Tryangulation

China's heroic teachers

I recently wrote about the problem of poorly built schools around the world in reflection on the tragic earthquake in China. I have just now read, and feel I must share with you, some very moving stories I have just read about the teachers in some of those Chinese schools whose love for their students led to the ultimate sacrifice. 

These stories are part of a collection of several stories compiled by Chinese blogger Bob Chen and published on Global Voices Online. Taking a break from grading papers and exams to read these will certainly put our own work, and our relationships with our students, in perspective.

Here's the link:  Global Voices Online » China:国殇; survival stories in QUAKE

Schools around the world are earthquake death traps

A lot of the news about the earthquake this week in China emphasized the tragedy of students trapped and dying in poorly built schools. Unfortunately, outrageously, perversely, school buildings around the world are potential earthquake death traps. Remember Pakistan, where 7000-plus schools killed 17,000 students?

On Thursday the New York Times published an article by Andrew Revkin on this global threat. Revkin writes:

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

Revkin cited an OECD report that states "schools 'routinely collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced." That last bit was a polite way of saying "corruption" -- the allowance of poor design and pathetic construction in exchange for personal favors. Here in Turkey, construction contractors have a nasty habit of fleeing the country when their buildings kill people, so the system apparently works --for them.

The reports by Revkin reminded me again of the latest such tragedy we witnessed here in Turkey. Five years ago this month, an earthquake in the Southeast killed nearly 170 people. Half of those killed were public boarding school students in a single dormitory building (click here for the CNN report). More than 90% of the schools in the area were affected by that quake.

Revkin has also published a background story (click here) and links the Coalition for Global School Safety (COGSS). It's horrible to think about, I know, but is your children's school earthquake/ tornado/ disaster safe? How do you know? As the COGSS Turkey case study says,

It is better to be ten years too early than one day too late.

The photo was taken by Chen Jianli, Xinhua/Reuters, and is titled A rescuer held the hand of  a trapped student at Wudu Primary School. (image link)

Whether we work together or apart

Last week when I shared our little flower's survival of winter and good intentions, I prefaced my post with a line from a Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall. While I was setting up the previous post just now about a local newspaper covering the reappearance of the flowers in the wild, I sorted through my own old photographs, too impatient to hold out for this year's crop of photos.

I found this one, which I had taken a couple miles from where we collected seeds. This image is perfect for another of my favorite Frost poems, The Tuft of Flowers, which, in its own way, is also fitting for all kinds of virtual co-labor.

The poem relates the melancholy of a field worker alone on a beautiful morning, after his co-laborer has moved on:

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,--alone,
`As all must be,' I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

The laborer is then surprised that his unseen partner has  left uncut a  tuft of flowers growing among the hay:

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

Even though his coworker is still out of sight and earshot, this shared beauty unites their spirits and joins their separate tasks into one labor. We too can find things of beauty and leave them for our co-laborers in the next field, or across time.

... and feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

They noticed!

It was encouraging to see in the Today's Zaman online edition that our little flowers --or rather their still wild cousins-- got some press. Last year I didn't go out to the meadow where we collect seeds, so I didn't realize until reading this new article by Zaman that they were down to an area of only 30 square meters. I'm going to use that news article to do some campaigning!

World Malaria Day

My wife brought to my attention just a few hours ago that today is World Malaria Day. I am a malaria survivor, and since my personal ordeal I need to do my part to promote more awareness of this disease.

Each year malaria infects more than half a billion people and kills more than a million. Most of those who die did not have what I had going for me: general good health and adequate body weight prior to the disease, and access to medical care and medicine.

Like so many preventable diseases that continue to ravage the underdeveloped world, malaria is so devastating because of poverty and powerlessness. Access to basic resources and information goes a long way to fighting malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and other killers of millions each year.

For more information, you can see the officlal World Malaria Day website, or this excellent article on Wikipedia. The world needs young people who are inspired to put their knowledge and creativity to work to change the world. We can all help fan the flame.

