Blackstone's World Without Walls

Speaking of Norms: America and the "Gun Culture"

2012-02-28T21:34:00.001+08:00

The headlines are hardly noteworthy anymore: "...shooting-leaves-1-student-dead-and-4-wounded." Why? Because in America, it happens all the time. School shootings have become a norm.

This time, however, I took note because the tragedy occurred in an Ohio high school. It was easy for me to imagine the cafeteria at 7am just before the shooting took place: kids coming in with thick winter coats and scarves on, having just arrived from homes nearby. Others sitting and talking with their friends, their coats hung on their chairs, hats and gloves piled in front of them, right beside the plates of scrambled eggs and glasses of orange juice. And still other kids dragging themselves up to the cafeteria line, waiting for some grub.

The place would have been lively, maybe with a song from Lady Gaga's latest album playing from one girl's laptop, noise from another being passed ear to ear as a group of boys checked out a new screamo number from a buddy's mp3 player.

Then suddenly one lad, a boy that many people knew as a quiet guy who attended a different local school but who would occasionally stop in Chardon High to visit a friend, stands up, jostles with his coat and takes a pistol from his pocket. He brandishes the weapon for just a second, then takes aim at a group of dudes sitting at the next table over.

Before anyone can process what is happening, BAM! he shoots. BAM BAM!!! he shoots again. A couple boys slump immediately in their seats, slide to the floor. Simultaneously, a heavy rain of screams and cries pours out from all directions. Hell is unleashed.

The scene might seem like that of a Hollywood flick, but it is all too real, all too common: Thanks to a combination of interpersonal issues (bullying and teenage angst) and America's "gun culture," a young problem child turns to violence to express himself. Others end up dead before their time.

For several days, maybe even a week, the media will focus on the school, the victims, the culprit, and the affected families and friends. There will be images of hospitals and funerals and the childhood home of all those involved. For another fortnight, there will be talk throughout Ohio about the shooting up in Chardon. For a year, maybe two, maybe three (until the kids who witnessed this incident have all graduated), there will be a ripple effect throughout scores, maybe hundreds of parent-teacher meetings, counseling sessions, and focused community discussions on the cause of violence in schools and the part that guns play in the equation.

And then, slowly but surely, the focus will turn away, turn to other events, turn to violence with other faces, in other places, while back in Chardon, like in Columbine (Colorado), like in Baton Rouge (Louisiana), like in Blacksburg (Virginia), things will have long returned to "normal."

But what is the norm?

That a shooting can happen anytime, anywhere, and anyone can be a victim. Just wait and see.

For more information, check out this link.

I will never meet the Sentinelese

2012-02-28T20:53:00.002+08:00

Have you ever imagined taking a sailing trip through the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal? I have. And though I hear the scuba diving is excellent and the sunsets are spectacular, my greatest interest is not in the water or on the horizon but for the little known island of North Sentinel. What would it be like to step ashore, I've wondered.

Welcome to a version of the Stone Age, where sure death is the answer. For on that tropical islet, among lush vegetation and behind a ring of white sandy beaches, resides a group of people for whom outsiders are unwelcome, and time has stood still --- meet the legendary Sentinelese.

In visiting North Sentinel, one has to move cautiously. In an article on the website AtlasObscura, it is reported that two fishermen who made the mistake of illegally casting their lines within the shadow of the island were killed in a barrage of arrows. Even the helicopter sent to retrieve the bodies nearly fell prey to the tribesmen's expert shots.

No, the Sentinelese don't take to strangers, and for that and other reasons, their idyllic speck of real estate has been declared off limits by the Indian government, which oversees the area --- and that has been the saving grace of their society and culture.

When we talk about culture, I like the definition set forth by Lederach (1995) in the book Preparing for peace: Conflict transformation across cultures: "Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them" (p. 9).

The social reality for the Sentinelese, we might surmise, is one in which the idea of in group and out group is very strong. If you are one of us, you look like we do, you act like we do, you speak like we do, and you live in the lean-to next door --- then you're safe. If you don't fulfill those criteria --- you are a danger for us, and if you get too close, you will die.

The Sentinelese "perception" of outsiders as dangerous aliens who merit a response of finely-crafted iron-tipped arrows has been corroborated by the experience of other islanders in the Andamans. Without the protection of the Indian government, the Jarawa, the Onde and others have been individually and collectively exploited, their social universes broken apart in much the same way as those of the native Americans from the 17th through 19th centuries: men forced into working as cheap laborers, women conscripted into the invaders' kitchens and beds, and children stripped of their sense of identity as the tsunami of outside influences rushes in.

There are different perspectives, of course, on what action a government can and should take in this case. Some would argue that it is better for the inevitable to happen, that the assimilation/integration of "primitive" groups to the dominant, more "civilized" society is social evolution, a necessary stage in historical development, and the sooner the better. That argument gains strength when one considers, for example, the advantages of giving these people access to modern health care.

Still, as the experience of the Penan in East Malaysia and countless other tribal groups from Borneo to West Papua shows us, forced assimilation -- with reneged upon promises of health care, housing and formal education -- can come at a high price: thwarted expectations, dire new living conditions and cultures in decay.

So India's current policy of enforced protection of the isolation of the Sentinelese stands, and my dream of visiting their island will never be realized. Good for them.

For more information on the culture of various tribes in the Andaman Islands, see this link.

Turning the Table on Study Habits (repost)

2012-01-22T12:25:00.002+08:00

Have you ever wondered whether it's more effective to study in the same place night after night or to change locations frequently? Should you focus on one subject per study session, doing mugging for that physics exam tonight and the project work for prof comm tomorrow, or split things up across various evenings?

This article from The New York Times, "Forget What You Know about Good Study Habits," gets at the heart of study habits in a lucid manner. Invoking recent research while dispelling old myths, author Benedict Carey leads you through the library, into your favorite spot in the student lounge, back to your room in the residence hall and right up to your work desk --- then out again, and provides fine detail on an activity that takes up far too much of your time.

So you better get it right!

2012-01-15T12:48:00.006+08:00

The Kids of Ermita

I was in a taxi Christmas Eve coming from my hotel near Mango Square in Cebu, the second largest city in the Philippines, when my destination took my driver by surprise. "Ermita?" he asked. "Are you buying drugs?"

Huh? "No, I'm not," I responded.

"But Ermita is dangerous," he added.

"I'm visiting a close friend," I added. (My friend is a veritable "princess" of Ermita, the granddaughter of one of Ermita's most infamous personages, a now-deceased "godfather.")

Having been to Ermita nearly half a dozen times before Christmas Eve, I already had many impressions of the neighborhood bisected by a single pulsating thoroughfare: crowded, chaotic, in-your-face, friendly, even welcoming.

Every time I had been driven by "tricycle" into the Ermita barangay (burrough) from one of Cebu City's main bayside arteries, Magallanes Street, I had been warmly welcomed by kids wanting to give me a high-five and voices familiar and unfamiliar alike: "Hey Blackstone! Hello Blackstone!"

And though there were stares and the occasional threatening glare, I never had the impression that Ermita was dangerous, not with so many children out and about. My most immediate reaction was that the place, while teeming with seemingly hundreds of kids of all ages playing games, was like a gigantic pre-school. Of course, Ermita's main drag, more like an alley lined with mostly open drains and an assortment of narrow makeshift wooden and brick homes, stores and other structures, hosted not just kids but also gossiping housewives, preening teenagers, straining videoke singers, street vendors selling everything from local dishes and pastries to bagged soft drinks and bottled water, lounging village elders, and random chickens and ducks (and even the occcasional pig). At various spots along the alley, fires were being tended, with black kettels hung over them being brought to a boil or skewered meats being grilled.

Even with such robust activity though, Ermita was clearly one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Cebu City. This was evident in the rags that many of the residents were wearing and the scrawniness of so many of the kids. On my early visits I had also been struck by the fact that so many babies were being carted about by tiny mothers, some barely into their teenage years. In fact, a recent article bears witness to the pressing social problems confronted by the area's residents, from unemployment and gambling to teenage pregnancy and hunger.

Still, even in the face of such problems, the neighborhood has impressed me as its inhabitants strive to work together to overcome the obvious challenges and create a sense of normalcy within their community. I've seen this in the way that those who have share with those who don't, in the manner that the most fragile young are so often protected and even adopted by the ones who can do so, and in the enduring and seemingly genuine cheerfulness that pervades interactions---and in the smiles.

Of course, as I reflect on my experience with the residents in Ermita, I wonder what I can do to help. The impromptu English lessons that I gave, the tips to the trike drivers and the asundry holiday handouts are not enough.

What could I or any one of us who are in more fortunate positions contribute to a community such as this?

2011-11-13T12:37:00.000+08:00

The Playlist

On a biweekly basis, a musical playlist that I create is given airtime on www.radiomoka.com under the title Daddy Peet Expresso (DPE). Along with each "show," I also write what could be called a blurb, not a description of the music so much as a reflection on any aspect of that particular list that catches my fancy.

For DPE #12, I thought it would be of interest to give listener/readers a chance to get in the kitchen, to see what my playlist creation process might entail. Here's what I wrote for that segment:

If you were considering making a playlist for a party, or for a romantic evening, or even for an afternoon of work, where would you start? Favorite songs? Favorite songs on a particular theme? Songs that elicit a special mood?

And if you were going a create a playlist for a biweekly program, would you go about it in that same way, choosing favorites or hoping to create moods?

I can’t speak with the authority of a world famous deejay, nor can I pretend that my own approach is based on any sort of winning formula. What I can say is that for creating the Daddy Peet Expresso playlist, the process is a bit like the creative process I’ve followed in writing a short story, a poem, and even a song lyric. I get some sound or phrase in my head, process it in my imagination, then it takes flight from there. What the playlist eventually sounds like might not be anything like that initial sound byte, but within the broad songscape there certainly is a genesis, an alpha, the beginning of a storyline, just as there is also a sense of omega, le fin, “leave out all the rest.”

This particular set of songs * was probably initiated when I was lounging in my living room in a condo in Singapore, chilling to the disc Bleu Blanc World, a free CD that accompanied my monthly Songlines magazine injection, and I heard voices from what I later learned was a 6-man vocal ensemble from Marseilles named Lo Cor de La Plana doing a very fine a capella piece called “La Vièlha,” and I thought, “that’s cool,” a nice song to start a set with.

Later, on my iPod, a rhythmic African number that I didn’t recognize but that I guessed came from a CD I’d picked up on a recent visit to the States gnawed at my attention, and I took note: an Angolan singer named Mamukueno doing a piece entitled “Rei de Palhetinho” (The King of Palhetinho). Let’s add that.

Then there was the moment when I was sitting at the kitchen table of my sister’s country home in southern Ohio, surfing the Net and listening for the first time to the last Ray Charles recording, one that included, she said, a series of unlikely duets. Sure enough, the minute I heard the notes of an old familiar tune done with strings, then voices I never imagined side by side, I paused and asked, “Who is that?” The duet was both poignant and arresting, especially when the improbable meant voices as tonally disparate as Ray’s and Willie Nelson’s, on a Sinatra tune with all the orchestral hype --- schmaltzy? Absolutely. Moving? By all means.

And so forth. One by one other tunes joined the ever growing list in my Mac: by popping up in my daily listening experience on the iTunes shuffle (“La Negra Tomasa” by Compay Segunda and Moby’s “Run On” being two), at least one from my daughter’s iPod (“Secrets” by One Republic), one re-enjoyed when I was traipsing out in the world (Marley’s "Exodus”) and a dozen others popping up…..well, as to where and how, that’s very secondary to the music itself.

* By the end of December 2011, all Daddy Peet Expresso playlists will be available for your listening pleasure on the updated and improved radio moka website. Stay tuned ...

2011-10-26T14:24:00.001+08:00

Three Chords and the Truth

On a lazy Sunday afternoon in May 1977, I was taking the escalator up and out of the Universitetskaya metro stop near my Moscow State University student residence, when I saw two fellow American exchange students, both like me from Ohio, coming down the adjacent escalator. Where you guys headed? I recall asking. The girls responded with great excitement: “ Come on, Khlebchick! We’re going to see the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Why don’t you join us?”

They went on to rush an explanation of where the American country band was playing and how the two of them had gotten tickets. I hesitated, not knowing much about Nitty Gritty and not really “into country” at that time. And then my chance had passed; the girls were gone.

A day or so later when Laura and Deb told me about how great the concert was, and how they’d been invited back stage to meet the stars and then to the after-concert party at the US Embassy, I was deflated. (And if my memory serves me correctly, they reported that Comrade Brezhnev, apparently a fan of American roots music, was also in the audience.)

Now I realize what an opportunity I had missed. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band might have had less rock star flash than similarly-influenced units from the era, groups such as The Band and Crosby, Stills and Nash, but its members were seriously talented, and by recording with Maybelle Carter and Vassar Clements on the album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, they not only gave a nod to their “bluegrass” roots but put themselves at the forefront of a “country and western” (C&W) revival.

The C&W appellation actually included a number of early 20^th century folk music styles, from reels and ballads to cowboy songs, accompanied either solo on guitar or with a combination of guitar, violin, harmonica, banjo and dulcimer. The genre in its various forms originally gained popular appeal in the 1920s with recordings by Fiddlin’ John Carson, Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole. By the 1930s groups such as the Skillet Lickers and the Carter Family as well as individuals such as Jimmie Rodgers and Bill Monroe had become widely known through nascent radio broadcasts.

But soon the music had been overshadowed, first by jazz and rhythm and blues, then by pop and rock. By the late 70s, however, country had shed its “western” nomenclature and polished its rough-hewn edges, reinventing itself as it incorporated elements of pop, rock and R&B, gaining audiences far beyond its blue-collar Appalachian and prairie home. Country’s popularity in the USA today is unparalleled. In fact, according to a recent Harris survey, 60% of America’s adult population like country music, supporting 2,600 full-time country radio stations. That’s up 92% since I was in Moscow missing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

This playlist includes a range of songs from beneath the country umbrella, including a bluegrass number by Doc Watson and Bill Monroe (its alleged father), country rock by the likes of Pure Prairie League and the Marshall Tucker Band, pop country by 60s idol Skeeter Davis and Canada’s Cowboy Junkies, and the roots Nashville sound by legends Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline. Of course, there’s also a representative song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

If that was good enough for Comrade Brezhnev, it’s good enough for me. Enjoy!

* This essay was written for the www.radiomoka.com Daddy Peet Expresso program entitled "Three Chords and the Truth": http://www.radiomoka.com/daddypeetexpresso13

2011-10-26T14:17:00.003+08:00

Psychic Elephant & other gems

The range of approaches and results in songwriting never fails to amaze. Just look at a sampling of the titles in this set, on a continuum from the most straightforward to the most enigmatic: Miriam’s Goodbye to Africa, Last Steam Engine Train, Satin Doll, Rio Nights, Como Siento Yo, Luz Negra, The Calling, Camions Sauvages, Kinsiona, Meadows of Dan, Fake Plastic Trees, Psychic Elephant.

Though the meaning behind musical titles can elude discerning listeners, it is often the lyrics – no matter how inventive -- that baffle us to the point of no return, even while bringing us great entertainment in our attempts at deciphering. Over the years how many Beatles’ fans and critics alike have agonized about the meaning of the classic “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” without simply attributing the psychedelic imagery and that of other masterpieces from the period to John Lennon’s well-documented interest in hallucinations?

Another fine example is Thom Yorke’s 2001 classic, “Fake Plastic Trees,” from Radiohead’s The Bends:

Her green plastic watering can / For her fake Chinese rubber plant /
In the fake plastic earth / That she bought from a rubber man / In a town full of rubber plans / To get rid of itself … // It wears her out, it wears her out / It wears her out, it wears her out…

We can speculate on whether Yorke is feeling anger or amusement, whether it’s based on some reality or merely theater of the absurd. But for many listeners, the words of such numbers are irrelevant. It’s all about the mood created, the rhythms, the arrangements. For others, realism in lyrics is a must, and so the lyrics of a song like those by Brazilian songstress Fernanda Takai – even while dramatic to the extreme -- make much needed sense:

Sempre só (Always alone)
Eu vivo procurando alguém (I live searching for someone)

Que sofra como eu também (Who suffers like me)

Mas não consigo achar ninguém (But I don’t succeed in finding anyone)

Sempre só  (Always alone)

E a vida vai seguindo assim (And so life goes)

Não tenho quem tem dó de mim (There’s no one to pity me)
Estou chegando ao fim (Arriving at the end)

A luz negra de um destino cruel  (The black light of a cruel destiny)

Ilumina um teatro sem cor  (Illuminates a theater without color)

Onde estou representando o papel  (Where I play the role)

De palhaço do amor (Of a clown of love)

Whatever your fancy, the beauty of music is that there is a song being created every day that will soothe the soul each one of us. There’s a number in this set for each of us as well. Enjoy!

*This is the blurb for the www.radiomoka.com Daddy Peet Expresso program "Psychic Elephant and other gems": http://www.radiomoka.com/daddypeetexpresso14

2011-10-02T15:28:00.003+08:00

Rastaman Vibration: A Brief Intercultural Encounter

Sunday afternoon at Goodluck Garden. From inside my second story concrete nest, I can see the pool, cool transparent blue. Usually the pool by this time of day is filled with kids and doting parents -- of Singaporean Chinese, Indian or Caucasian background -- splashing each other, floating on rafts or shooting water guns.

But this afternoon is different. There is only one family at the pool today, a mixed family, the wife a Caucasian woman in her early to mid 30s, a pair of cute kids around three or four years old, and nearby, the husband, a very athletic black man with thick dreadlocks dangling to his waist. What makes this scene most unusual is that I have rarely seen any fellow Goodluck Gardeners of African (or African-American? Jamaican? African-European?) origin, much less anyone whose hair seems to be classic Rastafarian.

I call my daughter from her room to see the family, simply because I know she will admire the man's hair, which she does (she also says he is "amazingly buff"). As we then spy on the group from our apartment, discussing the wife's midriff bulge, the man's dreads and the beauty of the couple's kids, we witness an unusual occurrence.

Another couple, seemingly in their 20s and also mixed (she appears Chinese, he Indian), approach the pool area from the area opposite our place, hand in hand with their own kids, twins of two years old or so. They are dressed in bathing suits as well. Suddenly though, when they get a view of the athletic gentleman, they do an about-face, making a hasty retreat.

Then my daughter and I both wonder: What has just happened?

2011-09-04T21:48:00.001+08:00

What to do when your money is on the line?

It's Saturday afternoon, and I receive an email request from a professional acquaintance who directs an English program at an Indonesian university. I'd already heard that he was coming to Singapore for a professional visit with nearly 30 teachers from various Indonesian universities. I'd also heard that he'd made reservations for his group at a local budget hotel. What I didn't expect was what he would ask me to do.

He was in panic mode. According to his missive, he had not been able to secure his reservation because he didn't have a credit card, and the visit was just two weeks away. His request was this: Would I be willing to use my credit card to secure the reservation and pay up front for 15 hotel rooms? The tab would be in the thousands of dollars, but he assured me (and I believed him) that as soon as he received the bill from me he would have the money wired to my account.

Generally, I would not have even considered getting involved. But the fellow making the request was a person who had helped organize for me a workshop tour of various Indon universities. He had also invited me to do a presentation skills workshop at his school. In addition, he had made it possible for me to get a book chapter published, and we had also collaborated in project work. In a very real sense, I owed him.

At the same time, I was wary of putting so much cash up front. What would happen if something went awry? I really wanted to avoid a situation that tested our professional friendship.

So how to avoid a conflict in this situation?

I will never meet the Sentinelese (repost)

2011-08-26T08:25:00.002+08:00

So India's current policy of enforced protection of the isolation of the Sentinelese stands, and my dream of visiting their island will never be realized. Good for them.

For more information on the culture of various tribes in the Andaman Islands, see this link.

2011-08-17T23:02:00.002+08:00

Nonverbal versus Verbal Communication: A False Dichotomy?

Imagine this scenario: It's dark in Cebu City, 7:45pm. On Mango Avenue sits a well-lit bookstore. On the shop front, a sign reads 10am-8pm.

