Tryangulation

Messy is beautiful

April, glorious and muddy, was made for children. Or have we forgotten?

Prof. Ziya Selçuk, formerly of the Ministry of Education here, at the closing ceremony of a seminar on multiple intelligences spoke openly about myths that have guided the design of education and proposed a better way. He debunked ideas about quiet, orderly, unison lessons, where everyone sits straight and is taught the same thing at the same time. Orderly isn't always good.

Turks are immaculate, keep spotless homes, and practice fastidious personal hygiene. While I appreciate and admire that, I also remember fondly those Aprils on the Michigan farm where I grew up, digging mud puddle canals and building mud dams, wrestling on the new grass with the dogs, collecting worms and tadpoles. Having a grand old time while my brain quietly created an understanding of life.

Schools --and Turkish moms-- are in a constant battle against chaos, crooked lines, and grass stains. Learning, however, loves a mess. That's why some of my favorite television commercials here are by a laundry detergent company that celebrates mess, mud, and childhood with the motto, "getting dirty is beautiful."  Probably the first time those words have co-occurred in Turkish.

So here's one of those Omo commercials. Let's pray that YouTube stays online long enough for you to enjoy it! I've also done a rough translation of the voice over.

You can't just watch life from a window.
If you don't start out on the road, you'll never arrive.
You can't always sit on the sidelines.
If you don't get out on the field, you'll never hit a goal.
You'll never swim if you don't get wet.
You'll never rise high if you never climb.
If you never live, you'll never learn.
The stains and smudges of the children's world
are the badges of what they have learned and achieved.
Omo - getting dirty is beautiful.

Radikal'in haberi buraya, Omo'nun reklamların hakkında güzel bir yorum için buraya tıklayın.

Free eye patch with each book

In the midst of rampant copy/pasting from web sites directly into book reports, and where the sidewalks are choked by vendors of cheap, badly copied bootleg movies, games and music CDs, I guess this had to be expected.

The newspaper Radikal reports that the book translator and publishing labor unions here have released a report citing that a number of the "100 basic works" of literature recommended to students by the Ministry of Education are pirated translations, while others have been inexplicably abridged or altered to be more ideologically appropriate.

The labor unions investigated 154 books and found that 58 were plagiarized, with translations falsely attributed or not attributed at all. These included 6 of 11 editions of Fathers and Sons by Turgenyev, 6 of 14 editions of London's White Fang, 11 of 25 editions of Les Miserables (including one abridged down to just 80 pages), and 9 out of 14 editions of Crime and Punishment.

Going beyond the ethics of individual purchases of pirated publications is the problem that the Ministry of Education, by creating a reading list that is more required than recommended,  consequently passes on a huge windfall to companies that violate international conventions protecting intellectual property.

Haberin Türkçesini okumak için link üzerine tıklayınız: Radikal-çevrimiçi / Türkiye / MEB tavsiyeli korsan kitap serisi

Photo by eekim.

Stranger than (science) fiction

Writer Arthur C. Clarke died this week at the age of 90.

Farm boys with vivid imaginations tend toward science fiction, and since our tiny school library didn't stock that shelf very well, my sympathetic parents let me sign up for the Science Fiction Book Club. One of the first books I got was Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Clarke at the same time he wrote the screenplay for the movie. The idea that space travel could have a mythic, mystical dimension that transcends technology was just the fuel to fire my imagination. It was maybe five years later that I finally saw the movie, but after reading the book the movie was superfluous.

Most people, even Sir Arthur himself, did not always realize how much his thinking crossed back and forth across the boundary between imagination and reality. In the 1940s he believed that man would reach the moon by the year 2000.  No one else believed back then, even though he overshot the prediction by 30 years.

The Associated Press reported that, "serving in the wartime Royal Air Force, he wrote a 1945 memo about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications. Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched." But now, a geostationary orbit at 36 000 km is called a "Clarke orbit."

Up until the end Clarke explored and imagined. He had just finished reviewing the manuscript of his latest science fiction novel when we passed away, having already authored more than thirty novels and countless short stories and magazine articles.

Such a creative iron man is both an inspiration and an embarrassment to most of us. I wonder how many of us will keep up and keep ahead as we get up into our 60s and 70s. Or will we succumb to creativity fatigue, watching timidly while our students (and our students' students) pass through paradigm shifts that we today cannot imagine? In twenty years, will we still be twittering at SecondLife seminars, left behind in the dust while whole other new minds commune within other new virtual worlds?

Those who cannot remember the past...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the poison gas attack on the city of Halabja, Iraq. If circumstances in my own life had been different, the headlines today probably wouldn't have grabbed my attention, but this event touched us because a dear friend of ours is a survivor of this attack.

