Violence and humanity. Some are more important than others?

There is not a day when there is no violent act anywhere on the planet.  Humans being humans we kill and rape and do things that many of us might not even be able to imagine.

As atrocious and horrible those incidents are, I suspect we never get to hear and read about most of them because they just don't get reported.  Or, if they do show up in the news, it might be geographically restricted.  And then there are some that get global coverage.

Almost always, the tragedies that strike the poor countries get very little coverage compared to events in rich countries.  Here too we display that human trait, I suppose, in being a lot more fascinated with the lifestyles of the rich and famous while condemning to anonymity the poor and the disadvantaged.

The Boston violence was an awful act.  Horrible and senseless violence.  I certainly would like to torture the life out of the crappy humans who carried that out.

But, even within the US, we have witnessed a lot of violence.  The killing of children and adults at a school in Connecticut.  The killings at a Gurudwara.  The movie theater killings.  The reactions to each of these events seem to be very different.  It is almost as if we have some kind of a metric that guides the media, social, and political responses to the killings.

Now, all those are within the US.  Meanwhile, bloody violence happens on a daily basis all around the world--a lot more in some countries than in others.  In Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Congo or ... the magnitude of violence against civilians is a lot more, and on a daily basis.  Most of those don't even blip in our radars.  And even if they do, they don't stay on the radars for long.

The violence itself depresses me.  As one who even prefers to avoid verbal conflicts, and as one who doesn't even like the idea of water pistols, I literally feel weakened when I watch the blood and gore of the violence. I force myself, sometimes, to read and watch news items about them because I tell myself that I can't simply close my eyes and wish them away.  I owe it to my fellow humans to understand such suffering.  And, of course, I need to do this so that I can be a better educator.

On top of the violence that depresses me, I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

A strange interpretation of "what it is to be human" that we walk around with when we do not pay attention to, for instance, the following from recent days:

• An explosion in Pakistan has killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens more
• Blast in Bangalore injures 16
• Meanwhile, at least 35 dead and more than 150 injured as a result of an earthquake in Pakistan
• And last Sunday was that horrific attack in Mogadishu
• The civil war in Syria rages on ... 

A human's life in one part of the world is not the same as a human's life in another part of the world?  How can that be!  As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that

Well, here is to hoping for peace on the planet.  Everywhere on the planet.

"Are you an educator?"

Getting back home after the conference in Los Angeles was not a straight shot, thanks to flight delays.  As I waited in line to get my re-routing done, I couldn't help but think that the young woman ahead of me looked familiar.

But, as a middle-aged single guy there was no way I was going to creep her out by asking her cliched lines like "hey, do I know you from somewhere?"

Thankfully, I didn't have to pull the remaining hair out of my scalp trying to figure that one out; I overheard her tell another woman "oh, I go to Western Oregon."  Aha!

"No wonder you looked familiar to me" I told her with confidence.

"Yes, I was in your class three years ago" she replied.

It is one small world after all!

A few hours after that, I was in the small plane in the last leg of the journey when a young woman sat in the aisle seat next to me.  She reminded me of another student who graduated about two years ago.  Could this girl be her sister?

"You look so much like a student I had in two of my classes a couple of years ago" I said.  "She was a redhead though."

"Oh yeah, where at?"

"Western Oregon University is where I teach."

I barely finished saying that when she said with excitement in her eyes "I am a student at Western."

What are the odds of running into two students from the small university where I teach!

As we chatted, I shared with her the interaction with the other student, and added: "I have to make sure that I am on my best behavior when I travel then."

It was quite a struggle to wake up in the morning and to head out to work after having crawled into bed only at one in the night.  But, I did.

After classes, I swung by the grocery store before going home.  I was hungry--a bowl of oatmeal was all I had eaten the whole day.  The middle-aged checkout clerk smiled as she asked me "are you an educator?"

Even as I replied with a yes, I thought "educator" was a better word than "teacher."  I like it.

"Why did you ask?  Did it flash on my forehead that I am one?"

"You just looked like one.  It was your demeanor" she said with an even wider smile.