Two potential customers arrive at the front door. They are obviously not locals, and perhaps are not aware of the norms of the store. They try to enter the main door but find it locked.

Inside the shop, a store security man stands at attention as a cashier rings up a final customer. Outside, the two would-be customers stand in surprise when they note that the door has already been locked nearly 15 minutes before the end of the opening hours stated in the language of the sign.

One of these potential shoppers becomes angry. Without a word, he waves at the security guard, points at the shop sign, grimaces, then tugs at the door handle. The guard looks on but doesn't move. The would be customer throws up his hands in frustration, looks directly at the guard and points yet again at the sign, and when he receives no response other than an indifferent look from the guard, he turns and walks away.

What has just happened in this mainly nonverbal exchange? Why is there a problem?

2011-08-16T09:05:00.004+08:00

The Imaginary Jukebox

9 to 5? Work deadlines? Doctor bills? Mortgage payment? Taxes?

Those are all burdens that we adults have to endure. Just for a second, wouldn’t it be nice to be a kid again? How would that feel?

Of course, it wasn’t a painless experience, but when I remember how carefree I felt at particular times during my childhood, especially during my teenage years, circa 1972, and most especially when I was hanging out on my beach towel at the swimming pool in Thornville, Ohio, on lazy summer afternoons, a big smile comes to my face.

Part of that pleasure was retiring to the pool for a swim. Another part was ogling the young ladies. But just as important was hearing the music blasting away from the pool jukebox, that oversized, coin-operated phonograph that kept the pool crowd swinging.

A quick Google search shows that the “juke” in jukebox derives from “juke joint,” the often rowdy drinking and dancing establishments that catered to workers on plantations in the southern states of the US in the early 20^th Century. (The word “juke” is apparently from the Gullah (Georgian Sea Island) word “joog,” meaning wicked.) By the middle of the 1940s, 75% of all the records produced in America – and that was millions of records -- found their home in a jukebox.

The jukebox at the Thornville Pool stood right at the front of the concession stand, opposite the wading pool. For a quarter (25 cents), you could choose 3 songs from the 100 or so titles that were presented on a menu within the display case top. Some of my friends would probably spend 50 cents every time they visited the pool, enough for 6 songs. If a guy had a buck and a half, he could line up 18 songs --- and if my memory of 1972 serves me correctly, they might have included anything from War’s recent release “Cisco Kid” to the oldie but goodie “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters. Of course, there were also hits by hugely popular groups such as The Doors and Chicago and by cool singers like Cher and Marvin Gaye.

For some of us though, it was about more than music; the jukebox at the pool was where we learned so much about hipness, about style. Listen to the words and catch the vibe from songs like the “Theme from Shaft” by Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to see what I mean.

Tune in to Daddy Peet Expresso on www.radiomoka.com on Saturday night August 20/21 midnight and Sunday morning at 11am for this program.

2011-07-17T20:13:00.007+08:00

Help Me

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The theme of love gets revisited by each of us over and over in our lives. We lap it up as babies, demand it as small kids, chase after it in the dark when we’re school children, and fret over it from adolescence forward. Still, it’s an emotion that can’t be easily defined, although many songwriters have tried.

Whether our love is directed at a supreme being or a fragile human, whether it is carnal or spiritual, we pace our lives within its parameters. It’s noteworthy, too, that since the advent of mass media such as radio, songs of love have become commodities that seem to reinforce our sensitivities.

Chicago has been a hotbed of stories sung about love since its studios started recording crooners and its radio stations began to compete in the “broadcast boom” at about the same time, early in the Jazz Age. In fact, one of the very first commercial broadcast stations in America, WLS (standing for World’s Largest Store), which was inaugurated in April 1924 by Sears-Roebuck Company principally as a means of advertising its commercial wares, proved to be a long-lasting outlet of music and other information.

I got my own taste of Chicago radio in the early 1970s when each night I would tune the radio beside my bed to WLS. One of the groups I would hear there was the Chi-Lites. Their soul hit from 1972, “Oh Girl,” resonated deeply for a small-town Ohio boy, searching for answers to conflicting feelings:

"Oh girl/I'd be in trouble if you left me now/'Cause I don't know where to look for love/I just don't know how”; “I could save myself a lot of useless tears/Girl I've got to get away from here"; "Better be on my way, I can't stay here….”

Sonny Boy Williamson’s classic blues, “Help Me,” recorded in Chicago in 1963, hints at a similar dilemma:

“You got to help me/ I can't do it all by myself/ You got to help me, baby/ I can't do it all by myself/ You know if you don't help me, darling/I'll have to find myself somebody else….”

Perhaps Nietzsche, whose words inspired an opera by Wagner, but – to my knowledge - have not been set within many love songs, said it best when he commented that “a pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.”

Whatever the case, it’s the songs that most often get us through.

(abridged from a Daddy Peet Expresso program of the same name)

2011-07-17T19:46:00.004+08:00

Blues the Healer

Are the blues a cultural universal? We all suffer disappointment, loss and ultimately, the sort of pain from harsh reality that provides the basis of “having the blues.” And if that is true, do we solve our problems in similar ways? More aptly, does music similar to the blues bubble to the surface from geographical areas besides the Mississippi delta, and give us a sense of “get over it”?

Music writers are quick to connect the structural dots, of course, not just between African beats, work songs, field hollers, spirituals and the genesis of the blues, but also between gypsy cante and flamenco, and between sailor songs and Portuguese fado. That sort of etymological discussion can take place across the globe when it comes to all sorts of traditional music.

My own understanding of the blues in musical terms got a serious shot in the arm when, in the late 1980s, I was living in Petaling Jaya (PJ), a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia, and more importantly, hanging out in various corners of the vibrant local music scene. The live music there in particular was strongly influenced by an American and British invasion, with numerous Filipino bands well established at major hotels, and small bars like All That Jazz, The Longhorn, and Traffic Lights featuring groups that eased through jazz standards, country rock and pop/hard rock respectively.

On the bar circuit at the time was one group of long-haired local talents called The Blues Gang, whose high octave repertoire included a fistful of rock-based originals sung in Malay along with numerous well rendered tunes from the American-British blues rock songbook, from the likes of Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton and Cream. Having been a rock head in my youth back in the US, I was quick to get on the party train a la the Blues Gang in Kuala L’impur (Andre Gide’s words, not mine).

In the same era I also frequented a hole-in-the-wall stereo shop in the now defunct Asia Jaya mall. There my buddy Kim, the well-informed and UK-refined Chinese owner, sold state of the art audio equipment while possessing what must have been the best collection in the Klang Valley of recordings on the new CD format, which he would happily expound upon and then loan out for a small fee. It was on Kim’s recommendation that I borrowed the Deutsche Grammophone recording of the San Francisco Symphony doing Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story,” and a piece I had never heard before, William Russo’s “Street Music: A Blues Concerto.”

A blues concerto, on blues harp no less? Completely plausible, I remember thinking. Not long before listening to and being blown away by Russo’s ode to the blues, I’d been in Cee Jay’s in central KL, listening to the Blues Gang cranking out a fast-paced rocker together with local harp maestro Rafique Rashid wailing away, when I suddenly realized the power of that tiny ten-holed instrument, bent to tasteful effect with a bout of the blues.

Having the blues is undoubtedly a cultural universal. Being a fan of blues perhaps less so. But until you've given listening to the blues a chance, whether on CD or in a bar or on the back porch, don't judge. You don't know what you're missing.

2011-05-24T16:23:00.004+08:00

Primal Rhythm

My buddy John, a well-known corporate trainer and formidable percussionist in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has an apartment within a stone’s throw of KL’s largest Chinese temple, Tian Hou. Often times at night you can hear music emanating from the depths of the layered ornate structure, whether live accompaniment for a celebratory lion dance or prerecorded Hong Kong pop played for a wedding party. In fact, I’ve even heard bhangra blasting from the temple’s expansive basement hall, the pulse measuring a Punjabi celebration.

But the rhythms that accompany my friend John’s life start at home. You walk from ground level gardens into his family’s dining room area and, standing by his teak table, look on the two facing walls, and you see three long shelves of drums and various noisemakers, from painted djembes, bongos, dumbeks, ashiko, congas, a tabla, a surdo, a thumpu, a mrdangam, djun-djun, tambor and an ancient talking drum from Sarawak, to assorted bells and bangers. And that’s just the start.

Go to John’s back kitchen, and open a large closet and you’ll find nearly a dozen sets of nesting drums, more and more and more djembes, half a dozen plastic tubs filled with percussive toys, and other assorted things to bang on ---stacked floor to ceiling. What’s this mad scene all about?

Rhythm. Besides enjoying a good round of sounds himself, John directs drum circles and various percussive workshops, often under the banner of corporate team building but many times orchestrating for yet another of a multitude of Klang Valley community groups (I’ve happily participated in a few, including one for charity at Montfort Boys’ Town and another for the Parkinson Center.) Regularly, he packs his car with his tom toms and goes off for a rousing day of drumming, thrilling everyone who gets to bang on something and, like the Pied Piper of drums, moving anyone whose heart throbs within earshot. What’s that all about, John?

Rhythm.

Need I say more? Not really. Get the rhythm. Just listen to music from Lester Young and Teddy Wilson’s “All of Me” to Tony Allen’s “Homecookin’,” from Salif Keita’s “Soro” to Suba’s “Tantos Desejos,” plug into the beats, and tell me, which way do you move? Up and down? From side to side? Do you move your hips back and forth, head bobbin’ one way and arms flayin’ a dozen others?

Even if the change is just in your heart beat, you got the rhythm, baby, that deep primal rhythm.

Check out Daddy Peet Expresso #5, Primal Rhythms, here.

2011-03-31T21:47:00.008+08:00

Compared to What?

In the early 1990s I was teaching at a university in Akita prefecture, northern Japan, and I produced a concert at the school that included famed jazz pianist Les McCann as the headlining act. McCann and his Magic Band were in the area to play a couple gigs at local jazz clubs, and using a mama-san connection in the jazz scene, I’d secured their participation in my own mini-music festival. Of course, I really had no idea what to expect.

The night of the gig, I was really sweating it. A couple local bands and several student groups opened the evening in the 4th floor auditorium of the uni’s main admin building. It was a major effort to set up the place since there was no elevator; all the sound equipment had to be hauled up the seemingly endless staircase. But the real nail-biter was waiting for Les and his band. By 8pm I was freaking out, while certain members of the audience who had paid a steep ticket price were also restless since there was no word of the band's arrival. Still, by landline (pre-cellphones) the mama-san assured me that the band would show.

Sure enough, just as the act that preceded the Magic Band got onto the stage, a couple vehicles carrying Les and his boys pulled up into the parking lot of the school's main building. When I heard they had arrived (I had sentries posted awaiting the arrival!), I rushed down the four flights of stairs. There were half a dozen players piled into a van, and Les seated in an accompanying car. I greeted them at the building door. The Man himself, by 1992 a bearded, sumo-sized pianist, seemingly twice the size he'd been when he recorded a startling set at the Montreux Jazz Festival twenty years earlier, was faintly pleasant but a bit standoffish. And I can still remember how his eyebrows raised at my announcement that there was no elevator up to the auditorium.

That was all understandable, too, since Les had already played an afternoon gig, and he probably weighed in the neighborhood of 120 kilos. Anyone could have guessed that exhaustion would come easy for a fellow his size. By the time we reached the third floor, the towel around his neck was soaked in sweat, and by the fourth, he was wheezing dangerously. Heart attack city?

As a sort of icebreaker, I told Les I had cold water for him in my office. He looked at me like all he wanted to do was lay down and die. What happened next though was even more than I might have imagined.

Since my office was on the 4th floor, I had arranged it as a makeshift dressing room, with drinks and a swivel office chair installed for Les to relax in. As we got to my door, the poor headliner looked white as a sheet. Just inside, and with the door closed behind him, he went straight for the comfort of the chair, like a man on a mission --- apparently without a thought—when BAM! All 200+ pounds crashed butt-first to the floor.

Sure enough, the chair's wheels had given way, and it rolled backwards as Les rocked like a boulder off a ledge.

“Sorry, Les,” I feebly offered, then ran calling some of the guys to help drag the big man back up to his feet. He was clearly shaken, but to his credit, instead of complaining, he had a good laugh.

Shortly after that tumble, Les McCann and his Magic Band went on stage and blew the roof off the auditorium. The night, like the song that has made Les most famous, was incomparable!

Check out Les McCann's song and others on the radio program Daddy Peet Expresso, on www.radiomoka.com

2011-03-31T20:35:00.011+08:00

Journey of the Heart

A musical journey is very similar to a physical one in that it is also a journey of the heart. My first one got a boost during my teenage years in a white clapboard farmhouse back a long lane tucked amidst the hills of southern Ohio. I had a well-to-do friend, Tommy J, whose parents raced horses, and they followed their animals south when winter came to the Midwest. That meant that my buddy often found himself at home alone during the winter months. When I’d visit on weekends, we pretty much had the farm to ourselves, but we were never lonely thanks to his stereo system and eclectic record collection. And it was from there, amongst the Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Uriah Heap and other English rock albums, that he revealed an LP (long play) record called Transa, and a song in particular, "It's a Long Way," that gave me, his wayward friend, a new and exciting sense of direction, one that I would never forget:

Woke up this morning

Singing an old, old Beatles song

We’re not that strong, my lord

You know we ain’t that strong

I hear my voice among others

In the break of day

Hey, brothers, Say, brothers

It’s a long long long long way

We teenage boys liked our music loud, but I remember first listening to Caetano Veloso’s uptempo ballad at low volume. It got played somewhere amongst Tommy’s stories of his year abroad in Brazil. Along with those images of a life in the far off tropics, I was captivated by Caetano Veloso’s suave voice and strong sense of melody, along with the vibrant rhythms and evocative lyrics, which were a mix of English and Portuguese. It resonated of a world distant from my rural Ohio experience.

Os olhos da cobra verde

Hoje foi que arreparei

Se arreparasse a mais tempo

Nao amava quem amei

Arrenego de quem diz

Que o nosso amor se acabou

Ele agora esta mais firme

Do que quando comecou

It's a long road

Agua com areia brinca na beira do mar

Agua passa e a areia fica no lugar

E se nao tivesse o amor

E se nao tivesse essa dor

E se nao tivesse sofrer

E se nao tivesse chorar

E se nao tivesse o amor

No Abaeto tem uma lagoa escura

Arrodeada de areia branca

With that song in my head, I have since traveled the globe. I even spent three years living in Lisbon, Portugal, and while there, learned to love the songs of a number of fine Brazilian singers, including Chico Buarque, Gal Costa, Milton Nascimento, and one of my very favorites, Caetano Veloso's sister, Maria Bethania. I also became a fan of Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco and lots of other musical styles I'd never heard of earlier. Ironically, it was while living in Lisbon that I also started a journey of discovery of music from America, for it was there that a friend turned me on to American jazz and blues.

Ever since that experience, new horizons -- whether in the deserts of Rajastan or the mountains of the Ainu, in the tropical rain forests or the turquoise seas of Southeast Asia -- have tugged methodically at my heart strings. The soundtrack to such a journey can be rich and varied.

I invariably advise students to seek out and listen to music other than the songs played on radio or advertised on TV because generally much of what gets heavy media airplay is what is being proffered and sold by large recording companies. This is not to say that music of that sort isn't good; it's just that what the typical deejay is going to spin is what his station's (or network's) musical programmer will mandate. Often times, that's music which can easily be called mainstream. It's called such, first, because it is often made by recognizable artists, and secondly, because it usually reflects certain production values (smooth and easy, classic oldies, and the like).

Luckily, there is so much more to music than what the stations deem as popular, and there is much more being made by incredible musicians than the stuff that a station considers the sort that will make advertisers happy.

In fact, everywhere there are remarkable musicians, singers and composers with so much to say. Give that local music from anywhere a chance, and what you will discover will often be as astounding as another new vista encountered on a hike through the local hills.

Bon voyage!

Caetano Veloso - It's A Long Way

Found at abmp3 search engine

2011-01-18T21:48:00.020+08:00

Lessons where you least expect them

Invited to lead workshops on presentations skills at a university in Jember, East Java, in December 2010, I learned some important lessons, first and foremost on the value of patience when dealing within a cultural milieu different from one's own.

Here's a clear example. On the Saturday before the university workshops, I was invited by my university host, an English teacher/program director with whom I'd worked on several projects earlier, including a lecture tour at universities in the same Indonesian provinces the previous September, to go east to the neighboring province to visit his wife's kampong. On Sunday the plan was to stop by a nearby national park famous for its pristine beach.

The four-hour car journey from Jember to Banyuwangi was very enjoyable. We drove through the forested Gumitir mountain region, stopped at a cafe selling locally-grown coffee and then wound our way into the flat plain opening to the Strait of Bali. Expecting to simply ride in my friend's car for four or five hours, I wore shorts and a T-shirt, my usual style in the tropical heat. I had even asked my friend if these clothes were appropriate, and he'd given me the thumbs up. I started to doubt this though when he asked me if I would mind "dropping in" at the Islamic school where his wife teaches; I pointed out that I was dressed very informally. He said it didn't matter, that we would just be stopping in for a short while.

Around noon we arrived at the school, where I could see that the Saturday morning session had just ended. The street in front of the school was filled with the motorbikes of parents come to pick up their kids; the inner courtyard was filled with male students in uniform slacks and dress shirts and girls in long baju and head scarves gathering their bags in a scurry out of the classrooms.

Our car was met by the very well spoken head English teacher, and my host and I were led into the principal's office. There on a low-set wooden table fresh cut fruits and colorful rice cakes had been set out, in anticipation of our visit. This should have been my first clue that something more formal in nature was planned. I didn't have to wait long for the missing information. After chatting with the school principal, vice principal and head teacher for 15 minutes, I was asked if I wanted to see the classroom where I'd be teaching the lesson.

The lesson? Teaching? I would be teaching?

This was news to me, and with a tone that must have seemed slightly incredulous, I asked what I would be teaching. The head teacher explained that it was simple: just give a lecture to motivate the students for their English study. And by the way, he added, many of the teachers had wondered if they could attend "the lesson" and observe as well. Hopefully that was acceptable, he said. I tried my best to suppress the shock.

How long should I lecture? I then asked. "An hour will be good" was the nonchalant answer.

Over the years I have traveled quite a bit, I've taught in myriad situations, and I've learned to expected the unexpected. I have to admit though, in this case even the well seasoned itinerant teacher in me was caught off-guard. Ok---an hour lesson, my mind raced. Won't this be an experience.

Arriving at the appointed classroom, I did a double take: the room was filled with 35 or 40 students, age 15 or so, and at least a dozen teachers. There were also all shapes and sizes of brown faces looking in the slatted windows beside the open door. I suddenly felt like a zoo animal on display. A few "hellos" to students and teachers and I discovered that many members of my prospective class spoke little to no English. I had a job to do though with no time to worry about language skills.

Surveying the big wooden desk on the raised dais at the front of the class and the neat rows of chairs and desks crowding the classroom space, I made a quick decision: the environment needed to be crafted to my liking. In short, I needed to take some control. Without hesitating, I gesticulated to the group, signaling that I wanted the desks moved out of rows and into groups of four, with pairs facing each other, perpendicular to the front of the class. Then I wrote in broad strokes on the whiteboard:

0 = Zero English 1= Some English
2= Good English 3= Great English.

"If you have no English, 0, move to the front corner of the classroom, by the door," I said, asking my host to interpret. " A bit of English, move to that back corner. Good English, back in the opposite corner. And if you have great English, move up here," I said, pointing to the corner opposite the door.

My idea was simple. I would first divide the mass into groups, initially by English level, then into small foursomes, with at least one decent English speaker (including my host and the head teacher!) in every combo. That strategy worked better than expected, with everyone cheerfully self selecting a spot in one of the room's four corners. I was relieved to see that the entire group was almost evenly divided between those who saw themselves as having some English and those who felt they had none. I then assigned each person to a group of four desks, trying my best to mix in participants of different skill levels, and at the same time, the school teachers -- most of whom felt they had no English -- with their own students. The groups squawked with excitement when they realized they were being mixed!

