Tryangulation

It's just down the road from Paricutín

Do you remember in grade school the story about the Mexican volcano that rose overnight in a farmer's cornfield? That volcano is called Paricutín, and during its initial eruptions it destroyed the town of San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro. The townspeople relocated and named their new community Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro, while the amazing story of the volcano brought some broad, but brief, attention to their tragedy and also to the astounding name of the town.

With the passing of time, the place name took on a mythical quality, and now many in Mexico doubt that Mexico's longest place name is authentic, although across the country people are amused by a famous tongue twister that evolved out of that name. I won't repeat the entire tongue twister here, but you can see different versions of it on the town's Spanish Wikipedia page. I've successfully used the tongue twister myself as a tool for teaching the language learning technique of the backward build-up: learning phrases by starting at the end and with lots of repetition gradually adding the preceding syllables, thus demonstrating that the technique works even with nonsense words.

Well, wouldn't you know that someone from that town eventually made it to Houston, and during a chance meeting and subsequent casual conversation about the both of us growing up on farms, he mentioned in passing the name of his hometown. Having myself come from near a place called Kalamazoo, I was also used to meeting people who didn't believe there really was such a place, and I had to confess to him that I too had doubted the name of his hometown. Still, we quickly got past that, I surprised him with my ability to recite the word without prompting, and I enjoyed our conversation far more than if I had just met a lady named Sue who really did sell seashells by the seashore.

I chalk this up as another example of my theory that there are wonderful unseen things --and people-- all around us. Take the time to find some of them and it just might make your day.

86 year old man earns university diploma

The Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reported today about Mr Halis Beyhanoğlu, who graduated from elementary school in 1938 and just received his second university diploma in September at the age of 86. After being a civil servant for most of his life, he finally received a degree in public adminstration, so he now apparently has the choice of returning to work as the country's oldest bureaucrat, or staying in school as the oldest grad student. He says he wants to be a lecturer someday, so we wish him well (link).

This reminds me of a story a few years ago about an 84-year-old man who enrolled in first grade in Kenya as soon as the country began to provide free universal education, unashamed to sit among six-year-olds so that he might gain what had been deprived for so long. (click here for the rest of that story).

Both stories impact me for the brazenness of these gentlemen to pursue learning beyond society's limits of propriety. A couple years ago I shared on this blog the quote of a woman in her 90s who had not been so brazen: "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."

We --that is, I-- forgo so many endeavors because we are unaware of what is within us, how much endurance we carry, and the power of the victory over society's often silly ideas. So today I remind myself to pick up once again the aspirations that were within me and rekindle them, even if it is with the tiniest of sparks. So what if I'm past 50? Just think where I'll be in 40 years!

Today is Information Overload Awareness Day

August 12, 2009 has been declared the first Information Overload Awareness Day. In honor of the day, I will not provide you with any information.

Oops, that was a bit of information, wasn't it? Sorry.

Here's the link: Information Overload Awareness Day

The blog evolves

I started this blog while I was working full time in a school in Ankara, but now that I've been away from Turkey for a year and went for nearly as long without updating this blog, it's time to make some external changes that reflect internal changes. My previous context kept me thinking mostly on the relationship between knowledge, learning, technology and culture within the confines of school. Since then, I've turned my thinking more to how people -and myself in particular- learn or don't learn, school or no school. 

So "education" has been removed from the title of this blog. I still think of Education (with a capital "E") as one of the most important institutions of society, but my own thoughts now go in other directions enough to make Tryangulation more inclusive. I've tried to express this in more detail in the rewritten About me page which, by the way, is still a draft. Hey, if I'm changing, why shouldn't my About me page be in flux as well?

While at work fixing up my About me page, I spent most of Sunday learning how to add a couple other features to the blog. You might notice the new navigation bar under the banner. That's the row of links that say Try what?, About me, and so on. When I first added the navigation bar I got a row of very unimpressive plain text links, while I was hoping for something a little more visually appealing.

I kept hunting around the Typepad help files, and learned another cool html trick for using images as links to html pages. That means that, for example, the Find me link above is actually a graphic that works as a link. It took some time and frustration, but I won out and now have <img src="http:\\url"> in my little blogger toolkit. I then had to try creating graphics with the right look, which involved another hour or so of trial and error (learning some new functions in my graphics editor), reformatting the blog design to test the new graphics, then going back to the drawing board.

I'm still not sure it's what I want, but at least the font matches the banner, and the horizontal spacing doesn't look too bad. This is all part of the process called "fail forward." A bit of knowledge that had eluded me and even intimidated me a little, after many small failures and victories, is now mine.

And that's what this blog is about.   