Something there is that doesn't love a row

Newer readers might not be aware of my contentious school project to protect the beautiful and critically endangered Centaurea tchihattcheffi (yanardöner in Turkish). The natural habitat of this nearly extinct species of the cornflower family is in the vicinity of our school, and for the past few years two of our science teachers and I have bravely fought to propagate seeds on our campus  (click here for photos and text from a happier time).

The flower's habitat is threatened by large scale agriculture, Ankara's urban sprawl and, ironically, its failure to be noticed (behavior which I have commented on before). After first collecting seeds in the wild (natural habitat pix here), we carefully prepared a plot close enough to be observed, but just out of the school bus and recess commotion. For a couple years following, we (that is, I) collected seeds, cleaned and sorted them, and then recruited students and colleagues to get a little dirty in the name of species diversity, sowing the seeds in our gradually increasing garden.

Who would have thought three years ago that we ourselves were a threat to our centaurea's survival?

Like I wrote recently concerning the local aversion to disorder, straight lines and right angles are the norm for flower gardens, and our nonconformist self-seeding weeds were a threat to that system. Our well meaning grounds crews and I were constantly in a race, they to restore order, and I to protect disheveled nature. As soon as I got one crew and crew chief on board with the project, they would be reassigned and new workers would show up, hustling to clean up the mess their predecessors apparently had left behind.

I was away for the entire fall semester this year, a critical time for fending off welldoers. When I returned to school in February I was disheartened to see that orderliness had finally won out: the garden was neatly hoed and planted with shrubs in straight little rows.  The notion of death by PBL crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finally went out to see if anything had survived, and felt the faintest whisper of hope when I found that there were, in fact, a few buds creeping out of the ground. I went back today and saw that quite a few more were popping up at the edges of the plot. I found the newest commander of the gardeners (the 4th in the lifetime of this project) and together we assessed the state of the plot and agreed on a plan and a compromise: once the centaurea were in bloom and easy to spot, workers could go in among them and pull up the other less desirable weeds.

While we were examining the grounds, we found that two had bloomed. I took some quick shots with my mobile phone, as evidence that our project had survived all our best efforts at project based learning.

The title of this post is adapted from the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. The photo is unretouched, taken under heavily overcast skies.

Roughly the equivalent of banning pencils

Another foreigner-in-Turkey blogger just sent me an email with his new url, explaining that Wordpress is now blocked in Turkey. Not just his blog, mind you, but everything that has wordpress in the URL.

My friend's blog is just an innocent bystander caught in a legal dispute over a jailed cult leader and the press both for and against his cause. Since one blog in English that is hosted by Wordpress was deemed inflammatory, a judge decided that it would be best to just block Wordpress than try to get Wordpress to ban a single blogger (although that strategy did work in a similar debacle with YouTube a few months ago.

As the smoke which rises from such virtual blog bonfires becomes visible to more and more, we can expect the court decision to be reversed. How those who are threatened by such freedom will respond can still apparently go either way, but they are bound to learn that there is now no closing the door to borderless blogging.

This certainly puts the my-school-blocks-my-blog woes in perspective.

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iPrices and iWorldviews

When the iPhone came out in late June, the retail price was $599. Now they're going for $399. While that's still out of range for anyone's dreams of a one-iPhone-per-child school project, we can see the gadgets slide down a little closer to the intersection of demand and supply.

According to Steve Jobs, "there will always be people who pay top dollar for the latest electronics but get angry later when the price drops". True, but few expect next generation technologies, and lower prices for the displaced technologies, to hit the market in only three months. Bill Gates seems to always get worse press for his capitalist ventures, but maybe Bill's got some things right about the world that Steve still hasn't learned.

Link: Apple responds to backlash, offers store credit - Wireless World - MSNBC.com

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The war on education is real

Safia Ama Jan risked her life by running an underground school for girls from her home in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. Later, as the director of women’s affairs in Kandahar province, she worked tirelessly to champion efforts to get all Afghan girls back into school, and to provide professional and vocational training for women. She was shot and killed outside her home in Kandahar on 25 September, 2006.