Next, I wrote a selection of key introductory phrases on the whiteboard. From there the lesson proceeded into a sequence of my modeling stock phrases and then asking some member of each foursome to repeat the phrase: "My name is Batu Hitam (Blackstone). What's your name?"

"My name is Asep."

"Oh, his name is Asep. Hi, Asep. Now say this: My name is Asep. What's your name?"

"My name is Asep. What's your name."

"My name is Batu Hitam. Pleased to meet you."

And off we went, into a fast hour of English conversation. Each class group willingly followed the lead of the silly old (and sweating) American teacher dancing at the front of the classroom, with each person learning all their group member's names in simple introductions as well as practicing possessive pronouns "my, your, his, her," reporting information collected, and spouting the answers to these follow up questions: "What's your hobby? What's her hobby? What's his hobby?"

"My hobby is fishing. Her hobby is reading. His hobby is football. What's your hobby?"

The students and teachers of the junior high school must have been amused by the process. By the end of the hour they were shouting with excitement, revealing English skills most of them didn't realize they had and exhibiting social interaction that undoubtedly was very rare between pupils and teachers within the confines of the typical Islamic institution in East Java.

"High five!" I offered to happy kids who did their part to make the lesson rewarding.

"High ten!" I shouted, slapping hands in tandem with the teacher in the white scarf who had spoken English for maybe the first time in her life.

And what was my take away point from all of this? I'd like to let you decide the answer to that question!

2010-12-05T14:57:00.006+08:00

A New Culture of Teaching and Learning

What did Mark Twain say was the most difficult month of the year?

December, followed closely by September, March, May, November, January, April, June, October, July, etc.....in short, all of them. His point was that there is no time that is really "easy."

I think of this anecdote as I confront the end of another semester at my university and a new one looms just around the corner, as my youngest daughter Billie ends another school year and is about to embark on a new one, and as the years keep roaring on --- 2010 soon to be replaced by 2011.

Then I reflect on my many roles, as an educator, father, mentor, learner, guide, facilitator, presenter, listener, workshop participant, blogger, Facebook friend, traveler.....it all becomes a bit overwhelming at times.

That's why it is a great pleasure to find a video/lecture such as this one. In the video, Philip Tae, a professor of physics at Northwestern University, offers insights on the age-old problem of how to best make public education effective. Grades, cramped classrooms, fixed desks, giant lectures, antiquated notions of what it means to teach and learn, all of these are creatively addressed by Dr. Tae, presented in a way that is as innovative as his latest skateboard trick. Check it out and see what I mean!

Dr. Tae — Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning from Dr. Tae on Vimeo.

The Creative Spark

2010-10-22T20:05:00.014+08:00

The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.

*****************************************************************************

What is creativity? How is it expressed in our thinking? How vital is it in our lives?

To what degree does the education system we have gone through and the one we send our children through --- be that in the US, Singapore, the UK, China or anywhere else -- help enhance creativity? Can creativity even be taught and learned?

These are all questions that Ken Robinson addresses in this short 2006 lecture from the now famous TED series.

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com

If you liked that, please watch Robinson's second TED lecture from May of this year entitled Bring on the Learning Revolution!

I

2010-10-14T21:19:00.014+08:00

The Proverbial Lead Balloon

I admit, I have always been a bit naive, and perhaps a bit overambitious. I remember that when I was five or six, I was lingering down by the barn on my Grandpa Elder's farm, contriving a way to catch one of the cute piglets that was in the feedlot (in the shadow of its grumpy 200 kilo mother sow) so as to keep it as my own. I had to have my own pig! And now I recall how I had also brought my small tricycle to the feedlot gate and set it there as a corner post for my would-be pen, along with a hodgepodge of boards, a watering can and some string.

Oh yeah, sure, I was really gonna catch that piglet and keep it fenced within that crude set up.

Several years later, I had another ambitious plan: to start my own museum. In my hometown of Thornville, Ohio, Grandpa Blackstone had a hardware store. On the second floor of the stately 19th-century building, there was an empty room, overlooking the front sidewalk and the village's main street. There was also a staircase that ran down to the street from my would-be museum space.

What a perfect place, I imagined, to display my various collections of heirlooms and collectibles, including some Native American artifacts, old jars and jugs, a minor coin collection, and souvenirs from multiple family trips to Canada. So I worked relentlessly at cleaning that empty room; I convinced my patient great-grandfather to build display tables, which I then set up, and I set out all of my treasures with carefully measured attention.

In all my effort though, I had missed one important point: Why would anyone besides my grandpa, my great-grandfather and my bullied younger siblings ever make the effort to walk up those dusty stair to visit a lackluster museum with my odds and ends?

I had similar big ideas in a couple other stages of my life, with similar results. The proverbial lead balloons.

That's a bit how I now feel about having my students utilize the NUS Wikispace for their group research projects. It's great for everyone to be able to view and comment on each other's work. It's useful for a tutor to be able to access, assess, and admire student achievements. It's a good idea having students archive their group work in a common, mutually-accesible space. And so there it is on the NUS Wiki Dashboard, Professional Communication BB, neatly available for student use.

What I discovered today though in reviewing student work was that several research teams had set up their own wiki space right there on NUS Wiki but not in "my" space. Others had understandably used a space more familiar or workable to them, like Google Docs.

And so, I faced a dilemma. Castigate those who had created alternatives that were more suitable for their own research team's needs or be amenable to the deviation from my plan and adapt to the "beautiful" reality of the situation.

Being more realistic and practical than I am either naive or ambitious, I decided I could adapt, that I should accept the learning apparent as students developed a system that worked best for them.

The pigpen idea I gave up when I suddenly realized that separating the tiny piglet from its gargantuan mother was going to be a life-threatening affair. The museum idea I dumped after my first visitors walked up and back down the hardware store stairs *without* making any entrance fee contributions to my coffee can at the door.

And what of NUS Wiki? Why persist in forcing students who had set up other wiki sites for archiving their research project documents to export them to my long-established space just for the sake of ceremony?

Well, I think you know the answer already.

I will be happy to review my students' materials on the site they have created, wherever that might be. That's more practical and realistic than transferring data just for the sake of some prescribed scenario.

Adaptation is survival.

2010-10-14T19:57:00.003+08:00

The Mock Interview (revisited)

What sort of jobs have I interviewed for? Here's a partial list:

U.S. National Security Agency country/regional analyst

People Airlines (now defunct) flight attendant

retail store assistant manager

Those are jobs that I applied for, got interviewed for, and was not hired for. (Thank god!) During my university studies, I never even heard of a course such as the one I now teach, a communication skills course in which a segment is dedicated to assisting/familiarizing students with resume and application letter writing, and then with preparing for and performing at a job interview. If I'd had such a course, who knows where I would be today....

Where was I today? In class facilitating mock interviews. In each class there were several interview teams. Each team of three or four students read and evaluated the application materials that another team's individual members had prepared, peer reviewed and revised in advance. The evaluating team, much like a hiring committee or HR group, would rank those individuals from the other team based on the quality of the materials in relation to a specific job, internship or graduate program application and then begin the interview process.

The interview process entailed setting up the room in office-like quadrants, with one team per corner behind a row of desks. In their respective stations each team created their first set of interview questions, set for the peer they'd ranked #1. During a point in the question preparation process, each team then lost one of its members, that being the person who was ranked as having the best set of materials. She or he, along with the top ranked person from each of the other teams, was directed into the corridor, there to wait until being called upon by the peer team for an interview of approximately 10-15 minutes.

Back in the classroom, each team crafted its questions, and each individual adopted a particular stance, whether friendly and smiling HR person, impatient and brusque interrogator or something in between. A request was made for Academy Award worthy performances, both from the interviewers and the interviewees. No matter what the demeanor of each interviewer was set to be, all sessions had a principle interviewer and a note-taker, the person whose main task was to reflect on the verbal and nonverbal behavior of the applicant. When the first round of interviews finished, the process was repeated in a second round then in a third, and then in a fourth. In this way, every student had an opportunity to be an interviewer multiple times, and to be interviewed once.

After all the rounds were completed, a debriefing session was held where students were encouraged to share something about their experience.

This is another opportunity for such a debriefing. How do the students view the process and these interviews? That's exactly what this bog post is all about.

Students, please add your thoughts. Innocent bystanders, please see the commentary below.

Turning the Tables on Study Habits

2010-09-11T01:38:00.000+08:00

I will never meet the Sentinelese

2010-08-27T19:46:00.010+08:00

So India's current policy of enforced protection of the isolation of the Sentinelese stands, and my dream of visiting their island will never be realized. Good for them.

For more information on the culture of various tribes in the Andaman Islands, see this link.

2010-08-02T23:57:00.002+08:00

To Copy, or not to copy? That is the question.

Here's the link to an interesting piece from The New York Times about the prevalence of plagiarism in the writing of some students in American universities nowadays. From the author's vantage point, many students who do plagiarize don't seem to be aware that copying is bad.

I'd be interested in hearing the opinion of students at NUS on the frequency of plagiarism, if any, they have witnessed in their study experience, and also on whether or not they view it as acceptable or not.

2010-07-30T19:26:00.008+08:00

1 School or 20 Soldiers from The New York Times

Occasionally, when I'm feeling lazy or lethargic or uninspired, I simply make a post of someone else's article or maybe a Youtube clip. I haven't been inspired to write for a while, but I have been reading. The following article is by Nicholas Kristoff and lifted directly from The New York Times. It's about how bloated and misguided America's military expenditures are as a means of combatting religious extremism and dealing with populations in a country like Afghanistan. When Kristof writes for people like me, a person who was adamantly opposed to America's intervention in Vietnam and who found Bush's invasion of Iraq to be illegal and unjustifiable, he's preaching to the converted. I don't see how more Stealth bombers will ever be a solution for the problems our world faces. Please read this article and leave your opinion.

July 28, 2010

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — combined.

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation.

Those historical comparisons should be a wake-up call to President Obama, underscoring how our military strategy is not only a mess — as the recent leaked documents from Afghanistan suggested — but also more broadly reflects a gross misallocation of resources. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was a distortion of American policy: By the standards of history and cost-effectiveness, we are hugely overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education and diplomacy.

It was reflexive for liberals to rail at President George W. Bush for jingoism. But it is President Obama who is now requesting 6.1 percent more in military spending than the peak of military spending under Mr. Bush. And it is Mr. Obama who has tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he took office. (A bill providing $37 billion to continue financing America’s two wars was approved by the House on Tuesday and is awaiting his signature.)

Under Mr. Obama, we are now spending more money on the military, after adjusting for inflation, than in the peak of the cold war, Vietnam War or Korean War. Our battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The intelligence apparatus is so bloated that, according to The Washington Post, the number of people with “top secret” clearance is 1.5 times the population of the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, a sobering report from the College Board says that the United States, which used to lead the world in the proportion of young people with college degrees, has dropped to 12th.

What’s more, an unbalanced focus on weapons alone is often counterproductive, creating a nationalist backlash against foreign “invaders.” Over all, education has a rather better record than military power in neutralizing foreign extremism. And the trade-offs are staggering: For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools there. Hawks retort that it’s impossible to run schools in Afghanistan unless there are American troops to protect them. But that’s incorrect.

CARE, a humanitarian organization, operates 300 schools in Afghanistan, and not one has been burned by the Taliban. Greg Mortenson, of “Three Cups of Tea” fame, has overseen the building of 145 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan and operates dozens more in tents or rented buildings — and he says that not one has been destroyed by the Taliban either.

Aid groups show that it is quite possible to run schools so long as there is respectful consultation with tribal elders and buy-in from them. And my hunch is that CARE and Mr. Mortenson are doing more to bring peace to Afghanistan than Mr. Obama’s surge of troops.

The American military has been eagerly reading “Three Cups of Tea” but hasn’t absorbed the central lesson: building schools is a better bet for peace than firing missiles (especially when one cruise missile costs about as much as building 11 schools).

Mr. Mortenson lamented to me that for the cost of just 246 soldiers posted for one year, America could pay for a higher education plan for all Afghanistan. That would help build an Afghan economy, civil society and future — all for one-quarter of 1 percent of our military spending in Afghanistan this year.

The latest uproar over Pakistani hand-holding with the Afghan Taliban underscores that billions of dollars in U.S. military aid just doesn’t buy the loyalty it used to. In contrast, education can actually transform a nation. That’s one reason Bangladesh is calmer than Pakistan, Oman is less threatening than Yemen.

Paradoxically, the most eloquent advocate in government for balance in financing priorities has been Mr. Gates, the defense secretary. He has noted that the military has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has diplomats.

Faced with constant demands for more, Mr. Gates in May asked: “Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”

In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to invest in a global education fund. Since then, he seems to have forgotten the idea — even though he is spending enough every five weeks in Afghanistan to ensure that practically every child on our planet gets a primary education.

We won our nation’s independence for $2.4 billion in today’s money, the Congressional Research Service report said. That was good value, considering that we now fritter the same amount every nine days in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama, isn’t it time to rebalance our priorities?

The New York Times

2010-07-02T01:10:00.002+08:00

Lessons from China and Singapore

In a recent opinion article from The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum, a professor from the University of Chicago, makes sweeping allegations about the nature and influence of education in China and Singapore. She castigates folks like President Obama who have heaped praise on these two countries' education systems, which -- as Obama stated -- prepare students not only for university studies but also for "a career."

Nussbaum's main beef seems to be that there is far too much rote learning/learning for the test at the heart of both country's systems. She goes on to describe how such learning may produce model citizens and cogs in a national economic machine but not critically thinking individuals. In fact, her central concluding idea is that anyone who believes an education system should foster independent thinking and pluralistic, democratic ideals should not look to China and Singapore as models but to Korea (which, by the way, has one of the highest per capita rates of suicide in the world).

As I read the Nussbaum article I had my doubts not just about her central thesis but also about some of the author's supporting anecdotes. She quotes, for example, a Singapore university teacher of communications, one who has supposedly since left Singapore, saying that when the person was discussing the issue of libel and critiques of the government with students, they became stiff and fearful: "I can feel the fear in the room. …You can cut it with a knife."

This contradicts my own experience in the university classroom in Singapore, where I have heard students openly present critiques of everything from their classmates' work to the workings of the university.

Of course, I don't share the same experience as students who have gone through the Chinese or Singaporean education systems from young. So I wonder what those of you who did might think. Here is the link to the Nussbaum article. Let me know your thoughts.

2010-06-22T22:26:00.004+08:00

Soft Drinks & The Blimping of America

In two days I'll be in the air again, heading north and west from Ohio to get back east to Singapore. As always, it's been great to be "home," with the usual reunions, re-discoveries, surprises.

When I asked my teenage daughter Billie what social phenomena amazed her most in this trip to Ohio, she mentions two things: widespread obesity and general friendliness. Those "impress" me as well. In fact, it's always a pleasure to be in a place like my hometown where approaching a total stranger on a village sidewalk invokes a "hi there" or similar greeting.

Billie's other observation, that obesity seems common, is less comforting. While in a Lancaster, Ohio, doctor's office several weeks ago, I noted that nearly every other waiting patient, seven or eight adults and one child, was overweight, and half of those were obese. Two months ago I visited the university clinic in Singapore and did not see one other person who would qualify as obese. This observation becomes more acute when I remember how during my childhood, 40 years ago, obesity was a rarity, not the norm. In the time worn pictures of my elementary school classes, not one kid is obese.

It's easy to recognize one of the causes: the constant consumption of "soft" drinks. I have seen shoppers in grocery stores pushing carts that are stacked high with a dozen or so cartons of Coke, Pepsi or other sweet drinks---and nothing else! And I think a visitor to the typical home in Ohio would be hard pressed to find a "second" refrigerator that is not filled with "drinks." Even in my own boyhood home, my mother often follows up greetings to guests with the question: "What would you like to drink? There's A&W Root Beer, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, Diet Dr. Pepper." At a recent family reunion I observed that nearly every one of the two dozen visitors, myself included, was nursing a canned drink as we sat out on the backyard deck.

A review of some articles on the Web regarding soft drink consumption in the US provides telling statistics. Americans consume 13.15 billion gallons of carbonated drinks a year. They spend 57 billion dollars a year on these drinks. And between 1977 and 2001, the consumption of soft drinks increased 135%. (For one article recounting a study done on this topic, read here.)

This obsession with sweetened drinks simply doesn't exist in Asia, and the difference in the size of waistlines shows the real story.

For more about obesity in America, see this article.

2010-03-30T21:05:00.005+08:00

Stay hungry, stay foolish

The term has almost come to an end. A mere two weeks remain on the schedule. In these two weeks though, your student teams will be very busy with many assignments and tests, and in our professional communication course, preparing for and then presenting your project proposals for change in some area of the NUS curriculum.

As you know (but I mention for visitors), the project aim is for each student team to follow up the needs analysis research you have done on those communication skills required in a particular workplace and the current communication skill offerings in a related degree program area at NUS and to suggest a plan of action that might assist a specific faculty (school) or department to better prepare its undergraduates for their future. In your 20-minute presentation, you need to convince the (fictitious) NUS Excellence Unit of the soundness of your ideas, explaining why a change is needed and how it might benefit various stakeholders at the university, justifying any of your claims with your secondary and original research findings.

In our most recent tutorial session we discussed presentation preparation tips from the Presentation Zen website created by former Apple employee Garr Reynolds. Hopefully, our review of those tips will aid you in your work for the coming weeks.

With this presentation assignment (and maybe our discussion of Apple) in mind, Deenise, a student in Group 2, posted a free blog post that shares the speech that Apple founder Steve Jobs gave at a recent Stanford University commencement ceremony. In that speech, Jobs recalls three stories from his own life. One of these demonstrates how the choices a person makes each and every day can impact unforeseen future outcomes. What's especially wonderful about the speech is that it also highlights Jobs' own success on a path less taken, as a college drop out.

I find this inspirational because it shows that it's not just hard work and a commitment to one's values that are important, but also a certain daring. In fact, Jobs ends his speech with a related phrase taken from the back of the last volume of The Whole Earth Catalog, one of the hippie bibles from the 1960s and 70s that in its content and ambition was symbolic of "out of the box thinking." The phrase Jobs quotes is this: "stay hungry, stay foolish."

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. How might these imperatives serve students at Stanford University, and at the National University of Singapore? In my view, "stay hungry" means you don't necessarily have to settle for what satiates you first, for what comes easiest. By staying hungry, you keep alert and always on the move, eyes and ears open for something new, for knowledge, for opportunity.

"Stay foolish" implies that you should keep your child-like nature, stay in awe. Don't be afraid to amble. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to reach for the stars. There's also a hint in this phrase of the idea that you shouldn't lose sight that since you're on earth for a very short time, you should make your best effort each day in doing what you enjoy. If you can make what you enjoy your life's work, so much the better.

How might these words of wisdom connect to the last couple weeks of the semester and the work ahead? I'd say you (we) should look at what remains as an opportunity, a chance for further growth, another couple enjoyable lessons in the school of life, and a chance for our unique groups to share what we have found, a common cause, clear shared goals and certain camaraderie. What do you think?

2010-03-21T18:48:00.001+08:00

Talkin' 'Bout Writing: How to Discuss a Colleague's Writing While Preserving Your Working Relationship and Career

by James Bell

Picture this: You're eating lunch at your desk and a head pokes into your doorway. It's a colleague asking you to take a look at a report he's written before he turns it in to the boss. You know he wants constructive criticism to help him improve the document, but you don't know exactly how to give it to him. You don't want to risk offending him if he doesn't like your suggestions, but you can't refuse to look over the report either.

Chances are you've been in that situation, whether you're someone colleagues trust for feedback or a manager reviewing your staff's work. The question is, how do you respond in a way that helps the person develop as a writer and preserves your working relationship?

Although there isn't one best way to critique someone's writing, there are some general guidelines. Here's how to offer effective feedback without stepping too hard on the writer's toes.

Clarify the goal. A request to review writing can come in many forms. Some examples: Would you take a look at this? What should I put in this section? Is this what you wanted? Before you offer feedback, you must determine your purpose. In all cases, you probably want the writing to communicate effectively, adhere to company standards, and uphold a positive image of the company. But which goal do you want to emphasize: editing the text or improving the writer?

