what are we doing here?

Greg, a volunteer down in Punta Arenas, has a wonderfully-titled and well-written post called "The Novelty Has Simply Worn Off."

In this situation, I never expected to be an afterthought. At that point, it feels like we're all kind of missing the point of me being here. I came to make kids excited about English, to expose teachers to new ideas of how to teach and to exchange cultural experiences and traditions with my family and community. As we press on through these last weeks, I feel that much of that has been tossed out the window. I'm not the new, exciting person that just showed up one day. I'm just part of the scenery now which certainly represents my cue to find an exit.

I see what he's talking about: I've been part of the routine at INSUCO for a while now. Two things strike me about that:

1. It's inevitable. Novelty is unsustainable by definition.
2. It's a good thing.

The lack of novelty means that everyone has changed and adjusted. My kids are used to me! I'm pretty offbeat even for a North American, so it took some time. We have really good relationships, where they like me (with one conspicuous exception) and know I care about them. I've adapted to them, sure, but I didn't have as far to go, because I have no experience with large groups of 15-year olds, so if they happened to be Chilean, well, whatever.

They, on the other hand, had to adjust to me, who:

• Required them to participate: to talk and stand up and move around.
• Forbade cell phones and eating in class.
• Checked to make sure they understood stuff.
• Took time to make them say things when they had trouble.
• Didn't make them--didn't let them--write anything down.
• Had no compunction about doing silly dances or making chicken noises in class.

That's all completely different from their experience, where they have to shut up and copy stuff down all the time and they get to check out and eat and wander around the room. And Chilean teachers do not, as a rule, make chicken noises.

And I got to be the Non-Parental Adult Who Cares. I tried to see them and accept them for who they are, while I push them to do things they were embarrassed about, and encourage them to act as adult as they can manage.

The WorldTeach orientation set my expectations pretty well. English education here is broken five ways from Sunday, and I had no illusions that I could fix it, fight it, or even teach a whole ton of English. This, for example, is what we've done this semester: 41 words and 4 questions/responses.

What they learned with me won't help them on their standardized test, the SIMCE, which is unfortunately the government's metric for success. Even if they gave the authority to rewrite the school's curriculum--which would include revolutionizing their structure so that students could be grouped by level instead of a random set of 45 kids all having the same classes--I don't know anywhere near enough about ESL/EFL education to know what to do.

I don't know that any of my kids are more motivated about English now; honestly, I doubt it. But they know they can learn at least a little bit of it, and that some random person from far away showed up and cared enough to help them do it, and to me that's the important thing.

what Chileans eat

During a discussion about trying to find a high-end pisco, Steve pointed me to this blog, Eating Chilean. There's a particularly fine post called "What Chileans Eat." He also did the research on the pepino I ate, a funky-looking striped fruit with the exact taste, color, and texture of cantaloupe (though he and his texts say honeydew, which is completely different, but whatever).

I'm not sure of the author's complete story: it sounds like he got divorced and retired from being a professor, moved to Chile, married a Chilean and started another family. Either way, he's enthusiastic enough to read historical primary sources about Chilean food, which is doubly interesting if you read Spanish. Anyway, check it out.

nope, we still need "feminism"

Via the Bookslut blog, author Piers Paul Read says in an interview:

"It's partly this feminist historicism, which I think is false, that women have been somehow oppressed by men throughout the ages. You don't find any evidence of women being dissatisfied with their condition before the 18th century and then it's just a few spoilt bluestockings and servants who get bored... I think women saw it as the natural order that the man should be head of the family - it's also Christian teaching - and that they played this domestic role. And I think the feminists stirred up a sense of resentment against men that persists today."

Riiiiiight. It's rare to see something so hatefully wrong not coming from a Republican. (Mr. Read is British.)

Hannah Betts has a few good things to say about that.

It is a lamentable idiosyncrasy of feminism that, unlike other rights movements - the campaigns against prejudice based on race, class, or sexuality - its beneficiaries take their emancipation and run. Many women will not even countenance the F-word, being prepared to concede only: "I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but..." But what? That I like being paid an equal wage, having the right not to get raped in marriage?

The disavowal of "feminist" always confused me during my years at Northeast Liberal Arts College, although if feminism's campus representative was the Women's Studies professor, she was pretty abrasive all around and seemed to concentrate on how it was important that she and other women enjoy hunting. Very postmodern (good riddance, late 90s!), but not exactly a standard-bearer for why the ideas of feminism are still important to today's young women (and men).

Then again, that was the age of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and paranoid political correctness that seems to have matured into a more rational sensitivity and even genuine tolerance, especially in younger generations, who have since done things like electing a black President, and overwhelmingly supporting gay marriage equality.

Much like people, you never know where ideas will end up, however screwy they are at the time.

go read more of his essays

I periodically sing the praises of Maciej Cegłowski's Idle Words, because he's just that great a writer. Here, from his post about Torres del Paine, a park down south--

Did I say "south"? I meant "Go south until you reach the middle of nowhere, then keep going for another day or two"...

On the Chilean side, there is a very serious man in a jacket reading DETECTIVE who peers at your passport and then sends you to the inspection table. Here condor-eyed agricultural inspectors search your bags for the slightest trace of forbidden fruit or meat. The search is thorough but strangely limited to what you physically bring with you into the building. Apparently the Chilean border service cannot conceive of a criminal mind so devious it would think to leave contraband on the bus.

His most recent post, "An Annotated Letter From Roman Polanski," is sad, but a really good exposition of the case, with his trademark sharp writing.

dangerous chemicals + good writing = awesome

Google Reader recently reminded me of a blog I hadn't read in a while: Derek Lowe's blog about doing research chemistry for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. I enjoy his writing enough that I want to share it with others, particularly his Things I Won't Work With series. Here's part of his piece on chalcogen polyazides:

Spirited stuff, that tetra-azide. The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say. It's safe to assume that any procedure which involves considering which parts of the apparatus I'd prefer to have flying past me will not get much business in my lab, no matter how dashing I might look in a leather suit.

That procedure deserves a closer look, though. You can't just crack open a can of selenium tetrafluoride whenever you feel the urge, you know. That stuff has to be made fresh, as far as I can see, and the way these hearty sons of toil make it is by reacting selenium dioxide with chlorine trifluoride. Yep, that stuff, the delightful compound that sets sand on fire and eats through asbestos firebrick.

I don't understand about half of the chemistry terms, but the joy of his writing is that you don't have to.

I might suck at this

This is a brilliant blog post and video by a teacher, about creating a lesson from real-world data about the per-milliliter cost of various liquids. The writing alone is fantastic, and the video is pretty cool too. He does something I learned about in ESL class, which is to create an anomaly that the students can ask a key question about. In this case, he makes the Red Bull be $50, when a single can is about $3, and all he needs is for one student to go "What's up with that?". It's like the old saying that scientific discoveries don't start with someone shouting "Eureka!"; they start with someone saying "Huh, that looks weird."

One thing I'm prepared for as I go is that I might be a bad teacher. I don't think I will be, on average: I think I have a lot of patience with and interest in kids, and a lot of willingness to engage with them in whatever place they happen to be, and a real desire to communicate stuff in a way they can understand. Ren assures me that's the biggest part of teaching, and I can learn the lesson-planning stuff that scares me. That all seems true. But I think that some days, I'm going to fail. It's just going to happen. Kids will be fighting or I'll be sick or we'll be doing something hard or whatever, and it's just not going to work, and that has to be okay too. One critical lesson from performing on stage is that we have to be willing to fail, to go try stuff, not just willing to fail, but to fail big. And maybe I do that so regularly that it's worth labeling me a bad teacher. =)