A license to teach

Ta dah! By virtue of my credentials from Michigan (from 1978, no less) I just got my Texas Educator Certificate from the State Board for Educator Certification, so that I can now legally impart my knowledge of Spanish to unsuspecting Texas teenagers. In consideration of the SBEC's legitimization of my competence, I will refrain today from any thoughts on Ivan Illich or John Taylor Gatto. 

Just today.

Houstonopathy

This is my latest entry in a new Flickr photo set of funny shots taken with my phone while driving around Houston.

I noticed this next door to the very successful Vietnamese noodle shop where we had lunch today. The door to the Pollo Bravo says "KG Grill & Subs" and the parking sign says "Philly Connection Parking Only." The windows are papered over, but it's impossible to tell who went under first. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Additional photo caption suggestions are welcome. Click here for the rest of the growing Houstonopathy collection.

Casualties of the Interpreter's Paradox

This post is a little longer than most, but it illustrates the emotional and contradictory aspects of my work as a Spanish-English interpreter. My most frequent type of gig is with social workers from Children's Protective Services (CPS) on visits to the homes of monolingual Spanish speakers either to investigate allegations of abuse, or to follow up on families who are "in the system" and receiving counseling or other services from different agencies.

Ideally, an interpreter should be nearly invisible. We are instructed to use the first person when translating, preserve the speaker's tone and register (that is, degrees of emotion and ranges of informal to informal speech), and otherwise create an impression on the listener that matches the speaker's own speech. We try to seat the parties so that they are next to each other and can speak to each other face to face, and we try to imitate the speaker's body language to add to the impression that the principals in the interview are speaking to each other, not to the interpreter. A two-way street, not a traffic circle. That, at least, is the ideal.  

This brittle ideal shattered in an encounter some weeks ago and left me in the middle of a professional and emotional dilemma.

A social worker and I had arranged to meet at an apartment for an unannounced home visit, a follow-up on a series of encounters concerning numerous confirmed cases of neglect and noncompliance in the family in question. My interpreting of the interchange between the social worker and the mother followed our guidelines fairly well until a backup social worker and the police arrived to take the children into protective custody. It was my job to interpret to their mother the bad news.

The mother screamed and begged for another chance, not from the social worker, but from me. Neighbors and their children streamed into the apartment to investigate the commotion, confusing even more the mother's cries and the distraught screams of her children. I had to insist to the mother that the social worker, not I, was in charge and that I was an impartial (!) interpreter. By now on her knees, she alternated between grabbing the social worker's hands and then mine, pleading and in tears. 

At the same time, the policeman was using his own limited Spanish to gather up the children and also to demand that the neighbors leave the premises. In the midst of tussles between the mother and policeman, the children clustering around their resistant mother in the corner and the intervention of the neighbors, it fell on me alone to translate the policeman's orders, the case workers' demands for the mother to sign papers, the mother's screamed arguments to defend her children, and to make whatever efforts were still possible to maintain the key players' comprehension in a deteriorating "speech act."

Melanie Metzger, in her book Sign Language Interpreting, discusses the impersonal, impartial image of the interpreter as a result of the professionalization of interpreting, and how the image of a professional interpreter has included the roles of helper, conduit, communication facilitator, and bilingual, bicultural specialist" (p.22). She asserts that, because interpreters are "faced with the goal of providing access to interaction of which they are not a part, while they are, in fact, physically and interactionally present," their very work creates the Interpreter's Paradox (p.47): communication between two people --even that between the interpreter and an interlocutor-- affects the relationship between them.

This is really the paradox of any profession. You are present, therefore you are involved.

Speaking for one person to another makes you the agent of the speaker, a role that becomes even more complicated when only one of the parties has paid you to be there. Far from the peripheral stance of the impartial interpreter, to be the only bilingual person in such a situation is to be the focal point. The center has moved, and any chance that remains for communication is in you, precisely where it must not be.

Blogging breakfast

The word breakfast has been used so commonly as simply the morning meal, that we forget what it means literally: and end to abstinence. So after nine months of blogging abstinence, I've broken the fast and I'm back.

There were a lot of reasons for not blogging for the first few months before inertia got the best of me. Moving to the US with the prospect of living like suburban Americans set off what my psychologist friend calls "adjustment disorder." We filled our newly disordered lives with moving into the Houston suburb of Katy to be near JoNell's sister, parents, et alia, and relocating both sons into our new, barely 1000 ft² apartment. Soon after that 8000 mile relocation, we were displaced by hurricanes Gustav and Ike before I could start my job search in earnest -- just in time for the economic crash. I'm still looking for full time work.

So am I still tryangulating? As far as keeping a running commentary on schooling versus learning, maybe not, although I haven't stopped thinking about knowledge and learning and life. I also haven't, please God, stopped learning myself. The tag line for this blog might change, and I might experiment with some of the new bells and whistles that Typepad has invented in the interim, but these are cosmetic, not content, changes. In a time of catharsis, learning some nuts and bolts can offer some occupational therapy outlets. It's either that or stringing beads.