If you focus on correcting the text, the document will improve but the writer probably won't. He may not understand the corrections, be overwhelmed by the number and variety of errors, and learn, above all else, that you're a good writer and should do all future editing. If, however, your objective is to help the person become a better writer, then you have a much more interesting but difficult job to do. We'll assume the latter purpose.

Meet. Meet with the writer at least briefly. Written comments are impersonal, open to misunderstanding, and leave little opportunity for the writer to clarify her meaning. You can request the document before you meet, or, if it's short, read it on the spot.

Try to lessen the writer's anxiety. He may fear harsh criticism and worry about looking incompetent, especially if you're his manager. Here are some tips to lower the anxiety.

* Put the writer in charge. Ask, What's the main thing you'd like me to look at? That emphasizes a crucial writing skill: self-evaluation. It also conveys that the writer is responsible for the document and shouldn't expect you to clean it up. If the writer replies, "Look for everything," say, "I can't read for everything at once. Do you think I should focus on content, organization, sentence structure, grammar and mechanics, or something else?" That list offers the writer a useful hierarchy of concerns. For instance, there's no point fixing grammar or punctuation errors in a paragraph that will be deleted when the writer reconsiders content.

* Agree on what will happen. State the objective for the meeting and how you'll both achieve it. For example, "I'll read to see whether you have enough support for the purchase requests. If I agree that there might not be enough support, we can brainstorm more ideas." At the same time, you may want to say what you won't do. For example, "I know you have the company style manual, so I won't look for formatting problems. You can catch those."

* Talk less about what's right and wrong and more about what's appropriate, acceptable, or inappropriate. For example, in this sentence, After the latest changes, we have less assembly-line problems, less should be fewer because problems are countable. However, it will be more useful for the writer if you discuss how the sentence may be acceptable in an email message between two crew bosses but inappropriate for the company's annual report.

* Give reader-type responses rather than expert judgments. Instead of saying, "You should move this sentence from the bottom of the paragraph up to the top because it's your main idea," say, "When I was reading this paragraph, I didn't know where it was going until the last sentence, which I think is the main idea." The first comment invokes either acquiescence or argument from the writer. The second comment invites discussion and, ultimately, leaves the decision with the writer.

* Focus on just a few things each pass. Resist the temptation to dry-clean the paper and make it come out exactly the way you want. Correcting every technical and stylistic error will overwhelm the writer and put you in the position of editor. Instead, teach your writers to edit their own work.

* Try to point out something positive about the writing, making your praise as long and detailed as your most in-depth criticism. The employee will likely repeat that element in his or her next writing project.

* Dispel the myth that people either can write or can't write, and if they can write, then they can write anything. Competent writing can be learned and is a process of gradual improvement. Ensure that your writers know that even professional writers must keep sharpening their skills.

* Create a climate in which sharing writing is natural. Asking other managers or staff for feedback on your writing speaks louder than words.

Structure the meeting for success.

The following steps facilitate productive talk about writing.

* Step 1: Ask the writer what to focus on and what questions she or he has.

* Step 2: Read silently.

* Step 3: Briefly answer the writer's questions. Suggest an objective--not what you'll do but what the writer will be able to do by the end of the meeting. Then, state how the two of you might accomplish the objective and ask whether the writer agrees. Although that process may sound cumbersome, it needn't take long. Here's an example: "I agree that there's not enough support for the purchase request if it's going to the vice president. One way we could address that is by brainstorming. Does that sound like a good approach to you?"

Rather than collaborating on brainstorming, some writers may prefer to revise based on a model that you create. Others might want you to ask questions to help them generate ideas. You can tailor your approach according to the writer's preference.

* Step 4: Now that you've focused on the writer's chief concern, address one area you consider crucial. The typical hierarchy of concerns stipulates that once the content is sound, you can address organization; once that's logical, you can address sentence structure; and once sentences are in shape, you can address grammar, mechanics, and punctuation.

* Step 5: Conclude by asking what the writer will do next. That checks her understanding and clarifies the progress of the document. If the writing has to be perfect technically, you can ask to see it a final time.

Although you may be a more experienced writer than the person asking you to review, you don't need to rewrite even a small part. Use these steps to create better writers--which will serve your and the writer's purposes better in the long run.

James Bell is sole proprietor of Bell Education and Consulting in Brtish Columbia, Canada; jim11b@yahoo.ca.

Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Article Title: Talkin' 'Bout Writing: How to Discuss a Colleague's Writing While Preserving Your Working Relationship and Career. Contributors: James Bell - author. Magazine Title: T&D. Volume: 56. Issue: 12. Publication Date: December 2002. Page Number: 57+. COPYRIGHT 2002 American Society for Training & Development, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

2010-03-10T01:14:00.008+08:00

The Mock Interview

What sort of jobs have I interviewed for? Here's a partial list:

U.S. National Security Agency country/regional analyst

People Airlines (now defunct) flight attendant

retail store assistant manager

Where was I today? In class facilitating mock interviews. In each class there were four team. Each team of three or four students read and evaluated the application materials that another team's individual members had prepared, peer reviewed and revised in advance. The evaluating team, much like a hiring committee or HR group, would rank those individuals from the other team based on the quality of the materials in relation to a specific job, internship or graduate program application and then begin the interview process.

After all the rounds were completed, a debriefing session was held where students were encouraged to share something about their experience.

This is another opportunity for such a debriefing. How do the students view the process and these interviews? That's exactly what this bog post is all about.

Students, please add your thoughts. Innocent bystanders, please see the commentary below.

2010-03-07T02:17:00.008+08:00

Peer Teaching

“Teaching depends on what other people (as in the students) think,” says Deborah Ball, dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan, “not what you (as the teacher) think.”

Team peer teaching in the professional communication module I teach is coming to a close for this semester. Over the course of the past six weeks teams of students have taught their classmates 30-minutes lessons on performing effectively at job interviews, creating good resumes and application letters, using wikis and other collaborative workspaces, writing effective business correspondences, and designing effective survey questionnaires. These are all content topics that the "student teachers" had to learn themselves (with a list of websites at their disposal) then teach.

As I've mentioned, the most amazing thing for me about the peer teaching is that for many students, it's the first time they have stood in front of a class. It's also the first time they have created a lesson plan, managed a classroom, delivered a content-based lecture, and directed teaching/learning activities. Amazingly, they have done so while not receiving any instruction on teaching. They've had to learn and teach simply by doing.

What then makes this possible, or plausible? A simple mix, really, of three attributes: Intellect. Courage. Heart. Add to that a good portion of hard work, e voila!

In the lessons I've attended, I've seen a good number of natural-born future teachers, and quite a few peer teachers that are diamonds in the rough.

What makes teaching so special? And what might contribute to a person becoming an effective teacher? See the article "Building a Better Teacher" by Elizabeth Green in the New York Times for an overview.

I'd like to hear your reactions, in a couple paragraphs or less, to the experience you had teaching (and learning as a peer teacher and a peer student) this term.

2010-01-26T23:10:00.010+08:00

Above the Law

Recently, I learned of the passing of a person who had generated lots of controversy because of his outlandish behavior. That individual was the former monarch of Malaysia and sultan of the country's southernmost state.

As a former British colony, Malaysia -- even upon independence -- kept its tradition of ascribed hierarchies. For that reason, today there are 9 "royal" families. These family groups and their many members, numbering in the thousands, receive not only financial subsidies from the federal and state governments, but special privileges. In short, the common man pays tax dollars to support a system of collective imperial welfare. At the same time, the system makes specified allowances for behaviors from these royals that would not be deemed acceptable of others.

The late sultan, according to many well regarded sources, exceeded the typical limits of his office. In fact, many allege that he was so abusive of his position that his subjects' well being, and at times very lives, were at stake. The story is that he killed several unarmed people: one of his golf caddies for snickering at him after a missed shot and a trespasser who dared to walk too close to the sultan's helicopter.

Oddly, when the man died, the major newspapers of Malaysia responded as if a national hero had succumbed. In the obituaries it was universally stated that he had been loved by his people.

The absurdity of such eulogies hit home when my mother-in-law, a resident of said southernmost Malaysian state, was pressured to wear a black arm band to demonstrate her sadness about the late sultan's demise. Because of his reputation though, this was something she and, according to news sources, a large number of other citizens were loathe to do. This brought questions to my mind:

Where does liberty lie when a person, because of a traditionally ascribed status, stands not just above the law but above common decency? And what aspect of the much vaunted Asian values are on display when government-owned Malaysian newspapers as well as government officials and other members of the entrenched aristocracy treat the passing of such an individual as an event that should publicly mourned with grand respect?

I welcome your opinions. But be careful. According to a number of sources, the Malaysian authorities are on the look out for bloggers who get too nasty when writing about their wayward former king.

2010-01-21T01:06:00.003+08:00

She Bop

In a lecture that I attended today given by Professor Emeritus Sandra McKay, a sociolinguist from San Francisco State University, she discussed some of the implications that English becoming the paramount global language might have for teachers of English in places like Singapore. One focus of this discussion was on the sort of feedback that teachers should be giving developing student writers in light of contemporary " sociolinguistic theory" that posits that all varieties of English have legitimacy.

Generally, according to McKay, one important issue is this: It is easy to see that new lexical items (think new base verb forms, for instance, "to google" and "to sms") appear then quickly gain global acceptance and legitimacy. Similar innovations in grammar may develop, such as the way that people worldwide who use English as a second language (and the number of these far outnumbers that for whom it is the first language) often drop the "s" on simple present verb forms in the third person singular: she bops >>> she bop. However, acceptance of such a change in grammar is very slow to develop. In fact, many teachers would consider this an "error" and would make mention of it in feedback to the student.

The question sequence then is this: What should a writing teacher do when encountering such a "drop" of the "s"? Should he or she (we!) accept this drop, seeing it as legitimate, or not?

Let's add a very real context to this: What should I do if and when I encounter an occurrence like the following in a student's blog writing?

I write like this and she write like that.

I can give McKay's view, but I'd like to hear yours first. Please give me your opinion and explain why you feel that way.

2010-01-17T01:13:00.025+08:00

Have a Green Day

Back in November when I first ordered the mosh pit tickets for the Green Day concert in Singapore, I didn't fully understand the ramifications. Sure, my daughter Billie's excitement about the gig announcement was clear and was soon echoed by my wife Karen. And certainly I am an admirer of the raucous band's hard-driving music, considering American Idiot lyrically and musically one of the most important American cultural statements of the first decade of the 21st century. So I quickly got online and did the Sistic credit-card thing. But the mosh pit?

Should we get tickets for the mosh pit? I asked my ladies. Yes! they hooted in unison. Our fate was sealed.

Within a week the tickets arrived by mail. After opening the envelope, it suddenly came to me: I saw on each ticket the ominously printed section name: Pen A. Oh to feel like a soon-to-be caged (and slaughtered?) animal.

Months passed, the holidays came and went, and I had nearly forgotten about the concert and the mosh pit. Apparently, I had also overlooked Green Day's appeal, even here in Singapore. The day before the concert Karen asked me when I'd be home from work, in the same breath suggesting that we head to the stadium venue by mid afternoon in order to have a chance to get in early and get close to the stage.

What? Mid afternoon? I asked incredulously. Why?

I was remembering how two years earlier we'd gone to WOMAD Singapore at Fort Canning, and for the concert by Britain's Asian Dub Foundation, we'd waited to the last minute to go and still gotten choice spots alongside the stage. This will be different, Karen said, a knowing look on her face. Later in the day she called my office and confirmed what she'd heard from Sistic: a line had been forming at Singapore Indoor Stadium since 9am. We'd better go early.

I'd still balked, but I agreed to come home from school by 4pm so that we could leave the house by 4:30. When we arrived by taxi at the stadium grounds, I was surprised so few cars were in the lot. There ya go, I thought. No one here yet.

Right on one front, but generally wrong! What was true was that no one who could drive a car was there yet. After a detail of security dudes directed us to the line for Pen A, we discovered, hidden under the eaves of the stadium, at least a 150 fans sitting on cold concrete in a line cordoned off by a thick purple strand of theater rope. My guess at the average age: 18 or so.

Still, things were calm---it wasn't anything to worry about. So there we sat for nearly two hours, amidst the developing line and growing piles of burger wrappers. But that was just the beginning. As more fans arrived, the buzz became more palpable, and then just after 7, the doors were opened and through the turnstiles we quickly went. Unlike the fans in several of the stadium concerts I'd been to in the distant past -- seeing The Who in Cincinnati and the Stones (twice) in Cleveland come to mind -- these kids were amazingly well behaved. In fact, once through security, I was one of only half a dozen people I saw running for the front!

Easy as pie. I got right up to the chest-high metal barricade separating the mosh pit area from the stage. And that's where we stood as the arena filled. And filled. And filled some more. And the more it filled, the tighter our space became. Finally, just before the opening band got on stage (a rather dull and pompous glam rock group named Prima Donna), I realized that yes indeed we were penned against the barricade. The only way out would have been via "life flight" care of the muscular bouncers who stood just opposite us, smiling in their own spacious comfort zone.

Then came the moment we'd all been waiting for, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool running on stage, and the audience sway became a tidal wave. It seemed that everyone behind us, from little Malay dudes in colored hair to Indian girls with nose rings, wanted to enhance his or her position so as to see these musical heroes. With hundreds of cellphones and video cameras held high, with sharpened elbows plying for the perfect screen shot, the impassioned fans heaved into a collective mass of humanity. Luckily, I was able to hold my own in the fray (and protect Billie and Karen), but smaller characters, including a skinny 15-year-old Chinese kid Billie had befriended back in the initial line, now fought for a breath as they were squeezed more and more. From the rhythmic force of the first bars of the first song, a power surge ensued, and the crowd's moans and bellows followed. Within our immediate view, at least a dozen kids soon were begging the bouncers to be plucked out of the maddening throng. (After being lifted over the barricade, they were escorted out of the front of the arena to the back, from where they could still watch.)

Up on stage it was all a 21st Century Breakdown. What excites fans about Green Day is the high energy level and great execution. These guys play with a maniacal conviction. No one hits the drums (or loses drumsticks) like Tre Cool. No one pinches the bass strings (or his brow) like Mike Dirnt. And then there is Billie Joe, a bit of a Charlie Chaplin character: one part poetic genius, one part circus clown, and three parts masterful communicator/lead singer/rhythm guitarist of one of the hottest bands on the planet. The band's three more anonymous sidekicks are all heady musicians as well.

In action, Billie Joe and Mike run from one end of the stage to the other, they jump, they slide---all the while kicking out song after song after song. They also interact with the audience in a manner that I've never witnessed, Billie Joe going so far as to invite the entire audience to sing along as he did with "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," or asking volunteers from the crowd to come up to strut their own stuff and to not just sing along but to hold court---king or queen for a moment in the evening. One young Malay dude with green hair was just such a lucky invitee. Though his vocals were mediocre, he used his chance under the hot lights to imitate Billie Joe with quite a bit of finesse, much to the band's obvious satisfaction. After his singalong through "Longview," he and Billie Joe embraced, then Billie Joe slipped a fat envelope into his back pocket: money or back stage pass?

Back in the mosh pit, life had become a bit more civilized. Yes, personal space was lacking. Yes, the breath of the tall Chinese kid beside me was repugnant. Yes, my neighbors' hand-held cameras occasionally slipped too far into my view and I was forced to push them away. But we were all in it for the music, and in that way, we bonded, even if only momentarily, chanting along: ole ole ole ole, or hey oh, I say, hey oh!

The music went on non-stop for two and a half hours, the musicians showing not just a great talent for reproducing the gems from their albums but also very serious athleticism. When Billie Joe finally bid us good night and then completed his introductions of fellow band members, no one was fooled. We knew an encore would follow in the form of the classic songs, "American Idiot" and "Jesus of Suburbia." What none of us might have suspected though was that a medley of three more songs would follow --- "Last Night on Earth," "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and "Time of Your Life"--- all played commandingly in acoustic solo fashion by the singer-songwriter himself.

By the time the last stroke of Billie Joe's clangy guitar faded into the rafters, the mosh pit had become as meaningful as a giant womb, with each of us finding a sort of collective calm in a cultural experience of accelerated worth. No regrets, I then thought to myself. Not on this day.

2010-01-15T15:14:00.010+08:00

Bricks in the Wall, or What?

In much of the educational process throughout our lives, we as students want to be taught. In fact, we expect that our teachers/lecturers/professors "give" us knowledge, we see ourselves as receptacles for a particular content, and we submit ourselves to this process often without questioning its linear fashion, assuming that the educator knows best and that he or she has our best interests in mind.

Here are two quotes that for me throw a different light on the educational process. I would like to know how you view either one of these statements (or both) in the context of your own study.

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington

*****

A teacher who establishes rapport with the taught becomes one with them, learns more from them than he teaches them.

Mahatma Gandhi

If I said that these two statements reflect to a large extent my own philosophy of education and my expectations for not just teacher-student interactions in the courses I "teach" but even the way I structure my classes, how might you the student respond? Would you want to reconsider your decision to join my sessions -- and perhaps even withdraw immediately -- or might your curiosity be stimulated?

I look forward to reading responses to thoughts on these issues.

2010-01-11T08:45:00.009+08:00

The Science and Art of Effective Problem Solving

In a recent article in the New York Times entitled "Multicultural Critical Theory. At B School?," author Lane Wallace describes how, in light of the recent worldwide financial crisis, a large number of prominent American university business schools are rethinking their curricular offerings to include a greater focus on what was once seen as the cornerstone of not a business education but a liberal arts one: critical thinking. One aspect of such thinking that Wallace mentions is “problem framing,” whereby students are asked in their studies to "think more broadly, question assumptions, view problems through multiple lenses and learn from history.

Do students at NUS think critically? Do the modules they take require them to "think outside the box" and explore alternatives that might be shaped by a deep understanding of historical precedent or radical perspectives?

Further, do students think through complicated issues while taking into consideration any moral imperatives?

If you are an NUS student, I'd like to know what you think of your university education in the context of how this education has already facilitated your development of critical thinking skills.

To read the Wallace article, go here.

2009-12-05T13:42:00.009+08:00

The Power of Two

We've all thought about the nature-nurture issue and about what makes us who we are.

For a powerful statement about both the strength of our genetic make up and serendipity, read this article from Newsweek that recounts how two young girls adopted by different sets of American parents from the same orphanage in China not only turned out to share the same DNA but also the same given name. And much much more!

...

2009-12-01T01:00:00.007+08:00

Facebook Follies

In a recent article from Salon.com, "Facebook, the Mean Girls and Me," Taffy Brodesser-Akner takes on Facebook and the way that via the social networking megalith, she has rekindled relationships with various girls who she had been friends with until junior high school, when they all turned nasty and bullied her. The article becomes a place for the writer to air this laundry and wonder about the worth of revisiting past people and times through new profile pics, current photo albums and status updates.

I wasn't bullied in school (except on rare occasion), and was generally popular, but I do have my own doubts about Facebook and its authenticity. On Facebook I have been requested as a "friend" by a good number of my high school classmates from 30 years back. What I have found is that though I always answer these requests by "accepting" and then writing a brief and friendly "you attitude-focused" letter, I have quite often received no response.

When I do receive responses, I have always written a message follow up, praising the writer for whatever accolades they have received or grandchildren they've been rearing, asking relevant questions, and trying to dig a bit deeper into that great divide that has left us well on in the latter stages of life. That's when the wall of silence really appears.

I'd estimate that nearly 75% of those new (old) "friends" never write again, not even when I ask them explicit questions or make comments on their photo albums. Never again.

Which certainly does beg the question: What have I done to create such a situation?

Or is it them and not me?

Ultimately, the question may be, what is the point in all of this?

Granted, I have been able to reconnect in an exciting way with some friends from past eras whom I really had wanted to keep contact with all along but simply had lost in the shuffle. An e-rendezvous with any one these folks is rewarding. But then there is that other mass of humanity who just sit warehoused in my growing friend list.

Now I wonder what to do: Should I conduct a Stalinistic purge, or let the pile of photos and profiles accumulate?