A month ago I wrote about the global war on education, but I used that phrase as a figure of speech, not in reference to a literal war. Since then I read a new report from UNESCO about deliberate and strategic attacks on schools, teachers and students. That report is the source of the quote above.

The report, Education under attack, cites armed attacks on schools, assaults on teachers and students, and forced recruitment of child soldiers, as acts that specifically target institutions of learning; "general daily violence" such as that between students and teachers is excluded.

Specific data from 13 countries is presented, mostly from countries affected by armed conflict. It is reported that "up to 40 per cent of the 77 million or more children in the world who are not attending school can be found in countries affected by conflict".  A summary of the report, with a link to the PDF document, can be found at Eldis.

The world is not flat

I just realized today, after reading a myriad of posts in dozens of blogs reporting on the NECC and BLC conferences in the US that, with one possible exception*, I have never met another "edublogger" face to face.

This week, thanks to some new social networks at Ning, I've met online some Argentine edubloggers (none from Catamarca yet), and one from Guatemala (I'm waiting to see if she's from anywhere near Tacaná). These connections, and the possibilities they hold, amaze me every day. Some would even say the world is getting flat.

Not me.

The world looks flat to some people because they are on the rooftops of high rises, waving and cheering to each other across the gaps; closer to each other than they are to the people on the ground floor of their own buildings.

To carry the metaphor further, visibility at ground level is so bad that people can barely see across the street.

While a relatively few people are becoming ever more connected, there are still millions who never go to school. I have known adults who did not know how to look at a photograph or how to dial a phone. I have known children who died of diarrhea and adults who died of measles. I have known women who didn't know if they were widows, because their government wouldn't tell them. ICT? Information at that level is scarce, communication is paralyzed, and technology is busted.

This isn't about guilt. It's about the frustration I feel that, in spite of all the talk about bridges, the bridges are connecting like to like. I don't want to give up the technology we have, and I don't think we should. Yet at the same time we can't leave so many behind. Sure we need bridges, but we also need elevators, chair lifts, moving sidewalks. We need to connect vertically as well as horizontally.

*a friend who blogs mostly on politics, occasionally on school politics.

What's an iPhone worth?

Last weekend the new iPhones went on sale, and several of the bloggers I read regularly rushed out to be among the first to own one (or two), and publish their reviews. Around the same time I came across a news item from Nigeria about a school that has joined the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC).

The news from Nigeria was that the Galadima Primary School in Abuja was without electricity so students could not power up their new laptops. I visited the OLPC wiki and left a message to follow up on this, and got a nice response from Walter who said, as I expected, that the OLPC is certainly aware of power shortages in the countries where they work, and have strategies for many alternative energy sources, including hand cranks like the ones shown above.

It's not clear to me why the news article did not go one step further to learn about these alternatives, but it was ironic to me to read, just minutes apart, about basic infrastructure problems in Nigeria and then about a new iPhone owner complaining that it takes too many screen taps to call his wife. It's always interesting to me to see what becomes important when the truly important things are taken care of.

The OLPC features what some have called the "$100 laptop", but which actually costs around $175. These are real computers --not toys-- and they have Internet connectivity, built in microphone and camera, a swivel screen, and the capacity to store hundreds of books (click on the image to enlarge).

I'm not saying people definitely should not buy an iPhone, but we can encourage them to consider an opportunity to divert some discretionary funds to change someone else's world. At least check out the photos and student work here before you decide.

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The global war on education

There's plenty of talk about the global war on terror, but several headlines from the last couple of weeks remind me that there is another war going on, over the right of children --and especially girls-- to basic education. Among the major factions are poverty, greed and misogyny. 

The timing of the recent spate of news items was interesting, since several of the education bloggers I read regularly are now off to various conferences  to discuss educational technology, one laptop per child, school 2.0 and reforming education so that children are better prepared for a future we can now only guess at. 