If it is in my demeanor, then it is all the more important than I watch my behavior when out in the public.

Before the day ended, I decided to finish the essay in the New Yorker with which I had a tough time because it was all about music and piano and everything else that I am ignorant about.  But, I worked my way through.  And, I hit the mother lode when I read the following sentences in that essay, Every good boy does fine:

When you give ideas to students, they tend either to ignore them or to exaggerate them.  The first is distilled futility, but the second is grotesque ...
One thing no one teaches you is how much teaching resembles therapy.  You can be working with a student you've recently met, and you begin to tinker with one thing, even the movement of an arm.  It becomes clear that some important muscle has been blocked for a decade or more.  It's an intimate thing, being shown these years of lost possibilities, and before long you're giving advice about boyfriends, and explaining why parents are such a drag.  There are diabolically opposed incentives, too: while the teacher is trying to express the truth about the student and discover what isn't working, the student is in some way trying to elude discovery, disgiosing weaknesses in order to seem better than she is.  In this complicated situation, a teacher must walk a thin line, destroying complacency without destroying confidence. ...

 I have listened to students talk about their boyfriends and girlfriends, their stories about their parents and grandparents, their travel adventures, their unpleasant encounters with the law ... Yes, whether it is music or economic geography that we teach, we have to walk a thin line.  A very difficult walk that nobody can really teach us how to do.  We learn to do that by reflecting on our own experiences.

Ninety-percent of a teacher's job is directing students to read what's plainly on the page. The other ten percent is attempting to incite their imagination about what's behind and between the notes, what could never be written down anywhere in any score--and sometimes this seems unteachable, like the creation of life itself. ...

Oh, if only I had the capabilities to articulate the ideas like how those sentences have been crafted!

Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way.  They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.

I am an educator!

My final day as an educator in California

In academia, it is "I publish, therefore I am" and not Cogito ergo sum?

In case you hadn't noticed, I was off my daily blogging ritual--I was away from home and work at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.

One of the sessions that I attended was about achieving learning outcomes by having students make use of the different technologies that are at our fingertips these days--videos, Twitter, ... This is something that I am always interested in, but unable to incorporate for the same reasons that I articulated during the Q/A which was something like this:

I think terms like "digital natives" to describe the youth who seem to be at ease using the gadgets is incorrect.  They are merely consumers.  And, by using terms like "digital natives" we assume that students can easily transition from being consumers of information to becoming producers of knowledge.  But, that is not the case.  In fact, it has become much harder for students to become producers of knowledge and education is quite a challenge to make them producers.

The presenter agreed with me and explained why, therefore, he thinks training will be required.  But, that is not what this blog-post is about.

After the session ended, one of the other presenters at the session walked across to me and expressed her pleasure in me having used those phrases of producers and consumers of knowledge.  "Do you have any ongoing research on this, and have you published anything?"

"I don't have any formal research work into this issue" I replied.

Later at lunch, while conversing with another geographer, when she referred to Tanzania, I told her that I was there about three years ago.  "I was in something like the south central part of the country" I said and described the location of Pommern and Iringa as best as I could without a map.

"I went there to better understand this whole idea of volunteer tourism because my feeling is that while it does the volunteer a great deal of good, it doesn't do much to the community in terms of building institutions that can generate self-sustained growth and development" I explained.

"That is exactly what one of my students wants to study" she said with excitement.  "Have you published your findings?"

This time, I was not polite in my response; so, what's new!

"I think most of the academic publishing is crap" I replied.  "I did write a few newspaper columns related to it."

In academia, it is all about publications.  Even if nobody ever reads them.  As I remarked in my essay from twelve years ago in The Chronicle Review, against this extreme fascination for everybody to talk even when nobody is listening, my dissertation adviser once commented that perhaps an average of six people read his articles, and that includes the peer editors!

It is a crazy world in which we publish articles for the sake of publishing articles.  In that world, I simply do not exist.  Sriram who?  Because I don't publish.

Any day, I prefer cogito ergo sum.

A few of my fellow-volunteer tourists at work in Tanzania, 2009