2009-11-09T22:33:00.007+08:00

The Social Atom

As I might have mentioned earlier, I rarely lift and post substantial amounts of texts from books I'm reading. This post, with a focus on an excerpt from Mark Buchanan's The Social Atom, is an exception. I have posted what follows as a pretext for discussion in my classes. (now over!) This was done in the context of a review of the communication/life skills that my students had learned about/practiced this term. The discussions that followed were interesting, but unfortunately, none of them made it into direct responses to this post. The students generally had had enough of the assignments I'd given them, including the blogging/commenting.

While I was tempted to delete this post, I've decided to keep it up for next term.

Here are a few of Buchanan's (not very original, really) ideas:

"...rule number one for the social atom: We're highly skilled at recognizing patterns and adapting to a changing world. We interact with the world and learn from it. But we also learn, or try to learn, from others. We live our lives within families and networks of friends, with colleagues and neighbors, and amid a cacophony of voices and opinions blasted out from television, newspaper, and the Web. Far from being isolated, like atoms in a perfect vacuum, we are fully interdependent and embedded in a thick social tapestry of others, like atoms in a dense liquid, where we can barely move without jostling against others. Our social 'embeddedness' influences what we wear and eat, the work we do, our social opinions and thoughts. We do not think entirely on our own---what we believe and why depends strongly on our interactions with others.

"...Next to our ability to adapt, perhaps nothing is so pronounced in human behavior as our capacity for imitation. Infants learn within a few minutes to imitate their parents' facial expressions. The Romans, well aware of our imitating tendencies, hired professional mourners to kick off the wailing at important funerals. We have hardwired instincts for imitation yet often we also imitate consciously, as imitation offers a strategy, often our only strategy, for taking advantage of things that others may have learned. Of course, imitation can lead to weird and costly distortions, because those others don't always know very much. But ultimately, the surprising influence of imitation needn't be mysterious or puzzling --- scientists are finding that it often leads to patterns as regular as clockwork."

Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom

2009-10-28T00:39:00.010+08:00

1Malaysia

I have a deep connection to Malaysia. In 1985, I moved there from the US on a six-month lecturer contract without knowing much about the country, its people, history and cultures. I ended up working for five years for two different American university twinning programs under the auspices of the openly discriminatory tertiary educational institution, Mara Technical Institute, which was created exclusively for members of the Malay ethnic group (with a small number of native students from East Malaysia thrown in for appearances' sake).

Soon after arriving in Malaysia, I learned about the "race riots" of 1969, the "special rights" given to the Malay people, and the resentment that this caused amongst members of other ethnic groups. Realizing that "affirmative action" (as we call such programs in the US) is at times justified, I was able to rationalize my work on behalf of the government and the Malays when the programs I served were providing educational opportunities for a group of students that was mostly from rural and impoverished backgrounds.

What I could not help questioning was the considerable number of middle- and upper-class Malay kids on our campus, guys and gals who were getting a free ride just because they were Malay and not because their parents could not afford to send them to school. In fact, I even had the son of Malaysia's foreign minister at that time in one of my classes, and I watched in wonder as he was chauffeured to school and eventually drove his own BMW to classes.

I worried then about how the college-age children of the underclass of other groups were faring. But I became even more in tune to those folks' plight when I married a young woman of mixed Malaccan Portuguese and Chinese/Indian descent, a girl who had excelled in secondary school but was not offered a single ringgit by the government for her educational studies. The hypocrisy of the New Economic Policy's mandate to assist the poor "irrespective of race" really hit home.

It's 20 years later now, and I have watched Malaysia sink further into the abyss of ethnic divisiveness, much of that caused by communal arrogance, authorized greed, blatant corruption and a host of wayward government policies. It's easy to be depressed by the situation, even though I feel that I am now "part Malaysian." And it's rare when anyone might see light at the end of that long tunnel.

Tonight, however, I saw just such a light when I read the Merdeka message written by Sharyn Lisa Shufian, the 24-year-old great granddaughter of Malaysia's first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman.

Rarely do I give over space on my blog to the writings of others, but this is just such an occasion.

Please read Sharyn's message and see why I feel that those of us who love Malaysia can have some hope:

Both my parents are Malay. My mum's heritage includes Chinese, Thai and Arab, while my dad is Minangkabau. Due to my skin colour, I am often mistaken for a Chinese. I'm happy that I don't have the typical Malay look but I do get annoyed when people call me Ah Moi or ask me straight up "Are you Chinese or Malay?" Like, why does it matter? Before I used to answer "Malay" but now I'm trying to consciously answer Malaysian instead.

There's this incident from primary school that I remember till today. Someone told me that I will be called last during Judgement Day because I don't have a Muslim name. Of course, I was scared then but now that I'm older, I realise that a name is just a name. It doesn't define you as a good or bad person and there is definitely no such thing as a Muslim name. You can be named Rashid or Ali and still be a Christian.

I've heard of the 1Malaysia concept, but I think we don't need to be told to be united. We've come such a long way that it should already be embedded in our hearts and minds that we are united. Unfortunately, you can still see racial discrimination and polarisation. There is still this ethno-centric view that the Malays are the dominant group and their rights must be protected, and non Malays are forever the outsiders.

For the concept to succeed, I think the government should stop with the race politics. It's tiring, really. We grew up with application forms asking us to tick our race. We should stop painting a negative image of the other races, stop thinking about 'us' and 'them' and focus on 'we', 'our' and 'Malaysians'.

No one should be made uncomfortable in their own home. I know some baby Nyonya friends who can trace their lineage back hundreds of years. I'm a fourth generation Malaysian. If I am Bumiputra, why can't they be, too? Clearly I have issues with the term.

I think the main reason why we still can't achieve total unity is because of this 'Malay rights' concept. I'd rather 'Malay rights' be replaced by human rights. So unless we get rid of this Bumiputra status, or reform our views and policies on rights, we will never achieve unity.

For my Merdeka wish, I'd like for Malaysians to have more voice, to be respected and heard. I wish that the government would uphold the true essence of parliamentary democracy. I wish for the people to no longer fear and discriminate against each other, to see that we are one and the same.

I wish that Malaysia would truly live up to the tourism spin of Malaysia truly Asia. Malaysians to lead - whatever their ethnic background.

Only ONE NATIONALITY -MALAYSIAN. No Malays, No Chinese, No Indians - ONLY MALAYSIANS. Choose whatever religion one is comfortable with.

2009-10-25T21:17:00.007+08:00

The Last...Lecture

It must say something about the times we live in when even the "last lecture" of a dying professor can be commercialized to such a high degree.

That's what I thought when I wanted to add a link on this blog to the late Randy Pausch's famed speech at Carnegie Mellon for all my students to see only to discover that the lecture was now a whole website, a book, and other odds and ends. My gut reaction was to can my intentions.

Is everything really for sale? I asked myself. Let's look for a speech by Martin Luther King or Barack Obama.

Then calm took me under its wing again, and I capitulated. There are so many reasons that the Pausch lecture is interesting, we shouldn't be dissuaded by the hype.

So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. Just be careful about bumping into the hawkers in the door way.

2009-10-06T22:34:00.039+08:00

Riding the Cultural Rails

How can a person explain the power and significance of cultural identity in a way that's not overly simplistic and trite, especially to a kid like my daughter Billie, who's lived in two countries and traveled the world, or to students like the ones I'm now working with, most of whom have grown up in multicultural societies such as Malaysia and Singapore and who have also traveled extensively?

One way would be to show them the Academy Award-winning documentary film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. The main focus of the film is children, European Jewish children, who -- until Hitler's pogroms of the late 1930s -- were shown to have had many of the the same preoccupations as kids today, worrying about who was going to come to their birthday party, what Mom and Dad could afford to buy them, and whose heads they would turn with a smile and a wink.

Proliferation of the Nazi creed, centered on German ethnic pride and politico-economic ambitions, changed all that. While Hitler and his circle of sadistic henchmen laid the foundation for war in Europe and proposed the "Final Solution," they also worked hard spreading propaganda among the masses, much of it aimed at creating a sense among their fellow Europeans that the Jews were dirty immigrants, an inferior, money-grubbing race, whose very existence was undermining the progress of the Germans. Within that prescribed belief system, the Germans were touted as the master race, creators of a unique civilization, the original and most highly cultivated of all peoples. (Of course, using the term race in this manner is a misnomer. Social scientists generally avoid the term, but if they must, confine its usage to descriptions of physical attributes. Physically, the so-called Ashkenazi Jews are similar to Europeans. It is really only in culture, and in the perceptions of what culture entails, that they differ.)

In the film, period photographs and archival film footage are woven together with the individual stories of half a dozen Jews who escaped the increasing hostility of the Nazis because they had been selected into a special program initiated by the British government that would allow nearly 10,000 children under the age of 18 to leave their families and travel by train westward from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia for foster homes and youth hostels in Great Britain.

One thing that seemed amazing to Billie was how similar the Jewish kids were to those of the land they were leaving. "What made them different?" she asked.

That's when I stopped the DVD player and did my mini-lecture on the religious beliefs of the Jews and how they differed from the German Lutherans and the Czech and Austrian Catholics basically by virtue of not adhering to the New Testament of the Bible. I mentioned how they looked physically similar to their neighbors, had many of the same values for family, hard work and a good education, and could even speak the same languages, but because they held different religious beliefs and traditions, and because many of them were successful in business, the arts and professions such as law and medicine, they were viewed suspiciously.

And that was enough.

Soon after nearly 10,000 of the young Jews had arrived at their destination and been set up with surrogate families, war was declared between Germany and Britain, and the kindertransport ended. All communication between the kids and their increasingly forlorn parents was also stopped. Ironically, even in Britain there was enough suspicion that these German Jews might have some allegiance to their homeland that a whole boatload of them, mainly teenage males, was shipped off to Australia. (Toward the end of the war, some of these would return to the UK to train and fight on behalf of their adopted homeland.)

What was it about the Jews that made them so hated? In Hitler's eyes, they were clearly different, a group of people who competed with his own for resources, stealing, as it were, their livelihood in the place that he felt should be the lebensraum, or living space, for the Germanic peoples above all others. This exclusivity, along with the negative stereotyping and hate-mongering, was easy to peddle, especially as Germans of every walk of life were striving for renewed greatness after the calamity of their country's defeat in the first world war (1914-1918). The Jewish kids might have looked and sounded like acceptable Europeans, they might have shared many traits with the peoples their ancestors had been neighbors with for a thousand years, but what they didn't share was a common identity, and without that, they had no safe place in Hitler's vision of destiny.

Into the Arms of Strangers , exploring through its subtext the link between what is seen as familiar and what is foreign, ended with what we knew would come to pass: the war ended as the Germans were beaten, and the kindertransport kids survived while most of their parents were executed in the Nazi camps (along with 1.5 million children and millions of others). The life stories of the interviewees wrapped up with a mix of triumphant tales and tearful reflections.

Sadly, long after the DVD players have been turned off and the deservingly positive comments on the film shelved away, the twists and turns of race and ethnicity continue, and the bumps in our road to better intercultural relations remain.

2009-09-12T19:21:00.021+08:00

Another Buckeye Tale

If I were a first year student at the National University of Singapore (NUS), I might be living in one of the residences, King Edward VII or Prince George's Park. The names impress me, and as an 18-year-old, that might have been enough.

When I was considering my own university studies a long time ago, I chose the only school I was really familiar with: Ohio State University (OSU). OSU was as familiar to me as a small town Ohioan as NUS is to anyone in Singapore. However, there is one major difference. For me, a love of OSU was based not so much on my fascination with its academic laurels, which is clearly how the NUS brand resonates throughout Southeast Asia, or my desire to work in any particular school or college at OSU. My college choice was not built upon a careful study of acceptable ACT/SAT scores, scholarship options, or campus contours. No, it was made mainly thanks to the image of excellence represented by the tradition of OSU football.

At this stage in my life, having worked in university education in a variety of contexts for 30 years, and having seen the richness of higher ed and the extent to which it can impact young minds, I realize how absurd my original motives might have been. The only way I can support the parameters of my naivete is this: OSU football is so HUGE in Ohio that for many it is the face that OSU shows off most gloriously.

This is not to denigrate the various colleges and schools within the university, both undergraduate and graduate. It's not a slight to the teaching staff and their commitment to education, or to the researchers and their world-class achievements. It is mainly a reflection of the university landscape that the media, and the university itself, opens most clearly to the world. And despite the many who may think such imagery begins up on High Street on the steps of the Law School, or at the entrance to the Ohio Union, or in the glass of the Wexner Center for the Arts, or somewhere on the Oval facing the William Oxley Thompson Library, the real deal begins on the east bank of the Olentangy River, at the corner of Cannon and Woody Hayes Drive. For there, in its 80-plus years of architectural and sporting majesty, stands Ohio Stadium, the center of our Buckeye State universe.

This stadium, more affectionately know as the Horseshoe, or just The Shoe, does not only present an image of OSU to the people of Ohio, but also to the entire nation (and I'd suggest to the world). Through its history, Ohio's coliseum has been a magnet for millions of people as they come out on autumn days of sterling sunshine or bleak chill to cheer a hundred-thousand strong in support of the university's cherished Buckeye football team. As a kid even when my family would go trailer-camping in the Hocking Hills or at Wolf Run on September and October Saturday afternoons, it was nearly a holy rite to set time aside between lunch from the kerosene stove and the evening's fire-pit dinner to listen to an OSU football game.

Though I only ever played football on the playground and not in an organized setting, as far back as I can remember, the OSU football games were watched in my home by us kids and the elders alike. More importantly, they were blimped over by zeppelins, analyzed by radio and TV show hosts, serenaded by the OSU Marching Band, and immortalized in the impassioned play of the team members themselves: heroes like quarterback Rex Kern (from Lancaster, close to my hometown) and defensive back Jack Tatum from the 1969 National Championship team, the two-time Heismann Trophy winner Archie Griffin (who attended OSU when I did), linebacking studs such as Chris Spielman and James Laurinaitis, the 2003 NCAA championship game underdogs and winning team members, and the current squad's quarterbacking hope, Terrelle Pryor.

Now the games and the stars even get skyped onto computer screens set up on living tables like my own here in Goodluck Garden, Singapore, pushing Buckeye pride into the globe's farthest corners.

Knowing such background and my allegiance to OSU football, few now might question the method of my college choice. But there was one other factor that tipped the scales furiously over in favor of my attending OSU: My acceptance into the Stadium Scholarship Dormitory!

Yes indeed. For two wonderful seasons (my first two years of college), I resided in the dorm that from the 1930s had housed an elite group of young scholars (and fervent pre-game party-goers!) like myself. I still remember the buzz of game-day Saturdays, and how by early morning, fans would be parading the vast parking lot beneath our residential unit's floor to ceiling windows, amazed to see students like me loitering inside.

Some of those folks even became our "clients," waving around fresh 20-dollar bills to entice us to open one of the dorm's ground-level entrances. (Yes indeed! From those entry ways, stairwells led up to three levels of hallways that would open into our living units; in the same stairwells, there were other doors that directly accessed the stadium's massive interior walkways.)

Of course, living in the stadium had numerous other bennies: 1) if we didn't have tickets, we could enter games for free anyway, as long as we were willing to scrounge for a seat ; 2) if we did have tickets, we could get in early, beating the crowds; 3) if we wanted to impress back-home friends, we could arrange pre-game parties in our dorm rooms, then lead the entire group into the stadium at game time; 4) we could access the stadium at any time, morning, noon or night, taking pleasure in the city's biggest sports arena as our private backyard playground, from the field itself to more romantic environs high up in C Deck. And that I did, on numerous occasions.

In fact, I remember that once during my last year as an undergrad, long after I had moved out of the dorm, I took a prospective girlfriend to the stadium late at night, entered by the main dorm door, then using dorm contacts, got quick approval and slipped into the stadium's bowels. From there I led the young lady out into the seats and up to the top of one of the coliseum's four main flagpole-bearing columns. There she and I sat until just before dawn, chatting, drinking a bottle of wine and surveying the shifting horizon. I even remember one of the topics from our heart-to-heart that night, travel, and I can recall saying that I wanted to explore the world, which might have seemed like just another naive thought at the time. Yet how grandly accessible the world looked from that vantage point!

Though I never played football "officially" at OSU, though I never felt the electricity of emerging from the tunnel on game day with my teammates into the wild screams of 105,000 well-wishers, I did live my own OSU dream, I took that golden educational opportunity to learn and expand my horizons, growing immeasurably in the process, developing other sets of goals to pursue.

Where I am today is very much an offshoot of that original seed idea, or a branch from the tree, if you will; and I am still a Buckeye, through and through.

And tomorrow, at 8am Sunday the 13th in Singapore, 8pm Saturday the 12th Columbus time, I'll skype one of my siblings in central Ohio, and in family-bonding mode, we'll watch the #7 nationally ranked Buckeyes as they tackle the #3 Trojans of the University of Southern California in another classic match up.

Like a schoolboy, I can't wait!

[Addendum: The OSU team lost Saturday night's passionately fought battle, 18-15. But win or lose, the Buckeye nation supports OSU, its student athletes and their lofty dreams.]

*I'd like to thank my cousin, Bev Elder Sturm, another OSU grad, former OSU Marching Band member and Buckeye fanatic, for the use of her photos. This one's for you, Bev!

2009-09-01T22:54:00.011+08:00

The Road Home

I'm a romantic at heart. That's why when tonight I watched the 1999 Chinese film The Road Home, starring Zhang Ziyi as country girl Zhao Di, a teenager who experiences love at first sight with the first-ever primary-school teacher to work in her village, I get so emotionally involved in the story that I believe yet again that something such as unflinching love is possible. My daughter Billie, a 14-year-old who seems wise beyond her years in this situation, cynically questions that, then tells me that the innocence of 18-year-old Zhao Di would be impossible in today's world.

"18-year-olds now plan to lose their virginity," she says, surprising me. "But this girl looks so cute following him all around. Nowadays she'd be considered a stalker."

In the movie, Zhao Di isn't thinking sex, but stalking she does. Since first seeing Luo Yusheng, the handsome young man, during the building of the one-room schoolhouse, she shadows him everywhere, such as when he is walking his young students through the fields; she's happy to have a chance to cook a meal for him (done in rotation as a village obligation); and she's captivated hearing his voice reading aloud to his pupils. Her love has a high price though when Teacher Luo is suddenly ordered back to the city. She suffers torment not knowing if he will ever return, and her mother remarks that he's left and taken the girl's heart with him.

But all turns out well. We see the love story both past and present, young Zhao Di's early saga framed by a narrative 40 years in the future. It's in this bigger picture that we meet the story-teller, the adult son of Zhao Di and Luo Yusheng, come home to his father's funeral. It's in this context that the mature love is posited, with Zhao Di insisting that her husband's cortege be done in the traditional way, even in the winter, with his coffin carried for miles and miles from the county morgue back to the village home where their love had blossomed and endured.

This is a film of few words yet deep pure emotion and stunning rural vistas --- a must view for anyone who longs for the ways things might have been.

2009-08-21T23:51:00.010+08:00

Together (There are heroes!)

In my previous post, the one below that addresses the national health care reform debate now taking place in the United States, I made a fairly sweeping attack against what I see as the degradation of American values. What are values? Those ideals that we hold dear. Values that Americans, Singaporeans, Vietnamese, Chinese and others the world over consider important include friendship, work, nation, education, technology and material gain, just to name a few. This is not to say that all citizens of our respective countries, or that you and I, or that my brothers and I have exactly the same views of these areas, but we do generally see the worth of each.

Similarly, "family" is a core value in all societies. However, the way family is defined and value that family is given by different individuals, and within different societies, can and does differ. Here are some "funneling questions" I have on the matter of family:

What exactly is meant by the term family? How does one's family differ from, say, one's tribe? Where are the boundaries of our family? In short, are we all brothers and sisters or not?

There are related issues and questions:

Most of the so-called "great" religions of the world espouse the view that we should extend a helping hand to others, not just to family members. But does that happen? To whom and in what way do we typically extend help? Am I or am I not my mother's, sister's, brother's, son's and/or neighbor's "keeper"?

And just how powerful can the love of family -- be that nuclear or planetary -- be?