I haven't in any way stopped writing, although it's been almost entirely by pen on paper, which creates a very different and sensory relationship with words. I keep a notebook in my pocket all the time now, and I give a few other moe serious looking notebooks plenty of exercise too.I took part in an essay writing seminar last fall as a jump start into a couple ideas I've had for writing projects. I've learned plenty, and learned mostly, once again, how much I didn't know. The essay, as a genre, is just about as broad as that of its big brother, the book.

During the seminar, a preliminary sorting of essay categories helped clear my head somewhat and organize my ideas, in a way like sorting an attic full of books before putting them back on their shelves (which I still dream of doing in real life someday).

I will still blog, and for the same reasons I had years ago. What has changed is that deeper writing has drawn me into deeper thinking. For example, work on our experiences in the Guatemalan mountain village is triggering new memories and new understanding with every draft.

The observation-contemplation-writing cycle still works and expands to bring meaning and resolution into the stories that have remained unfinished for so long. This takes more work than blogging, so I'm starting a collection of pieces which are too long to blog, but will still be accessible to all of you out there in the ether. So, for longer or shorter, I'm out there again too.

Image: JoNell and me at a bed and all day breakfast during our last vacation while living in Turkey.

a meditation for times of packing boxes

"It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos."

                    -Carlos Castaneda, Peruvian author

Our own private continental drift

Last night the movers came to give an estimate for moving our belongings from Ankara to Houston.

The decision to go back to the US for an indefinite period was in the making for quite a while, but we had thought of the move as a hiatus, taking a break after nine years here. We're leaving the school here in Ankara on very good terms (if they can forgive me for leaving) --  good enough in fact that they're holding the door open for us to return. Still, the ideas for a relationship during the interim never took shape, so we're doing the practical thing and moving on.

Today is the last day of school, and I said goodbye to a few of the students. I'll still be at work until mid-August, so I'm not saying goodbye to anyone else just yet. And there is still that thought of coming back in a year. But walking through our home with the movers yesterday, and saying goodbye to students today, reveal small fissures that will soon look like the Rift Valley.

This will be our fourth international move as a family in the last 20 years, so we've become familiar with upheaval: simultaneously feeling expectation and loss, losing the context that once defined you, but gaining the freedom to redefine yourself. Seeing new mountains and canyons appear out of nowhere. Discovering oceans where there used to be land. Redrawing the maps.

Hello, chaos. We meet again.

The best part of the lesson

This week I enjoyed the public performance of a young man I've been tutoring in classical guitar. I've been working with Peter for several months, and though I wish I could take more credit, he is so diligent and motivated that I mostly just coach and encourage.

Still, I was a little surprised when, at the end of our lesson a few weeks ago, he mentioned he might want to perform in his school's spring concert -- in two weeks! I gave him several pieces to look over, and he chose a rondo by Carulli that highlighted some techniques that he had only just mastered. We looked it over and discussed the challenging parts, and Peter took over from there. His performance was great, and it was clear that he was well prepared and totally in the piece.

My approach to music lessons is coming into line with my thinking on most educational endeavors these days: teach how at least as much as you teach what. Give them tools and the skills, not just facts. Teach them how to learn.

To learn to play a musical piece, you have to spot the difficult passages, understand what can go wrong, and plan your attack. If you're not patient with yourself you won't get very far. And no matter how much head knowledge you have about the rhythm and the fingerings, in order to know how, you must practice, practice, practice.

I've made mistakes a few times when I've played passages for Peter, so our lessons (and the embarrassment) have challenged me to push myself harder on the guitar. I have to be honest that whatever I expect from my students I need to expect more from myself. As a teacher, I have to always remember what it's like to learn, and I need to let my students watch me as I learn new skills too.

So, well done Peter, and thanks! The lessons have been good for me too.

Our efforts rewarded

Daily visits to our garden to get encouraging images like these make the whole frustrating project worthwhile.

We've had lots of unseasonal rain in the last few weeks, which has been great for our endangered wildflowers. I have a new Canon PowerShot this year, and our visiting film student son Andy has helped me figure it out. I'm doing better at getting the shots I want, and I'm eager to share them.

I just uploaded a batch to a Flickr photo set, which I've embedded here as a slideshow. (If you are reading this post by email, you will have to visit my blog to see the slideshow.) The photo set on Flickr has more detailed general information about the project, captions for most of the photos,  and links to other related photo sets and blog posts.

So go to the Flickr photo set for the project based learning main course.  This is just the dessert:

P.S. If you're a new email subscriber, you might not have noticed that the highlighted text (like this: Tryangulation) is actually a hyperlink, to make it easier for you to find the websites I mention in my blog posts.