Maybe I'm envious because I don't get to be around edubloggers very much, that I'm the only adult in my school with a flickr account and a feed aggregator, and I miss being among like-minded folk. But then again, my perspective is colored by experiences that many people at those exciting conferences can only imagine: communities where there are no teachers, schools with no books, girls with no future. 

Change needs to happen on both sides of the digital divide. At the same time, it's good for each side to be more aware of the other. This blog is about "triangulating": determining your position by its relation to other known points. Know where you are.

Now for some points to plot on your map:

Child soldiers in Sierra Leone The Star.com "The United Nations-backed war crimes court for Sierra Leone handed down landmark convictions against three men for recruiting and using child soldiers." That's a good start, but there are still more than 300,000 children forced to serve revolutionary armies around the world. 

Girls in Sudan leave school to earn money as prostitutes  IRIN Africa: "As many as three-quarters of female students [in Juba] drop out because of pregnancy, some as young as 11. Money and gifts are often an incentive to have sex with older men as well as age mates."

Girls in Afghanistan under fire for learning EuropaWorld: "A shooting outside a girls' school in Afghanistan's Logar province left two students dead and four people injured, including a teacher. Two gunmen on motorbikes opened fire as teachers and students were leaving Qalai Saeeda girls' school...  UNICEF is concerned that similar incidents -- and the intimidation aimed at stopping families sending girls to school -- could undo some of the educational progress achieved so far."

Corruption diverts billions of dollars from education worldwide Guardian Unlimited: "Bribery and graft in schools and universities is seriously undermining education systems worldwide and costing governments billions of dollars, according to a new report funded by Unesco (full report available at the link).

Photo by Mehmet Seven.

Well done, Andy!

Last night our son Andy graduated from high school!

It's been a long journey since his first classes in Guatemala (in Spanish), then public schools in Michigan and Texas, followed by several years of private tutoring and homeschooling in Ankara, Turkey until the Oasis International School opened three years ago.

Oasis has around 300 students from 35 different countries, and the warm relationships among teachers and students in such diversity created a great environment for all kinds of learning. Reports are that he'll be remembered as a fun and inquiring student, an entertaining classmate, a leader, and a good friend. In case you can't tell from the photo, his parents are nauseatingly proud!  (click to enlarge if  they don't look happy enough)

Andy's lifelong dream has been to enter the film industry, and he was voted by his class as "most likely to win an Oscar". He starts a film making program in Houston this fall, and though we will miss having him around every day, we know he'll put his creativity and unique perspective to good use.

So, without becoming too mushy, we congratulate you, Andy, and wish you much success and many wonderful surprises ahead!

Still another way to look at the world

I'm collecting sites that have interesting ways of depicting data, and came upon Worldmapper, which uses unusual maps to show all kinds of economic and development indicators, such as literacy and life expectancy. The maps are reshaped so that the relative distribution of the indicator value is shown in the relative size of each country. 

I played around with some of the maps showing education indicators and economic development, and was struck by the similarity in the distribution of spending on primary education (first image), secondary education, and research/development (second image).

Countries with high spending in one category tended to also have high spending in the other two categories. Likewise, countries with low investment in education also had low investments in R&D. I also found a lot of similarity with the map showing the distribution of new patents, a good indicator of innovation. Draw your own conclusions, or read more in the Eldis resource page on education and economic growth.

Worldmapper currently has 366 different maps, and they keep adding more. Visit their site, pick a few indicators, and see if you can guess what shape the world is in.

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Withdrawing and reflecting

First of all, thanks to all my faithful readers out there who haven't cut off their subscriptions due to a recent lapse in posts. I actually have plenty of blogworthy material on the back burner, but the times are against me.

I got busy, then took a business  trip to Wales, and then this happened. I knew one of the victims of this horrible crime, and am working through how this affects the meaning of my life here, not only as a foreigner and as an adherent to a minority faith (a minority here anyway), but also as one who has grown from knowing those who are different from me, in my own country as well as in other countries where I have lived.