In that previous post, I made the claim that for many Americans (not all, of course), individual material gain is more important than social equality/justice. I also wrote that this translates into the widespread belief that it's a dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest survive, and that the government should stay out of the fray.

That is one of my worries about American society (and any society, for that matter). That while we are often far too familial, tribal, national (in short, in-group) focused, the even bigger problem is that we are too individualistic or self-serving, and that we don't envision ourselves sharing this planet and facing challenges together enough.

An e-mail from a friend made me think about this on a different level. She sent a link to a video that, upon viewing, made me reflect on my own ideas of family, support and togetherness (or teamwork) again. It also forced me to reevaluate my sweeping generalization about Americans.

Check out this inspiring Youtube video about Dick and Rick Hoyt, an American father and son team with an exceptional bond, and see what I mean.

If you'd like to see another 10-minute documentary (with audio) about Rick and Dick Hoyt, click here.

There are real heroes in this world after all.

2009-08-14T18:20:00.023+08:00

Too Much Fat in the Health Care Reform Debate in America

I wrote the message that follows below and posted part of it in response to a blog article in the online journal, The Huffington Post. The article, entitled "Obama's New Hampshire Town Hall Brings Out Birthers, Deathers and More," relates the sad and truly violent situation that has arisen in America as a result of the health care reform debate.

One reader of the article mentions in a "blog comment" how Americans have been "left behind" because of their poor education, and as a result, they don't understand complex issues such as those involved in the health care reform discussion. An example of such ignorance is the number of public statements that have been made by anti-reform advocates who warn that the government should stay clear of their Medicare, itself a government-run medical assistance program for the elderly.

This same ignorance has led to an uninformed, irrational and potentially dangerous reaction to the Obama Administration's proposal for national health care reform. (See the article and the video that accompanies it here to get a clear idea of how dangerous the right wing in America is making this issue.)

Here's my rant on the issue:

Many Americans have been left behind. We have nurtured a society where sports worship and "American idols," TV dramas and superstardom are elevated to the highest level. Goals and values are skewed toward competition, acquisition and materialism in the extreme and away from fairness and empathy. In many neighborhoods kids learn the importance of money, and they are inculcated with the idea that the real heroes are of three types: gun-toting soldiers, flashy TV/movie stars and rich sports idols. Period. The time when being an astronaut or a doctor, an explorer or a teacher or a humanitarian was viewed as a heroic profession has seemingly passed. It's now all about the image and the cash. The more the merrier. Big is beautiful: big house, big car, big boat, big screen, big slice of pizza, big salary, big abs, big boobs, big hair...you get the picture.

High schools have bigger budgets for football and basketball than for their libraries. University coaches make more money than the professors. (In the rest of the world, this would be an absurdity.)

The result: the mentality, both corporate and individual, that what's most important in life is getting all you can get, getting the biggest slice possible from society, hoarding what is yours, with little sense of payback or sharing. It's based on a recipe, maligned though it may be, from the survival of the fittest manual. (You see the results of that in the way that many on Wall Street, during the recent economic crisis, were so clearly in it just for the money, and achieving that end made any means justifiable.) For many Americans, the very idea of government is bad because it represents an intrusion into that process, a chink on the armor of that ethos.

Meanwhile, in countries like Singapore, like China, like Japan, hard work and study are highly valued (maybe to an exaggerated extent!), and egalitarianism is not scorned. Sure, ownership/ materialism is alive and well even in Asia, but there also seems to be a focus on developing in kids and supporting in other citizens a set of social values that exists for the sake of conscientious economic development, a better/safer neighborhood, more lucrative opportunities for the youth and for future generations, not just more money and power and glory for the winners.

A former student of mine, a university graduate now doing an education diploma at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, recently told me that one of her main first-year teacher training courses is "service learning," in which she needs to develop a project that serves some particular community. That sort of focus is precisely what I'm talking about.

I grew up in Ohio and love my homeland for many reasons--but having lived and taught in several different countries in Asia for many years (and in the US before that), I see the difference between "us and them," and the fact is, it's glaring. Individualism in America has finally gone over the top. So much of it is so clearly about ME ME ME getting as MUCH as I possibly can. (Even Michelangelo's David, after doing a tour of the US, returned to Europe looking overfed. See photo above!)

For many in the US, education is seen only as a means to that end. To hell with social awareness, to hell with ensuring that society functions to everyone's benefit (which is why the regulatory bodies created by government are so loathesome to so many Americans). To hell with helping out the other(littler) guy (unless I can show off my generosity to my church group or to my friends). To hell with the big picture and the antiquated ideal of making America a place where even the "tired and the poor" can have a good, clean and safe home, top-notch educational opportunities, and affordable health care!

Where this will lead I don't know. But things aren't looking good.

2009-08-04T18:31:00.028+08:00

World Without Walls

Many of us tend to inhabit a very narrow slice of real estate and we do not think globally. For those of us living in Singapore, that's very easy to do. We tend to get caught up in our own lives here on the "wired island," we focus on our own work, study, family and friends and we forget about the other six billion plus inhabitants of this planet.

Why is thinking globally important? Well, for starters, just consider the old cliche: no man is an island. We all depend on each other, and in many ways, are affected by the actions of others. The recent H1N1 outbreak and our vulnerability should demonstrate this very clearly. Add to that the fact that Singapore is dependent on Malaysia for its fresh water and food stuffs and on China and a number of ASEAN countries for the bulk of its other raw materials, and then on places like the US and Japan for its export market, and you get the picture. And then of course there's our obvious interconnectedness via the World Wide Web. No island is even really an island in today's world.

There is another reason why thinking globally is important that I'd like you to consider: Doing so for the sake of improving the lives of others, and in that way, enhancing your own humanity. Those readers who are NUS students may wonder how they can do this, but within our "global university" (or so the advertising goes) there really are a number of ways. For one, there are numerous university programs that allow you to visit countries in the region to do volunteer activities. Some of you may have already been on one of these. As an example, at least one of my former students went to Sumatra after the Boxer Day Tsunami and contributed time and energy in that major relief effort. Others have gone on trips to Cambodia, China or Myanmar and participated in community development projects. In a very real sense, your NUS education puts you in a good position to gain the experience and develop the understanding and skills necessary for helping better the lives of the less fortunate among our global neighbors.

For volunteer programs outside Singapore, cleck out these sites: International Student Volunteers, the Habitat for Humanity, and Doctors Without Borders. If you're reading this and you happen to be an NUS student, and you're looking for a way to study abroad, check out this link.

One platform for developing the skills and understanding needed for being a more complete world citizen is the course that I am fortunate to teach: ES2007S, Professional Communication -- Principles and Practice. For those of you soon to be or now enrolled in the course, I welcome you. It really is a world without walls that we're talking about when we start our journey in refining communication skills. But that is a journey whose very first step begins with you acknowledging that there is a heck of a lot more to life than what we see out our own front door.

2009-08-02T13:07:00.004+08:00

Smashing Stereotypes

When we hear the phrase mail-order bride, we usually have a negative image in our mind. The article linked here is written by a Ukrainian-American woman and her story smashes the stereotypes and shows what happiness and fulfillment can be achieved through courage and initiative. Dream the dream!

2009-07-20T12:27:00.001+08:00

Why blog?

There are many reasons why blogging is a major component of ES2007S, Professional Communication: Principles and Practice, the course I teach at the National University of Singapore. Key course objectives include facilitating discussions of communication principles, encouraging students to practice various communication strategies, and promoting opportunities for them to develop their written communication skills. In that context, the logic of blogging falls neatly into place.

One reason for using blogging is that each student's blog becomes her platform for summarizing, analyzing and synthesizing ideas, presenting opinions and even story-telling on a number of communication topics. Because responding to any given post assignment can be done independently, where and when the student chooses, she also has time to mull over the topic and address it without the sort of pressures that might exist in class. At the same time, because the post will, in turn, be read and responded to by classmates and by me, the student writer needs to be aware of the demands of her authentic audience. When she reads that audience's comments, she needs to take their perspectives into consideration, at which point she can either respond to those accordingly in follow up comments or ignore them (perhaps at her own peril).

Another reason blogging makes sense for the course is that it's a chance for the student to consider and reconsider her means of written expression. Communication, especially of the professional sort, is not just about assembling information, thinking ideas through and developing opinions. It's as much or more so about expressing the information, ideas and opinions in a manner that demonstrates clarity, concreteness, conciseness and yet completeness, coherence, courtesy and grammatical correctness. (I'd add to these well known 7Cs of writing what I call the "mother" of them all: creativity). In the various course blog posts, the student can and usually will take these criteria into consideration. Not doing so might bring on the critical wrath of the teacher and/or any number of highly competitive classmates.

A final reason that blogging suits the course is that it is an Internet-based exercise, and in that way, a very current means of understanding, shaping and reshaping one's thoughts on a whole range of issues for anyone in cyberspace, while at the same time, archiving the process and product. The growing blog eventually evolves into an open-to-the-world interactive journal, a place where one's reflective character comes to be illustrated with words, audio and video clips, still photography and cartoons, website referrals AND feedback.

Appropriately, at the end of any blog post, week, month, term or year, the writer can sit back and take stock of the whole concoction, glowing perhaps with self satisfaction, or alternatively, flushing the whole thing or any part of it into the cyber-septic tank with a quick click.

My list of reasons for using blogging is not exhaustive. To learn why a professional coach sees blogging as important, check out this link.

2009-07-15T00:26:00.030+08:00

Randomness, the Cambrian Explosion and a Eulogy to Donald Thorpe (not necessarily in that order)

One of the things I love about maintaining this particular blog is that it gives me free rein to write on any topic that comes to mind. As the title states, it is ostensibly a venue for my students and me to meet outside of class (and where I can centralize their blog addresses on a list). At the same time, I admit that I use it to satisfy my need to think and write things through. Thanks to those broad parameters, the topics you can find listed here include everything from my thoughts on a university-sponsored visit to Vietnam, reflections on my 2008 trip back to Ohio, and a list of "green topics" for my students in Semester II 2008-2009. The apparent randomness in themes available to me is something that I relish.

Today, as it happened, I learned of the passing of one of my first coaches, Donald Thorpe. Sadly, he passed away at age 76 in an Ohio hospital of an undisclosed illness. Reading his name in the obituary, then that of his surviving wife and six sons -- Ronnie, Dale, Dino, Craig, Bart, and Kevin, all guys I went to school with -- brought back a flood of memories. The first memory was the most recent: in my hometown of Thornville, Ohio, last month, I had said to my sister Betsy that I felt like contacting Dino and visiting his father Don. Unfortunately, I missed my chance.

The broader set of memories puts me way back in the late 60s when my brothers and I were encouraged by our dad to "try out" for Little League baseball. Try outs, if my memory serves me correctly, consisted of 40 or 50 boys between the ages of 7 and 13 --roughly the age of elementary school -- all going up to the baseball diamond on a Saturday morning and showing our stuff: fielding grounders and pop flies, taking a turn or two at bat, running the bases, hanging out. Then the coaches, mainly dads themselves, divided us up into four groups of roughly similar talent and gave each group a name. My brothers and I ended up on the Braves, a team that, at least in my first year, had Don Thorpe as an assistant coach. He was one of the fathers conducting the try out. On the team along with us Blackstones were five of the six athletic Thorpe boys and, I seem to recall, a Hunt boy and maybe another kid or two.

Don Thorpe was a tobacco-chewing, stubble-faced transplant to our area, with the beginnings of a pot belly even then, and I vividly remember how he'd be playing ball right there with us kids, encouraging us to throw straight or keep our eye on the ball, all in his slow-paced West Virginia drawl, then wiping the sweat from beneath the bill of his black and red Braves cap. After we boys were assigned to the Braves, we were given similar caps. More importantly though, under Don's guidance, being on the Braves became the nexus for some serious camaraderie, and for our developing a strong sense of group identity, giving us that first feeling of "doing it for the team." It remained that way, too, for at least three or four summers after that first try out. Even after a few of us became too old to play Little League, we'd follow Don and the younger Thorpes and Blackstones to Braves games in Thornville and on the road.

Skills-wise, I never was more than a mediocre player (and a second baseman because I had a weak throw), and the team never won the league or any grand tourneys, but we still had a great time and I learned a lot. It's hard to zoom in on all of the details now that 40 years have passed. What stands out is that our games were played mostly on Friday nights, with the ball diamond and outfield bathed by sets of huge flood lights arranged atop tree- trunk poles. I also recall the wafting smell of popcorn and the hot dogs being served by feisty Lion's Club members like ole Burt Cooperider, Jake Shaner and my grandpa Jerry Blackstone, who'd watch from the concession stand conveniently installed in a green wooden building protected by mesh fencing just behind home plate.

Added to that, there was heavy competition in the air, because our opponents, the Yankees, Indians and Dodgers, were all our schoolmates and neighborhood friends. Each of us played our heart out to capture playground bragging rights and to impress our siblings, parents, grandparents and any potential girlfriends watching from the hard-plank bleacher seats.

The more I reflect on that time, the more I realize the trait that made Coach Don seem special was the gentleness of his instruction. He was the type who wouldn't bawl us out when we made an error or fanned out in three pitches. He'd clap and say something like "get 'em next time," then he'd put a juicy wad in the dust.

That style was in contrast to the manner of our first head coach, Jesse Hunt. Jesse was a huge bear of a man, with a big bushy eyebrows and the sort of booming voice that could scare the wits out of you just as your concentration was drifting off across the grass in right field. Whenever we lost a game that first year, Jesse would wear the agony of defeat on his face like an upset ogre. Not Don though. When he took the team over from Jesse, each of us boys rejoiced. Even in the heat of competition, he was cool, calm and collected, allowing our sporting antics to be augmented with barbs, gags and giggles that made it much more fun. Such was the case whether we were on the losing side or not.

Years later, some people could have speculated that it was Don's mild manners that contributed to a few of his boys drifting into so much trouble. Dino was the classic example. He was the one my age, cute as a button, and definitely the smoothest-talking Thorpe boy, and probably the best athlete amongst the whole bunch of us. (He eventually gave up baseball but set long-standing high school records for pole vault and broad jump.) By the time we were all in high school, he was running full throttle with local hoods, looting vending machines and robbing gas stations for a good time, even knocking up a classmate's sister and eventually getting sent up the river for failure to pay child support. The oldest brother, Ronnie, also ended up doing time, on two separate occasions. As with their more law-abiding brothers though, I never saw either of them as bad guys. They just seemed restless and willing to take risks, as young guys often do, and they had the added misfortune of getting caught. In later years when I recalled these stories, I'd guess it was the tough economic situation of the Thorpes that was the leading factor in all that, but I would never once think that Don hadn't tried his best to give his family what they needed.

How might any of this relate to the Cambrian explosion, that time roughly 570 million years ago when life on earth went into hyperdrive and new species multiplied after an era of mass extinctions?

Well, currently I'm reading a controversial book loaned to me by a friend. The work by British author Christopher Hitchens, who Stephen Prothero of the Washington Post called a "fundamentalist atheist," is entitled God is Not Great. In it, in a chapter entitled "Arguments from Design," Hitchens discusses, among other things, the Burgess Shale, a geological site in British Columbia revealing Cambrian-era fossils of bizarre animals such as the marrelle and opabinia, from roughly 500 million years ago. The place has been called the "Rosetta stone for decoding life forms." In that context Hitchens also presents comments made by the late great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould regarding an appearance in the shale of one particular vertebrate creature called Pikaia, which he speculated led eventually to all vertebrates, including man. According to Hitchens, Gould went so far as to say that if, by chance, Pikaia had not come into being, all life as we know it on earth would have never come into existence.

With that, Hitchens writes of the random chance of evolution, and at one point he states that "we are the offspring of history." Whether one considers such statements controversial or not, they are compelling. And when you add to them the idea (also mentioned by Hitchens) that a large number of renowned scientists will tell you that there are 700 regions of the human genome where genes have been reshaped by natural selection, the argument for the seeming power of randomness, of chance, as some variations become selected for and others not, depending on environmental conditions, swirls higher and higher into heady stuff.

In that context of this reading, my mind went back to what I see as the less disputable idea that there is a degree of "chance" in any social circumstances, and I recalled my Little League baseball try outs, the fact that I was chosen, by who knows what criteria really, to play on one particular team, the Thornville Braves, and in that way, I became a player for this gentleman named Don Thorpe, from whom I learned a great deal about teamwork as my brothers and I bonded with him and his sons. If anyone of us had become a famous ball player, I'm sure we would have pointed to Don as our inspiration. As it turned out, none of us ever went on to play in major league baseball. Still, in retrospect I recognize that there was something miraculous about that chain of occurrences. Some might call this fate, of course. Others may see it as a divine act, part of God's ultimate plan. For me it is not so easy to define, though on a fundamental level, Don was meaningful for my baseball experience and, indirectly, for the way I approach teaching. (Firm but friendly.)

In his "Arguments from Design" chapter, Hitchens also had presented his own anecdote with its roots in West Virginia (as were Don Thorpe's). To make a point about the dangers of declarations of "divine intervention," he mentioned the recent case in which 13 coal miners were trapped underground after an explosion, and how, after news reports had prematurely declared that a "miracle" had happened and all the men had escaped alive, the reality turned tragic as each man was found dead.

That, too, may seem ridiculously random here. (Am I now pushing the envelope and your patience? Surely.) But as should be clear by now, I believe that in every social context, there is indelible, inescapable meaning for the individual(s) and the group itself.

That's what I'm really exploring in each of these blog posts: the meaning that certain people, various events, ideas that I've discovered, the odd artifice, and interactions, past, present and future, hold for me.

Thank you for following the circuitous path of this one.

2009-07-08T22:08:00.037+08:00

Reflecting on My Past Experience with Russia and Obama's Speech at the New Economic School in Moscow

From 1972 through 1979, I studied Russian language, first in high school, then at university. I had been intrigued with Russian history, culture and society ever since, as a primary six school student back in the 60s, I'd read a chapter in my geography textbook about how difficult life was in the Soviet Union and how pitiful it was that its leaders wanted to rule the world, even to the point of being willing to destroy America. Oh yes, I learned, we were all potential victims in a Cold War.

My interest, or curiosity, took on added meaning one day when my P6 teacher asked me to assist a visiting lecturer in carrying his box of slides and slide projector from his car and into our school auditorium for a presentation - many years pre-Powerpoint - about his trip to the Soviet Union. The guest lecturer turned out to be Mr. Edward Taylor, a humble but world-wise and hilarious gentleman who would soon be my high school Russian teacher and the inspiration for my future studies and a career in education. What amazed me about his presentation was how he captured the faces of the Russian people. While the USSR was vilified throughout my youth by the American media, even by many of my relatives and neighbors who feared nuclear war, its people --at least those portrayed in Mr. Taylor's slideshow -- looked normal, and not like bomb-wielding homicidal freaks. What was the real story, I wondered.

Three years after high school, in 1977, after I'd been studying Russian for nearly 5 years, I left Ohio State University as a 3rd year uni student embarking on his first international trip, a study abroad program at the famed Pushkin Institute in Moscow. My goal had been to put all the Russian I'd been learning into practice, to walk the streets of my newfound literary "heroes" (from the very real guys like Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev, to characters such as Raskolnikov and Prince Myshkin), and to check out America's number one foe from the inside out. For a dude from small town America, it was a monumental, foundation-shattering experience. The travel itself, from Columbus to New York, then to Luxembourg, then to Frankfurt and West Berlin (my first plane rides), then by train through the Berlin Wall and into "Eastern Europe," across the DDR, Poland and into the USSR and on to Mockba, allowed me to "get my head around" the distances, mile by mile, and to prepare for the massive shift in cultural and geopolitical perspectives.

Then there was my daily life as a student. From eating soft boiled eggs and sausages first thing every morning in a dreary cafe in the university hotel to traveling across Moscow by train and bus to the school, to interacting with my Russian teachers, fellow (mainly American!) students and local friends, it would all touch me in a way that few experiences ever had. What broke first, I suppose, was the illusion that I had held until that time of America being the center of the universe. Suddenly, there I was, speaking another language to satisfy my basic needs, seeing sights (Red Square, St. Basil's, the Kremlin) that I'd only read about, studying in classrooms with photos of Lenin and Marx hanging in them, and --despite the mortal enemy rap I'd learned so well -- partying down with young commies and dangerous dissidents alike, learning that we were very much alike, after all.