The attack was waged by Saddam Hussein against his own citizens in March 1988, as an attempt to suppress the Kurdish resistance in the city. At least 5000 died immediately on exposure to various chemical weapons, and in total possibly 30,000 died of the effects.

On the night before the attack, word leaked somehow to a few people in Halabja, who then tried to help people flee. Our friend, Ameena, a widow with three small children, got the warning and fled up into the mountains to cross into Iran. She told us she could hear the screams as she ran. After some time in Iran, she and her children crossed back into Iraq and resettled in Suleymaniye. More time passed, and after the first Gulf War the allies established a secure area in the north of the country, permitting relief agencies to assist in the reconstruction of villages and infrastructure that had been destroyed by Saddam's army.

Among those relief workers were my wife's parents, who coordinated mobile medical services and the drilling of new water wells to replace those poisoned by the Iraqi army. My mother-in-law hired Ameena to help with housekeeping and to cook for the other employees. A few years later, the Iraqi forces re-entered the region and those who had worked with foreigners suddenly needed to evacuate. Again.

Ameena, her children, and several of her former co-workers arrived together one night in Houston to start their lives over again. JoNell and I were there at the airport to greet them and take them to their new home. We had just moved back to Houston ourselves after I finished my master's program, and had volunteered to sponsor Ameena and also Fouad and Bahar, a couple from the now famous multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk. We spent hundreds of hours on real life lessons in shopping, bill paying and parallel parking.

Our help mattered, but fell very short of what was needed to heal and overcome. We learned from their frustration with hugely generous Americans who responded quickly with furniture and cars and jobs, but never had time to sit and drink tea with people who had practically invented hospitality. So we took the time, and we became richer.

We deeply admire those who rose again from the ashes, especially Ameena. She quickly began to work cleaning houses, and soon built that up into a thriving business. A couple years ago when we went to Houston for a visit, we were amazed when she told us she had bought her own house, and that Fouad found his dream job, driving an 18-wheeler all across the US.

George Santayana wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Memory is elemental to learning. Even painful memories of war and lost homelands have something to teach us, which we in turn must teach to our children. Fouad and Bahar were blessed with their first child, a boy, while in Guam during the processing of their assylum. He was born a US citizen, a sign that the future did not have to be like the past. But also as a sign that the past lives in us as well,  they named him Yad, which means "remember".

Not again!

The evil denizens of cyberspace have once again disturbed the fragile balance of the universe, so we must be punished protected. YouTube is banned again here (click here for my last installment on this ongoing conflict). It's funny how this always seems to happen just before the weekend.

We have noticed some forward thinking this time however, because the screen that announces the ban is now in both Turkish and English. I'm not really sure why, though, because nobody outside Turkey gets to see this (unless people like me share it with you). Click on the image to enlarge and get a free Turkish lesson.

I'm actually not too worried. We here have learned from past experience that YouTube (a.k.a. Google) abhors a missed ad sales opportunity vacuum, so they will soon make the Internet safe for us again. I can't wait to see what censorship safety measures they'll have in place for China during the Olympics.

Maybe they wanted a school with wi-fi

News like this crosp up fairly frequently here. This time, it's a village in far eastern Turkey that for more than a year has waited for a permanent teacher for its 65 children. On a few occasions interim teachers have come but then quickly left again.

I remember cases like this when we were in rural Guatemala, another place where small remote villages had trouble holding onto teachers. Nobody there needed to be convinced of the value of education; the problem is that to be a teacher in such places means miserable pay, difficult living conditions, and little life outside school. To be such a teacher requires a clear calling and exceptional character.

I started wondering more about how many more places in the world are waiting for a teacher, and a quick search turned up this report from UNESCO (and another older report) with the fact that worldwide more than 18 million new teachers must be recruited to keep current student-teacher ratios. Keep in mind that those ratios in the least developed countries are three times the ratios in developed countries, with some countries in Africa counting 50 or even 70 students for each teacher.  To exacerbate the situation, large numbers of these teachers --as many as 50% in Uganda--  have no professional training at all.  Still, there's something to be said for having a little but using it a lot, versus having a lot and using it too little.

When I was in university I volunteered to teach literacy to adults. I remember how nervous and inadequate I felt the first time, totally unaware of how rich I was from lifelong reading, rich far beyond the small cost of teaching another. Later in Guatemala I taught adults who were literate in Spanish how to write and read in their mother tongue (and yes, in that order because if they didn't write, there was nothing to read); I imagined we were like explorers as we sat around a table looking at words that had been written for the first time.

I have felt wonder and humility at the tremendous power that we pass on when we unlock the written word. I then go for long stretches without giving it a thought, until someplace like the village of İpekkuşak draws some notice and makes me once again examine my own calling.

Haberin Türkçesi için buraya tıklayın:
Radikal-çevrimiçi / Türkiye / Kalıcı bir öğretmen bekliyorlar