Don't expect answers any time soon.

A new way to pretend the world is flat

Never mind flat, the world is upside down... or is it?

I've always loved maps, and in particular the different ways they approach the problem of emphasizing certain details like shape, area, topography, or human impact. That's a problem because, in order to emphasize one thing in a map, you have to de-emphasize something else: blatant distortion of reality in order to get a point across.

I've wanted one of these south-up maps ever since I first saw a similar one nearly 30 years ago. I finally gave in to temptation and got one from ODT Maps; it just came in the mail yesterday. I can't wait to think up some assumptions to challenge. 

Click here for more info on unconventional maps and to get your own.

O happy day

My blog is no longer blocked at the school where I work!

For some reason, when we got a new server, all the custom filter settings were lost, so all the computers within reach of students reverted to surfing that was "free" from blogs and other dangerous content. That's being fixed now, little by little.

Along with that good news, I get to end the week with a couple other successes: one of our teachers is taking the plunge to lead a small group of colleagues in a collaborative blogging experiment, and others have requested a beginner blogging workshop, which we'll do soon.

My part of the world is not flat

I'm bemused sometimes by edubloggers in the western world who feel like they are up against immovable resistance to their efforts to integrate technology in their facilitation of student-centered learning. A scan of the news today prompted me to share some short stories from our local front to put things in a different perspective. But first, I'd like to mention something that I first wrote here nearly a year ago:

I’ve been to lots of places in the world, and have yet to find a country, a city, or even a mountain village in Guatemala that was not simultaneously global and local, and simultaneously jihadist (reactionist) and McWorldly (assimilationist). Somebody ought to just ban dichotomies outright so we can try looking at reality instead of black and white caricatures of it.

The same goes for where I am now, in the midst of people who crave change as well as those who worry about what they could lose if things change any more. The following stories are just some examples of the reality we work in, and should not be taken as blanket generalizations.

Foreign language education "unconsitutional"

The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that Prof. Şükrü Akalın, President of the Turkish Language Institute (if I am permitted to translate that organization's name into English) advised the Turkish Parliament's Turkish Language Research Commission that education in foreign languages is contrary to the constitution and detrimental to the fabric of Turkish society. Currently thirteen universities in Turkey deliver some or all of their degree programs in other languages, as well as numerous K-12 schools around the country, in particular schools that offer the International Baccalaureate.

Prof. Akalın added that Turkish entries in the Eurovision Song Contest should not be performed in English, but that ship has already sailed since Turkey won the competition in 2003 with an English language song.

The YouTube Wars

Prof. Akalın was probably pleased last week when, for a few days at least, we lost our access to that Eurovision winning song. In response to a satirical video that was offensive to the memory of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, a Turkish court shut down any access to YouTube.com. The offending video was uploaded supposedly by Greeks wanting to antagonize their neighbors, and it prompted a war of offensive and counter offensive videos and endless (and pointless) comments.  It is against the law here to insult Atatürk, but since the offenders were "out there" somewhere beyond prosecution on the Internet, punishment was levied on Turkish Internet users instead.

The story is even sadder as I remember attending a conference in Athens last fall with several Turkish colleagues, and we were pleasantly surprised at the warmth of so many Greeks, including several who spoke with us in Turkish.

Some children long for a boring day at school

Another recent Radikal story focuses on two of the 170 million child farmworkers worldwide. Fatma, age 12, and her big brother Nevzat  work eight months a year migrating from one region of Turkey to another, working in tobacco, cotton, hazelnut, tea, and sugar beets. Fatma explained to the reporter that she'd like to stay in school and realize her dream of becoming a doctor, but her family desperately needs the money that she and her siblings can earn. During her breaks she reads in the shade of a tractor, and hopes to make it back home to sit in class before school ends for the summer and the family leaves again to work in the cotton fields.

The more things change...