Two of my best friends from that era, a young Chechen artist named Shamil and his sidekick, a Russian black marketeer named Valya, even introduced me to something I'd never expected to find in the land of Lenin, Stalin and Krushchev: ass-kicking anti-establishment attitude! In the back alleys, cramped crash pads, and beer halls that they inhabited, in the alternative lifestyles they had, Shamil and Valya showed attitude. In fact, these guys openly trashed many things Soviet, questioned the ideals and means of their leadership as well as the passivity of their fellow citizens, all that while listening to Pink Floyd and other forbidden Western musical groups and buying and selling every piece of foreign apparel they could get their hands on. They also talked of bringing another revolution to their "fucked" homeland. Through this they were, I surmised, yearning in some odd way to be more capitalist than me, which smacked of serious irony for an Ohio-farm-boy-turned-intrepid-explorer in search of the heart and soul of the socialist dream.

Little of what I found in Moscow, mind you, had ever been discussed in my international studies, political science and literature classes at OSU (although there was a Dostoevskian tragic quality to my new friends' existence). The focus of many classes was either on the archaic or the life-threatening. Once, when I'd wanted to research and write a paper on samizdat literature (underground self-published materials that had begun to filter out of the USSR), a distinguished professor had even told me to focus on the classics. In Moscow my friends lectured me on the reality, insisting that a focus on the so-called classics, whether in art, music or literature, was just a means by the the authorities for keeping discussion of change out of public discourse.

My book learning had taken place in the Brezhnev years, a period when the US-USSR competition seemed to have reached its epitome, when many of my countrymen envisioned that every Russian (or even student of Russian!) was a probable KGB agent and when many Soviet citizens were keen to show Americans how evolved their society was. It was also a period when the huge statues of Lenin and well-armed military parades symbolized Soviet might and hostile US and Soviet relations had been spun into scary acronyms like MAD --- mutually assured destruction --- and heavy metaphors such as the Iron Curtain.

Those images have fallen by the wayside in the last 20 years, of course. Which brings us back to Russia today, to Obama, and to his speech at the graduation ceremony of the New Economic School....

Nearly twenty years have passed since the country that my friends Valya and Shamil lived in ceased to exist. The Soviet Union of Lenin's dream, of Stalin's purges, of Krushchev's shoe being pounded on the lectern at the UN, is no more. This is not to say that Russia today has ceased to be anything like its Soviet incarnation. The corruption that still exists there might seem a vestige of earlier times. That a privileged few control vast wealth and resources might seem a vestige of earlier times. Even the fears, doubts and distrust that many Russian citizens have toward political institutions, toward leadership, toward America itself, might seem a vestige from earlier times. But there have been mountains of change.

In fact, at the end of his speech to future entrepreneurs and business leaders at the New Economic School, an institution whose very existence speaks of amazing changes in the Russian landscape, Obama carried the geological metaphor further when he said that "Russia has cut its way through time like a mighty river through a canyon, leaving an indelible mark on human history as it goes." Yes indeed.

What I especially liked about Obama's speech was not just that an American president was actually taking the time to address Russian college graduates, but also the clear intelligence and insight of his comments. Obama offered the students a rich analysis of how Russians and Americans (in fact, citizens worldwide) have many common interests. He spoke of how Russian success could also be interpreted as American success. He talked of the need for citizens and leaders of both countries to work together with the goal of building a better world with better opportunities and a better future for all involved.

I like that goal, and admire Obama's attempt to be inclusive. He's a guy who knows that people are just people, no matter where they live, no matter what their national or ethnic or religious identity. French, Iranians, Chinese, Iraqis, Chechens, Filipinos, Kenyans, Russians, Americans. We want a chance to fulfill our needs, a life that spells security and a measure of comfort, a good place to raise our kids, a brighter future for ourselves and our communities.

But Obama's also a guy with few illusions: he knows that in the face of growing demands and shrinking resources, peace and harmony hang by a thread because the world is the way it is, a place of backward tribal beliefs and dark corners of vice, raw emotions bubbling and chasms waiting to be filled with unsuspecting victims. Still, he's trying to put a positive spin on the human spirit and international relations, he's trying to engage others and reverse past trends -- down with all the stereotyping, vilifying, sabre-rattling. Out with the base need to conjure up ghouls and antagonistic, war-mongering sentiment in phrases like the Axis of Evil and the Evil Empire (or even the Great Satan).

And who can blame the prez? We're all in this world together. Look at the potential for disaster that exists by reviewing the mess that's been created in the last 100 years.

There seems to be cause for optimism, however guarded. At least the Russian and American leaders have sat down at the table and seriously talked about hot topics like easing bilateral tensions, reducing nuclear arms, shoring up international institutions and improving cooperation. Let's hope these guys' intentions are as sincere as they seem.

In these interesting times, I have to wonder what ever became of my old friends Valya and Shamil and what they might think now. Viva la revolucion?

Find the transcript of Obama's Moscow speech here.

2009-06-24T11:26:00.006+08:00

Homeward Bound

I study the deluxe road atlas. From my sister Betsy's log house on the outskirts of New Salem, I'll head south on State (Ohio) Route 188 for 400 yards (just past the graveyard where my great-great grandparents are buried), turn right on New Salem Road and proceed for half a mile, turn left on Canal Road and take that about 10 miles. It's mostly agricultural with farms and barns and the corn nearly waist high just before the 4th of July, all interspersed with attractive homes on five acre spreads that make me jealous. When Canal eventually intersects with SR 37, I will turn right and head north. There's when I will really feel like I'm heading north by northwest, back to Chicago, and by extension, back to the Far East.

Homeward bound? This is where things get sticky. I was raised in an idyllic land of broad fields and enchanted forests, small towns and friendly neighbors. As an American, I was told that we had the "best damn country in the world." It would have made sense to become an insurance salesman, a radio deejay or local coach and teacher. What dangled before me was the typical American dream: cool career, job security, good pay, a house with a yard, a boat in the lake, the successful family, all the other fineries. As a kid though, something pushed me to take another route, the path least taken. The effort I made with studies was encouraged, and respected enough, but my choices (a fascination with exploring the world's cultures and peoples, English language and communication teaching, living across Asia) seemed random to some, outlandish to others, mostly improbable.

Where has it all taken me, nearly 30 years since I graduated from college? To a 1600-square-foot condo in crowded Singapore, albeit with a job I love at an educational institution whose mission I believe in. Still, I'm at heart a country lad, and I do miss the aromas of a Midwest summer, the stars above cool June evenings, and my many family members who would just as soon run barefoot across fresh cut lawns and entertain on the back porch as drive fancy German cars and shop in London.

Where am I then?

In but not of, or of but not in.

That might seem to put me at a loss when compared to others. I don't own a muscle car, a trophy home with an expansive yard or a boat in the marina. I do have an education, a cluttered resume and a career, several credit cards and bank accounts, but not enough money to ever think of retirement and not enough sellable traits to mount my name in lights or to include my John Henry in an esteemed authors' index.

My social network is not measured by the club meetings I attend, the clambakes I'm invited to or the pictures of friends I have on Facebook. But I do count as close buds folks from worlds that my kin in Ohio have never been exposed to and whom my students in Singapore think only exist in movies. (That's not a boast but a function of my history and lifestyle.)

I might be set in my ways, but I do try my best at empathizing with different perspectives, at listening to others, at enduring the little aggravations with a sense of hunmor.

I believe, too. In goodness. In positive thinking. In fellowship. In progress. But I have few illusions. The graveyard down the road from Betsy's is filled with what remains of the best of intentions, the most heartfelt passions, lives with exquisite virtues and values. Names on stones big and small, polished or placed on plaques in the dirt, are all now just that: names.

No matter what side of the lawn I am on, no matter what I own and where I visit and how I teach, there is a spot waiting for me in cold anonymity.

Before then, all I can really do is drive carefully, and enjoy the ride.

2009-05-19T17:36:00.014+08:00

More from the fictional side:

Illustrious Uncle Bob

Everybody agreed: Uncle Bob was a surprising character, although his wife, Aunt Jane, had the more appopriate opinion. Bob was a unique individual, a one of a kind.

Aunt Jane was the one who folks in the movie industry would have liked to have gotten their hands on. Her story, and especially the one she told us of Bob just after he passed away, had all the stuff Hollywood seems to like: adventure, daring, and tragedy, with some odd twist of redemption thrown in for good measure.

It was the winter of 2004 that tragedy struck Uncle Bob and Aunt Jane. They had been married for nearly thirty years, and their only daughter Tina, a bright, soft-spoken girl with a huge smile, had just graduated from Northwestern, an amazing feat considering that she was dyslexic. But, as everyone said, Tina had her mom's intelligence and her father's drive. The sad thing was that she would never have a chance to really flower. One night during the holidays, just a week before Christmas, Tina went out shopping with two girlfriends, never to come home alive again. A video clip we saw on the evening news showed the story: a pick up truck nearly cut in half by the combustion of ice on a wintery Chicago street, mixed with speed, mass and a stationary tree. My cousin Tina wasn't yet 22 when she died, and her parents were devastated.

The accident weighed on Aunt Jane in a way that we all might have expected for a doting mother. She reacted normally, I suppose, for someone whose only child had been taken from her so violently. I was serving in the military in Iraq at that time and so wasn't around to experience any of this firsthand, but my mother and others would tell how Jane didn't answer the phone for months after the accident, and supposedly she wouldn't get out of bed for weeks on end. Nearly three years after that my mom recalled visiting and noticing how Jane still kept Tina's room just like it always had been, with her iPod on the dresser and her shoes by the door, as if Tina'd just gone out to the store and might get back anytime.

Mom said that the therapy and painkillers had worked to some degree. Jane could be civil, even verbal most of the time, unless the topic turned to Tina. Then Jane's eyes would go remote and she'd tear up and leave the room.

Uncle Bob had a different way of dealing with things. He'd always been a bit of a stoic, standing back from issues and not getting emotionally involved. I don't know if that came from his service in the military during the late 60s, or if it came from something else more basic. Bob was Asian, after all, and maybe he was hardwired for not showing his emotions like the white family he'd married into. The only thing clear was that he dealt with Tina's death in his own way, and no matter what anyone of us might have thought, it got him through the night.

Uncle Bob was a Filipino, but somehow he'd gotten tangled up with the US military during the Vietnam War. Rumor was he'd even worked for the CIA back in the day, or Air America, the CIA operation that was carrying on a secret war in Laos. I don't have any of this on good authority though. At family gatherings whenever Bob, Jane and Tina would visit us in Dubuque, Bob seemed to shy away from any talk of the army or the war.

A few times I did hear him mention the good life back in Southeast Asia. He'd allude to the beaches, the bars and the girls, but in a way that sounded erudite. One night after drinking with my father, Uncle Bob admitted he'd been a stud as a young man, blaming it on "a quiet intoxication with the feminine form." Bob's putting it that way nearly brought my father to tears.

Even Aunt Jane made no secret about Bob's casanova past, and on more than one occasion, I remember him getting uncomfortable with her for telling one story too many. The last story, puzzled together by a group of us at his wake, went something like this.

In the fall of 2008, Aunt Jane had waved goodbye to Bob as he hit the road again for an extended visit back to his roots. At that time, they were having a hard time communicating, or so Jane admitted, saying that she couldn't get herself out of the usual funk. "I was hard to live with," she confessed to my mother, " and probably wasn't much fun. Combined with the Midwest winter, which he'd always hated, poor Bob'd had enough."

Bob's trips back to Asia had become more and more common. He had retired from the US Immigration & Naturalization Service a year or two after Tina died, and though he didn't collect a huge retirement, I'm sure it was plenty for him to go off on a five-month tour of Southeast Asia every year or so. I was in Chicago starting grad school the last time he went, and that winter every now and again I'd stop by and visit Aunt Jane, at first to make my mom happy, then later because it seemed like the right thing to do. After a couple times Aunt Jane and I both felt more comfortable. It was on one of those visits that I heard a real shocker from her: she'd never been to Southeast Asia, not in 30 years of marriage, for a reason inconceivable to me. As she put it, "land mammals were not made for flying so far."

That didn't stop her from communicating with Bob regularly though. As it turned out, they would e-mail each other at least once a week. At one point, Aunt Jane asked me if I'd like to read the mails Bob had sent her. She'd printed them out and kept them in a pile on the kitchen counter just for me.

What I remember most was being blown away by the extent of Bob's travels. I could only imagine what he was experiencing from the way he'd put the name of the place he was sending the note from in the subject box of the hotmail. One e-mail was sent from Singapore, where Bob wrote he was staying with his brother's daughter and her husband. Another was sent from an island off the coast of Malaysia, where he said he'd rented a beach hut for a whole month for next to nothing. Still another half dozen or so he'd sent from somewhere in Thailand, and yet another from Cambodia. The most obscure place he'd sent an e-mail from was Bhutan. (I hadn't even heard of the place.) I have to admit though, his letters were far from interesting:

Hi,

I'm fine. The weather's been good away from the monsoons. Gained another pound from all the good food. Hope you're well.

Big hugs,

Bob

A month passed and I didn't hear from my aunt or bother to call her. Then the most unexpected thing happened. It was a typically horrible Saturday in March for Chicago, a day when I planned to lay around and watch college basketball. My mom called and told me that Bob was coming in and that Aunt Jane had a fever so she'd wondered if I would go to the airport and meet him. That sounded like a plan, so I agreed. What I didn't know was that Bob was arriving with guests.

Before going to O'Hare I debated whether to drive my new PT Cruiser or the old Jeep Cherokee. Finally, I opted for the Jeep, and lucky I did. For there at the terminal was Bob and three others, a very young, friendly and huggy couple and a slightly older woman. Uncle Bob called them "relatives."

The couple introduced themselves. The girl said her name was Ann. She looked more Caucasian than any of Bob's Filipino relatives I'd met before, with long blonde hair and blue-green eyes. I was startled that she spoke English with such a heavy accent. Ann's hubbie was different. He had very dark skin, and was a cheerful, outgoing guy. He asked me to call him Sovann. He spoke much better English than Ann, thanks, he reported, to the fact that he was now living and working in Singapore.

The other guest didn't make more than fleeting eye contact with me. Bob introduced her as Sovann's mother and called her Peach. She was quite a looker, with soft features, light brown skin, and brown hair tinted slightly auburn that ran to her thin waist. Although Bob said she was Sovann's mother, her relationship with the young couple seemed distant. She didn't give them (or me) any attention, and in some way, she seemed sullen.

I chalked that up to jet lag, but when it came to Bob, she acted very different. She followed every step Bob took and just stared at him as he pulled her oversized suitcase (in stark contrast to his backpack) to my car and later as he stood pointing out the direction of downtown to Sovann and Ann. Only Bob seemed to exist for her.

Bob acted weird around her, too. Without hearing a word from her, Bob seemed to know that she wanted a jacket from inside her carry on, which he quickly retrieved. When she spoke, it was only to him, and they shared a very endearing tone. The words she used were a mix of a few English phrases, "thank you," "yes yes," and a language that I'd never heard. Tagalog? It must have been their native tongue, I thought.

This all startled me a bit and made me wonder what Uncle Bob had been up to back in Southeast Asia.

As we drove south past the city and into the burbs, Bob sat up front with me, talking non-stop about what we were seeing. There in the back, Sovann and Ann exclaimed about all the sights and sounds, but Peach kept her eyes glued to Bob (I could see her in the rear-view mirror), and she remained perfectly silent.

I thought I had figured it all out. Bob had spent an awful lot of time away from home, and he'd only kept in touch by sending cryptic e-mails. Now he'd returned with the woman he was having an affair with. The young couple? Who knew who they really were? Maybe Sovann was the son, maybe not. It all made sense though, didn't it? Here was Uncle Bob, and this was his babe, his Southeast Asian squeeze. Okay, if that's what it took for him to get over Tina, well, who was I to argue?

But how could he bring the woman back to Chicago?

At Bob's command, I pulled into the Travelodge not far from his southside home. There we dropped Sovann, Ann and Peach off "to freshen up" in rooms Bob said he'd booked for them on the Net. (That reconfirmed my suspicions, of course.) Then he and I headed over to his house, where I dropped him without much ado.

Through the ensuing weeks, I heard nothing from Aunt Jane or Uncle Bob. I did hear from my mother that Bob and his guests had taken a road trip, and later I heard that Peach had gone back to Asia, but I never heard anything after that, and didn't think about it. Until the end.

Uncle Bob's heart attack came four months to the day after I'd picked him and the others up at O'Hare. And it wasn't until his candle-lit wake that I learned the truth.

I had been right in one way. There was something unusual about Uncle Bob's visitors. But it wasn't like I'd thought. They were relatives, just not in the sense that I'd ever imagined.

Aunt Jane and Sovann shared their story as we sat on the back deck and had Bob's memorial cake that hot summer night: Yes, Bob did have a special relationship with Peach. She was his first daughter, half Bob, half Cambodian.

Turned out Uncle Bob had had an affair with Peach's mother when he was stationed in Thailand back in the 60s. That's where Peach was born. Bob was not the typical expat rogue though, the kind who would knock up an Asian girl and split the scene. He'd paid Peach and her mother's way right from the start, and he would continue to support them for many years to come. The only glitch came when the crazy Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975. By that time, Peach and her mother were back in Phnom Penh where Bob had set them up in an apartment. But like everyone else at the time, the two were sent to a work camp in the countryside, and so Bob lost touch. Luckily for all of them, Peach's mother had a close friend back in Bangkok. It was the phone number of that friend that Peach's mother made the little girl memorize while they were in the camp.

Then the inevitable happened, and daughter and mother were separated. The two would never meet again.

Meanwhile, in the late 70s and early 80s, during the aftermath of the collapse of the Khmer Rouge government, Bob had gone looking for Peach and her mother several times, to no avail. Finally, late in 1983, just after Tina was born, he located his other daughter in Bangkok.

It had been after an arduous journey by fishing boat from southern Cambodia that Peach ended up in a Thai refugee camp. Remembering that one phone number, she managed to place a call to her mother's friend, and was rescued. Eventually, the friend's family adopted Peach.

By the time Bob located her, she was a teenager who'd grown attached to her new family. When Bob offered to take her to the US, she declined. Yet for all those years, they had kept in touch, and Bob continued to send well wishes and money, even after his Asian daughter had started a family of her own.

And Sovann, it was true, was her son, and in that way, Bob's grandson.

And now here he was on the deck that night with the rest of us, with his fiancee, Ann, and with Aunt Jane, each relishing the stories, relishing Uncle Bob in the afterglow.

2009-05-08T05:52:00.021+08:00

When I Close My Eyes

Saturday night, May 2nd, 2009, I reached a milestone. Nearly 24 years to the day after I had arrived in Malaysia for the first time, I now sat in the fifth row of the main hall of the Putra World Trade Centre and heard my name called before a nationally-televised audience as the co-producer of one of the nominees for best English album in the country. Back in late 1984, fresh from grad school, teaching as a lecturer in the ESL composition program at Ohio State University (OSU) and still living in a tiny second floor walk-up apartment in Columbus, Ohio, one evening I had actually spun a small globe and found my finger coming to a rest on the Malay Peninsula. What was that place like? I wondered. No matter, that's where I wanted to live, I'd decided. So I sent off a resume and cover letter to a school I had heard about from one of my Malay students, a cute tudong'd little lady named Fadzilah Din. The school was Institut Teknoloji MARA (ITM). Within two months I got a response: negative.

Ironically though, within a month of my rejection by ITM, I was walking in a corridor of Denney Hall on the OSU campus when I spied a poster announcing positions at a novel educational program also in Malaysia, and weirdly, also under the auspices of ITM. It was an American university-Malaysian government twinning program. Excitedly, I applied, and within a couple months was offered a position. In May 1985, just before the end of spring semester, I boxed up my worldly possessions, carting half to my mother's farmhouse in Pleasantville and shipping the others to an unknown address halfway around the world, and then departed myself for far horizons. Within weeks, my understanding of the world had changed forever.

