hands all consist of roughly the same texture and sweetness. Most of their wheat-based baking appears to have brought over by the spanish (well it damn straight wasn't the chinese!) and while I'm no expert on castillian breads, I doubt the whole panoply made it across the Indian Ocean. Flour may be an issue too, since I haven't seen any amber waves of grain during my morning jogs along chokingly polluted highways. The waves are pretty exclusively short and green and sitting in a few inches of standing water. So I'm guessing the flour is imported and that the market for whole wheat just never took off.
The time I've spent doing nothing alone has consisted primarily of reading. My main project this past week or two has been a second assault on Pedagogy of the Oppressed (many of you will assuredly recognize this title and a few of you would assuredly recognize the copy I'm reading. more on that later), but I've been casing the used book sales at the malls recently and found some real gems there as well.
Last week I was looking through a section of textbooks and found The Conscious Reader, which is a collection of personal writings, essays, poems and some fiction that is supposed to serve students as a sort of overview, very much in the western liberal tradition, of life itself. It's quite a collection and should serve to keep my brain from banging too forlornly against the pink concrete walls of my lonely little room. Speaking of, one of the selections was on solitude, and it made me smile a lot and be glad that I was spending a lot of time by myself instead of doing other things I'd rather have been doing.
The nice thing about being here as been I've had oodles of time to think and oodles of things to think about. The drawback is I've had few people to think with. Not that I've gone through life having had intense intellectual discussions with people every evening, but the language and cultural barriers are, for now, in my own cautious estimation, more or less prohibitive of really talking with locals, and time spent with fellow foreigners is usually spent commiserating. Also that time has tended to be in air-conditioned venues, which have recently been giving me stuffy noses and made extended discourse difficult. So I've kept my thoughts to myself and my journal and the occasional electronic communication.
The books which I purchased yesterday from an air-conditioned venue included one Inherit the Wind, the script to the play which was made into a movie, and another The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, by Douglas Adams, both of which I finished within a twenty-four hour period. Watching Inherit the Wind, the movie, in high school science class was a formative (and very enjoyable) experience for me, and I'd show it to my english class if I had a copy and a tv, and any say whatsoever over our curriculum. We could read the play but with only one copy students who probably would not practice the lines anyway, it would probably just end up as the same monotonous mumbling I can't hardly force myself to pay attention to that the other readings so far have. Anyway the play is a bit unsubtle in parts, but others are brilliant, hilarious, or insightful, and on the whole it's easy to digest but highly charged. I liked it, at least.
Douglas Adams, in a book I remember my dad speaking vaguely about some vaguely long time ago, never ceases to entertain and had me laughing out loud even more than Bill Bryson did a month or so ago with A Walk in The Woods, which was quite a lot. Adams's absurd but spot-on anthropomorphizations and cathartic complaints about everyday annoyances are hard to beat.
So after a brief hiatus I'm back to page 132 of 189 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I'm really wish I was reading for a class, because it's making me think an awful lot, but mostly in frustrating and inconclusive ways. Oh I should mention, the copy of the book I'm reading was given to my sister by my cousin a few years ago, and I don't think she made much progress toward completion before setting it on her shelf. I had thought it looked interesting during the initial gifting and saw it in her room and started reading it when I was at home and she wasn't a while ago. Then I wasn't done and moved away so I took it with me (sorry?), got about half way through, figured I had learned a lot already and would probably rather read something that I wouldn't readily equate with slowly ripping off fingernails (it's mostly the third chapter that's bad). Then I was all set to return it when I left on my Great Adventure, but it was recommended (for rereading, in its entirety) by my former supervisor who has some credibility in such matters as are relevant to the content of the book. So I brought it along and have eventually gotten around to it once again.
So because I don't really have anybody to discuss this all with here in real life, I'll try and articulate some thoughts here for those of you who may be familiar with Freire and his wild and crazy ideas. First of all, oppressor/oppressed seems like a great theoretical framework but when I try and apply it to my current situation my brain explodes. I feel like any attempt to understand my reality (or rather, the reality around me, I'm not sure it's really "mine" at all yet) using his ideas requires drastic oversimplification and a good deal of savior-complex on my part. But on the other hand so much of it seems to fit quite well. So that's confusing. The other problem is that I have no friggin' idea how to achieve anything near the dialogue he so thoroughly venerates. I agree that 'banking' education sucks in a lot of ways, but the contexts in which he is advocating his methods are vastly different than mine.
So that's all for now. Sorry to everybody I'm skipped replying to to write this post, but I'm nearly out of time and my fingers are sick of typing.
posted by ben at 1:29 AM
1 Comments:
i'm glad you felt the liberty to kidnap my book. i don't think my intellect is quite ready for it yet. right now i'm content to stick with steward, white and rappaport.
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