Without putting guilt on anyone, I just wanted to share today how the world isn't always flat, and that there can be dramatic differences from one place to another. Yet in spite of those differences we can have the feeling of "I've seen this before" as we see different outcomes of basic human nature in the face of hope and fear. How we act on our hopes and fears has everything to do with the way we educate --or withhold education from-- our children.

Can we 'unlearn'?

A recent post by Will Richardson on The Steep "Unlearning Curve"  suggests ten things that we need to unlearn as we adapt classrooms and education to global changes. Here are a few items from his manifesto:

• We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in may cases, they can now be our teachers as well.
• We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.
• We need to unlearn the notion that our students don't need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

I've used the word "unlearning" myself, often when suggesting the very same changes as Will. After reading some of the excellent comments on Will's blog I might agree that this is perhaps not the best word for what we want to say. I was gratified that one of the comment writers in fact reminded Will of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, a favorite author of mine, and that might actually enlighten us here.

We sometimes use negative words (unlearn, deschool, deconstruct) in the context of a process that seeks a positive outcome: recognizing where we have learned (and taught?) the wrong thing, and finding new words, thoughts and actions that correct the wrong and move us forward.

Will (and many of his commenters) are basically saying, "This is what's wrong with schooling" but with words that also carry the seeds of the solution. When talking about our spirituality we often use words like "reflect," "repent" and "reconcile" to say that we were on the wrong track, and we want to change. In both cases, this process requires self awareness, humility, and a recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and those around us as we seek what Illich calls conviviality.

Maybe that's not such a new idea, but it's the hard ideas that bear repeating.  Thanks Will.

(By the way, Will is author of an excellent book I just got and have started sharing among our teachers.)

You click, Microsoft gives

Until 31 March 2007, every time you perform a search from Microsoft's Live Search, Microsoft will make a contribution to ninemillion.org for the support of educational programs for refugee youth. 

To encourage Microsoft's generosity without giving up your beloved Firefox, here's how you can add a Live Search plugin to your Firefox search box.

1. Click here to jump directly to the Click4thecause search plugin

2. If that doesn't work, go to the advanced plugin search here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ and type "click for cause" in the search box.

3. Click on the Click4thecause link and the plugin will install automatically.

Clean hands not allowed

A project I've been working on for the last two years has been the cultivation of a critically endangered wildflower that's found only in the vicinity of our school (click here for more background).

Yesterday our Botany Club got in the mud to plant some of the seeds I collected this summer (about 2000!) in some new beds next to our original yanar döner plot. We also took another step toward our long term goal by adding another endemic species, Centaurea cyanocephala. There are 25 endangered wildflowers in our province, so we've got big plans for our big new campus!

The C. cyanocephala are biannuals, so now we'll have to be extra careful to make sure that our well intentioned school gardeners don't clean and hoe the area next summer. To see what we did and how we managed the problem of the biannuals, look at my Flickr set here. Some of the photos have notes attached to them which you can see if you pass your mouse pointer over the image. Maybe this will give some you new ideas for using photographs in your lessons. 

As winter approaches, we'll start work on the the club website, and I'm looking forward to trying some other cool tools with the group.

On the Internet we don't see the wall

Fellow Michigander Doug Hart is helping his IB students with an e-zine project where his students write essays and opinion pieces about their daily life, and then invite IB'ers in other places to comment. Family life, dating, and curfews might have been a little cliché if it weren't for one thing.

The school is in Ramallah, Palestine, where the life of a teenager is anything but a cliché.

The name of the 'zine is Behind the Wall, and their third edition just came out. I was happy to see how so many students from other countries have started participating. But what really impressed me was the acknowledgments page and the long list of schools and individuals in more than a dozen countries who have contributed to this project. 

Congratulations and tebrikler (as we say in Turkish) to Doug and everyone else involved!

Link:  Behind the Wall

60 ways to get it wrong

Back in April I wrote a post titled We're all less biased than everyone else. In the post I mentioned an article from the New York Times which cites research about how frequently people think themselves to be less biased than others.

I have since found on Wikipedia a very interesting List of Cognitive Biases, a  thorough pathology of how we can incorrectly interpret information.  While browsing this shockingly long list of biases, I recognized many immediately, not necessarily by their name (e.g. "the Von Restorff effect") but certainly by the symptoms ("the tendency for an item that 'stands out like a sore thumb' to be more likely to be remembered than other items").

What's more troubling is that not only did I recognize them, but some of them are old friends of mine. How much is there that I don't know because of their interference? Seeing them in this light will maybe make me more aware of them the next time they try to make an appearance.

If you're brave, maybe you can take a look at the list, choose to abolish one of these biases, and see what new things you learn.

Wonderful unseen things

I had meetings to attend in Istanbul, and so late on Friday afternoon I found myself on the public bus that goes from Sarıyer to Taksim. The bus route is mostly on the shoreline drive along the European side of the Bosphorus, and whenever I’m in Istanbul I am fascinated by the scenes along the water.

My colleague Mustafa spotted them, and tried to help me see them, but at first I couldn’t believe it. Then I saw something black arch out of the water, and then another, and then another.

Dolphins.

From the way they played and sometimes leaped out of the water, there was no doubt what they were. They were so unexpected among all the fishing boats, tankers and other traffic in the center of Istanbul, that their presence transformed everything.

The dolphins were swimming in the same direction as we were travelling in the bus, and I was grateful that the congestion on the avenue slowed us down to the same speed so we could watch them longer.

For a quarter of an hour we kept pace, and by watching closely we were able to count at least eight, possibly ten or twelve, of these creatures as they surfaced, turned, and leapt, mostly moving in twos, but occasionally one would circle back as they gradually made their way together toward the Sea of Marmara. Then I noticed something else that was remarkable.

Nobody else on the bus seemed to care.

Mustafa and I were fairly public in our admiration of the dolphins, and I pointed out to several people around me what we were looking at. They would glance, see nothing (since the dolphins spent most of their time below the surface), and go back into a locked stare at the traffic jams ahead.

Afterward, we talked about other rare creatures; Mustafa told how he had seen a wild squirrel once, but had never seen a deer. It intrigued him to hear me tell how squirrels are commonplace back home, and how frequently I saw white tail deer while growing up in rural Michigan. His amazement reminded me of how Michigan could be as exotic and full of wonder to a Turk as his country is to me.

We all experience the mundane, and would sometimes rather nap on the commute home than keep an eye out for miracles. But after our conversation I wondered how the routines of my own life have dulled my perception, and I challenged myself to stay alert for other wonders unseen.

Postdata: Radikal newspaper last year ran a story about a pod of about 14 dolphins residing in the Bosphorus, and published this photo, which is a fair representation of what I saw (click on the image to enlarge).

 

Looking forward to another year with the yanardöner

After many weeks of sharing ideas, making plans, getting expert advice, adjusting our plans, and talking the project up to just about everybody, we have succeeded in making TED's yanardöner wildflower population more permanent and secure.  To get some of the background, see posts (here and here) at this blog's previous address.
We now have officially desginated about 35 sq. meters on the campus for sustainable seed production for aesthetic, experimental and conservation purposes and - just as important - it looks like we have all the key stakeholders on campus buying into the common goal of protecting and enjoying this beautiful and  endangered wildflower in the most sustainable way possible. To see the source of our inspiration, check out my photo set of yanardöner and peygamber çiçeği in their natural habitat on Flickr.
The photos are of our seed planting ceremony on 26 Oct 2005, with special honored guests Mr. Süha Günel, our General Director, and Mrs. Melike Toklucu, our High School Principal. The seeds we planted were collected last summer from flowers growing on campus, and our expanded flower bed incorporates smaller plots where the flowers have already begun to naturalize.
We learned that the seeds need to spend the winter under snow for the best germination, which is why we're planting the seeds now instead of in the spring. I'll keep everyone posted on our progress.