After visiting Amsterdam, then passing through Dubai's airport, I finally arrived at the bustling Subang International Airport, getting my first whiff of the steamy tropics. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Then there I sat, 24 years later, amongst Malaysia's most recognized musical artists, people like Sheila Majid and M. Nasir, eventually to hear my name (co-producer) and the name of my Malaysian wife (artist, co-producer) rise above the din. The nomination was to no avail, of course. A more "famous" hip hop artist won the "honor" of producing the best anglo language fare, though his evening performance, accompanied by what looked like a private army clad in camouflage-blue khaki as he chanted "penggerak, penggerak" (march, march!) to a machine beat, was entirely in Malay.

Still, mine had certainly been a long, fruitful journey -- career-wise, artistically, socially, and spiritually -- albeit not always an easy one. But at that sweet moment, as I surveyed the richly-attired (and supposed) cultural elite in their glittering evening duds and coiffed dos, I tried to imagine the surprise that anyone who had known me 20 years earlier at ITM might have felt hearing my name pop up again (like a yelp in the jungle night?).

When I started this post, I'd wanted to write an expose of the Malaysian music scene and weave that together with an analysis of the country's odd and often unjust racial politics. I'd wanted to lash out at what I see as a bastardization of the artistic process in the music industry and at the corruption of the whole awards thing tainted by ethnic power manipulation and personal favoritism.

But at this early hour in Goodluck Garden, Singapore, listening to the same exuberant bird calls from a nearby mango tree that I used to hear at dawn back in my leafy suburban KL neighborhood (and invariably reflecting on that day's good fortune), I realized that there was more to this picture than could meet the eye, and that upon a closer look, on a personal level, I've been privileged to be here and to have learned and grown so much.

an emotional performance by Karen and the band Nrocinu; song lyrics and music by Karen and moi

2009-04-25T16:48:00.017+08:00

...and the Future is Now

The end of every academic term is invariably a bittersweet moment for me. It's a reprieve from a lot of hard work. But it's also the waning moments in a large number of intense relationships. In the previous three months, I've been privileged to have met and worked in depth with as many as 45 to 60 young individuals. Each one is special in his or her own way, each one a character with a whole lifetime worth of experiences shared (in varying degrees, of course), each has a certain knowledge base and fount of wisdom that has been tapped in various classroom sessions, each a face with a unique personality that's been unveiled.

It may be a cliche for me to say that what I learn from these university students is far more than I can ever "teach" because we hear this from teachers all the time; but it's not an exaggeration. (And I'm not just talking about the techy stuff I learn from them every term!) This past term, for example, I supervised 17 teams (of 48 students) in their survey-based research projects on "green topics." The range of topics developed, studied and then presented in terms of detailed written reports and presentations was amazing. The works presented of high quality. The ecological intelligence demonstrated was admirable.

Themes included everything from the attitude of student consumers toward the use of plastic bags to student views on the viability of electric cars. One group argued the case that recycling is wrongly overemphasized and then surveyed fellow students on the topic and expounded on the variety of perspectives, while another group investigated the littering of beaches in Singapore after collecting data from scores of respondent/beach users and critiquing views on the issue. A number of research groups even evaluated various areas of the the national university's "green" policy and procedures, producing highly informed reports that would be of value to real-world policy makers.

From following all these projects, and from reading eight postings of reflective, expository and creative writing in 48 individual blogs (and the subsequent commentary), I can honestly say that I have been in the company of many dynamic and seemingly tireless thinkers, proactive in their curiosity and initiative, highly critical in their observations, novel in their insights. I've seen them weather the combined storm fronts of too many courses and too much homework--- how they have persevered! I've seen them receive and accept direct open criticism. from me and peers --- how they've persevered! Many of these guys, whether from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, here in Singapore or elsewhere, have shown that they are intelligent in their abilities, competent in their methods, honest in their assessments of themselves and others, inspiring in their words and dreams, and forward-looking in their perspectives --- demonstrating the characteristics of future leaders for their respective fields.

These students have also reinforced my belief in the "good of humanity" as I have watched them meet and communicate with one another, bond and build teams amongst themselves, and support each other intellectually and emotionally while facing challenges under duress that might have brought even the most experienced professionals to their knees. And they seemed to achieve it all while still having time to complete Facebook quizzes and communicate with long list of friends!

In short, I've been extremely lucky. While observing things in some areas of the world leaves me begging for answers and feeling a bit listless, interacting with these students has given me a feeling of great satisfaction and renewed hope. If only they ARE the future....

...because the future is now!

The only questions that remains is this: What heights will these guys be allowed to achieve?

2009-04-05T17:01:00.020+08:00

The Reckless Search for Meaning: Another Week, Another Headline about Gun Violence in America

Gun violence in America. And the elements of the story always seem to be the same. A frustrated main character. Questionable motives. A slew of guns and a bullet-proof vest. A seemingly random place. The explosive moment(s). An innocent group of victims. Then widespread reports in the media.

The aftermath is always the same, too. A public outcry, the pointing of fingers. Some blame the gun industry, its producers, the sellers, the market, the buyers. Others take aim at the National Rifle Association, the organization that the late actor Charleston Heston represented. Those who either own a gun and/or who believe that gun ownership is as American as apple pie will blame only the perpetrators themselves. They claim that America is a country overwhelmed by the criminal and the insane, a land of too many psychoses and vices for any law-abiding citizen to ever give up his or her guns.

In reader comments written in response to an article that documented the recent massacre in Binghamton, New York, one writer suggested that had the immigrants and others who were killed been carrying guns, they would not have died. When reading that, I had this vision of an immigration officer at the US border issuing every entrant a new handgun, just in case.

No matter who is to blame, everyone agrees on one thing: gun violence is out of control in America. The image of hundreds of millions of guns strikes many as a sea that can never be crossed. The stat of thousands of gun deaths every year gives people worldwide the sense that America is still in its Wild West phase, that it's a place where shooting from the hip or getting gunned down in an argument is as routine as singing the country's praises.

When I was a kid in southern Ohio, owning a gun was certainly routine. All my friends, it seemed, had guns, generally used for hunting and for target practice (an odd sport, I now think). I was not from a hunting family though. Neither of my grandfathers and my father never brandished a gun in my sight. My brothers and I did briefly own pellet and bb-guns, which we used for shooting rats at my dad's grain elevator. But those were mere toys compared to the more common rifles and shotguns.

I remember the only time I ever did "real" hunting with a rifle. A friend and I were out looking for groundhogs in a pasture on his farm. I actually got one in my sights, and I shot it on the first go, I think. But before I could reach it, it had managed to crawl 10 meters then back into its hole (where I assume it died). Retracing its death march, I was sickened by the sight of the poor creature's blood lacing the ground from the spot where it had been shot to its home. Oddly, that was a "cathartic" experience for me, and my last outing as a recreational hunter.

Now as an American who has been removed from his country's shores and its "gun culture" for nearly half his life, I find the whole thing absurd. For me, from the outside looking in, using a gun to kill anything, whether a deer or a rabbit or a sparrow, seems as anachronistic as the old practice of burning widows must seem to the modern Indian, or as ridiculous as conducting female genital mutilation must appear to the contemporary African.

Killing humans, sadly, is just a few steps beyond killing other animals. (Look at how many of us train for that option in the military!) Granted, the vast majority of hunters would never do such a thing. However, with recreational hunting so popular and so many guns in circulation, and with TV and film showing us all just how easy it is to pull a trigger and how easy it is to "take someone bad out," the message gets through loud and clear. The gun option is on the table for those who want or need to use it.

And for many Americans, having the gun option is a must. They see it not just as a right enshrined in their country's constitution but as an element of their culture as deeply ingrained as their religious beliefs and their value for family. In that way, it's part of many Americans' identity. Owning a gun is one part security, but three parts self-image. For those characters at the extreme -- whether American or not (it's not a national thing, really, only a question of availability) -- their having and using a gun can become the ultimate power trip.

For this reason, I am not hopeful: the situation in the US will not change, at least not within the foreseeable future.

And for those of us who would rather not live in fear, who would rather that our children (generally) be safe at school and our other family members, friends and fellow citizens be out of harm's way, there are alternative places to spend parts of our lifetimes.

For more on this issue, read here.

*****

One Day's Top Ten Local Stories from an Ohio Newspaper

Below are the "top ten local stories" from the Columbus Dispatch, central Ohio's most widely circulated newspaper. The first story refers to two female university students being robbed at gunpoint. Four of the others also refer to gun incidents. That's 50% of the top ten local stories for a Monday morning.

Consider these headlines in light of my previous post on gun violence in America.

from The Dispatch:

Today’s Top Stories

2 OSU students robbed at gunpoint near campus
Man's body found on West Side lawn
19-year-old man dies in ATV accident
2 die in crash near Circleville
Columbus man killed self, shot girlfriend on East Side, police say
Police ID victim in East Side alley shooting
Male shooter sought in West Side market robbery
City ponders extra $6.5 million paid for paramedics over basic EMTs
'Green' visitor toilets to grace Governor's Residence
Census jobs plenty popular this time around

I love Ohio, and America in general, but this is ridiculous!

2009-03-14T16:55:00.013+08:00

On the Edge: Fulfillment and Disappointment in Communication

When you interact over a period of time with another person whether in a job, in a classroom or in any other formal or informal social situation, you develop a bond. That bond can be meaningful or perfunctory, depending on the value you and the "other" put on the interaction.

When I work with a person, whether we knew each other prior or not, whether our meeting will achieve the lofty heights of friendship or not, I feel like a slice of my life is being set before the person, and a slice of that person's life is being set before me, and that we each have a certain responsibility to "take care," to treat each other with respect. I feel that we need to pay real attention to each other if we want to demonstrate that our various encounters are worthwhile.

This is especially true when I meet a student in the classroom. I really don't walk into a teaching situation with the attitude that "you student, I teacher," "me great, you not." I don't adopt a pose that pits me "above" the students I work with, that sets me as their superior. I see each individual in the classroom as a vital member of a novel social situation; I see each person there as another living being who walks the earth just as substantially as me. I might have information and skills to share, sure enough, but I am also there to learn, to be invigorated, to feel alive. I also find it amazing that we have met at all, given the number of people who have inhabited planet Earth over the stretch of human history. In this sense, each teacher-student meeting is fateful.

And when I work with that student, as we communicate in class or via web communications, I feel the process has greater value than our individual contributions, that the laughs, smiles, sighs, ideas, achievements (and even certain disappointments) ought to take on significant meaning for each of us.

For this reason, when I encounter someone I've worked with or am working with in a class *outside* of class, on a sidewalk, in an eating place or mall or in a university hallway, and when in that situation, the person *consciously* ignores me, I'm invariably shocked. In situations such as these, it appears that the prior interactions we have had (especially in a course focusing on communication) were merely a mirage. It seems like "we don't know each other" and that we have never known each other after all.

And that bothers me. It makes me feel that I have wasted my breath, that I have wasted precious time, and that I have not had any effect on that person. It puts what we have shared into question. Suddenly, the attention given to me in class seems to have been feigned, faked, and for naught. Suddenly the effort I have made, whether in the form of asking and answering questions, telling stories, explaining concepts or areas of confusion, responding to blog posts or making comments on research reports and other assignments, seems to have been for one purpose alone: adding to the student's transcript & CAP.

Okay. Maybe I'm expecting too much. Maybe I'm too sensitive. Or maybe I'm just naive. But shouldn't the energy and time we've expended nurturing the bond between us mean that when we see each other beyond the classroom, we should at the very least acknowledge each other's existence?

What do you think?

2009-02-15T23:24:00.016+08:00

Of Slumdogs & Lost Boys: Two Important Films

I'm not in the habit of advertising films, but I am accustomed to making recommendations to my students. Recently, I had mentioned to a class the provocative documentary God Grew Tired of Us. This film follows the lives of three black African Dinka boys from their early childhood in southern Sudan to adulthood and new homes and jobs in the United States. But their journey is not an easy one.

In the film we learn that the three are members of the so-called "lost boys," children who were chased from their villages along the Nile by hordes of genocide-minded Arab marauders from Sudan's north. After a stint in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, they proceeded to another, safer camp in Kenya (1000 miles on foot from their original homes). There they received aid from the UN and various other organizations, and over the course of 10 years, a healthy diet of math, science and English study. In 2001, the US government accepted 3800 of these boys (and some girls) for resettlement in various US cities.

The film's main focus is on the cultural and emotional development of the three boys, John Dau, Daniel and Panther, from their place as members of the tightly-knit Kakuma Refugee Camp community to struggling immigrants who face new hardships as they try to adopt the American way of life. For young men who had never slept in beds, seen electric lights or faced cold Midwestern American winters, they did remarkably well. In fact, when John Dau tells us in his own words how he had to forsake university classes so as to keep his three jobs with the ultimate goal of reuniting with his mother, who languished as a refugee herself in a camp in Uganda, we see much more than the ability to adapt; this film's story is a celebration of amazing sacrifice and the grit of the human spirit.

That same spirit is presented in the feature film, Slumdog Millionaire. On Saturday I was feeling restless. What to do on Valentine's Day that would not be the same old schmaltzy thing? Then I remembered seeing an advertisement by the bus stop about the latest Danny Boyle film (he the director of Trainspotting and The Beach). I had also read about how the film had fetched four Golden Globe Awards with a little known cast and a far-flung story: a boy from the ghetto of Mumbai achieves fame and fortune on a TV game show.

But the film is much more than that. What we see is Mumbai as it rocks from the ancient haze of the 20th to the miracle growth of the 21 century, as it pulses from squalor to splendor, all from the perspective of not one but two of its least fortunate sons, brothers Salim and Jamal, who worm their way out of harm's way time and time again, only to collide on the tracks of their respective destinies.

Mildly put, I was blown away by the film, from the alleys and vistas of the brothers' childhood escapades to the raging rhythms of the soundtrack. The film also scored high for me on its other production values: dialogue (Hindi & English), pace, acting, and ultimately, that fantastical story, one that becomes more believable with each game show question to which the more fortunate brother, Jamal, demonstrates an intimate understanding of the answer.

What do these two films have in common? Both speak of dirty pants, unfair circumstances and defiled childhoods, and those dusty but persistent dreams. They also show us that there truly is good facing the evil, that a helping hand can lead to a well-fed belly and a beautiful smile, and that no matter what the odds, there is a chance -- just a chance -- for anyone to achieve far more than his or her single prayer might have ever asked for.

For an inside view of the lives of two Mumbai ghetto children who played main characters in the film, read here.

2009-02-01T22:23:00.008+08:00

The New Social Networking Site: MyFace

MyFace? This is the way I'm gonna earn my millions. (To heck with MySpace. Turn away your nose from Facebook!)

I'm gonna set up a site that allows subscribers to capture and project close up video images of themselves indefinitely, real time, and communicate those into the cyber-nerve-endings of every other interested sentient creature on the planet, 24 hours a day (at least for those that have an Internet connection). MyFace. Remember that. MyFace.

We all know that virtually everyone wants to be a movie star, right? Virtually everyone wants to see his or her own visage out there on the Big Screen.

No words are needed, really. Only real time images.

In fact, I want this to do away with the necessity of words, typing, emoticans, photos, updates. (After all----words can be obtuse, misleading, a barrier to the nonverbal that really says so much anyway.)

But images? Yes yes yes, streamlined video, constant, undeniable, soul-bearing...for those WHO HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, of course.

And what can others (governments, employers, individuals...BIG BROTHER) get out of this---well, you just tap into the videos that interest you. 24-hour access. For surveillance, better than any CCTV cam or private eye; for entertainment, better than your average webcam or a trip to the video store.

I have to admit, there are some wrinkles in this idea: The part that is bothering me most is how to create the photo-technology needed to keep track of users 24/7. Do I create a miniature camera that rests on the tip of the human nose? Do I loop from a strand of hair? But what will we do for the skinheads?

Don't know. But for those who have tired of words, spaces, freeze frames and facebooks, please check out this indictment.

MyFace Rules!

2009-01-29T22:51:00.008+08:00

Green Topics

Here's a post providing possible topics for student research in the "GREEN." This is not an exhaustive list, nor is it organized in any particular way. It is really just a brainstorming list. Please augment it by adding in the comments area.

global warming
alternative energy
geothermal
nuclear
drill, baby, drill!
bikes versus cars
hybrid cars
solar products
resources and materials
energy depletion
land use and community
low-flow plumbing
water resources
NEWater
indoor lighting
depletion of natural resources
electronic waste
plastic bags
carbon footprints
pollution(air, water, noise)
green policies
natural ventilation
building environmentally-friendly
eco-tourism
marine-life depletion
3Rs
overfishing
biodiversity
World Wildlife Fund
non-native species
dam building
sustainable development
preservation of natural heritage
parks
monoculture farming
rainforest preservation
logging
mining
deforestation
waste management
managing fisheries
coral reefs
Save the Tiger
habitat destruction
the effect of eco-campaigns

2009-01-19T19:26:00.013+08:00

Where is the Bliss?

Contrary to popular opinion and to the old axiom, ignorance IS NOT bliss; it's dangerous. In America, two examples suffice to illustrate this point.

One example is that, without enough information about the potential of Saddam Hussein to truly threaten the USA, without a proper understanding of the cultural and religious complexity of Iraqi society, and without knowledge of the fact that secular Saddam and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were actually enemies rather than brothers in arms, the American public unquestioningly supported George W. Bush in invading Iraq in 2003. The result has been a tremendous loss of life, billions of dollars wasted while casting an entire country into ruin, and much damage done to America's reputation abroad.

For another example, you only have to turn the clock back 60 years to the end of the Second World War. At that time, the nation of Vietnam, which had been under the dominion of the Japanese, and prior to that for nearly a hundred years, the French, was declared independent by one of its most popular factional leaders, the scholarly Ho Chi Minh. Uncle Ho, as he was affectionately called by his people, had tried to negotiate support for his nationalist movement from the US. He had even communicated with several former presidents about his nation's desire for statehood. Roosevelt, who died shortly before the end of WWII, dubbed Ho as one of the most articulate and wisest men he had ever met. But again, because of the general American ignorance about Southeast Asian history and cultures, an irrational fear of the Vietnamese leader's "communist" aspirations and his country's ties to China and the Soviet Union was perpetrated by warmongers. The eventual result was a conflict that lasted 30 years (roughly 1945-1975), one in which million of pounds of bombs were dropped, billions of dollars wasted, the destinies of three countries-- Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia-- sent into a tailspin, and 50,000 American soldiers and 4,000,000 Vietnamese killed.

Today, on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first biracial American president, America and the world at large are at a historical turning point. Citizens the world over can look back to a US presidency dominated by fear-mongering, fixed ideas about good and evil, and narrow-minded dogmatism; at the same time, we can see forward with hope inspired by a new, more intelligent, more globally astute leader, one who has sharpened his mind and communication skills with careful, critical study, wide reading and broad social networking.

Barack Obama is a model for citizens/students everywhere, as a man who came from modest means and yet took pride in developing himself, in shaping his own capabilities, in learning about the world then fine-tuning his place in it and his destiny.

photo Doug Mills/The New York Times

Two articles in The New York Times well describe Obama and his commitment to learning. One, entitled The Long, Lame Goodbye, is essentially a brief comparison of Bush and Obama. The other, entitled
From Books, the New President Found Voice, describes part of Obama's self-education process. Read these and consider the role that an education plays in shaping the place that each of us reaches in the world and how that learning impacts not just our world view, but the crucial decisions that we make.

And finally, here is a quote that succinctly gets at the heart of the matter, from the ubiquitous Lao Tzu:

Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in living creates love.

2009-01-08T23:44:00.027+08:00

The Family Tree: Genealogical Roots & The "Science" of Becoming

What was the year 1595 like? 414 years ago?

In that year William Blackstone (or Blaxton, as some spelled it), a future New World pilgrim to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and non-conformist Church of England clergyman, was born. By 1634 though, he had long left his homeland and was living across the sea as the lone European on a rocky peninsula known by the local native inhabitants as Shawmut. When ships such as the one he had arrived on began putting in at Back Bay with greater frequency, he decided to take his white bull and books and move on. After informing one group of the newcomers of the excellent spring on his stretch of gently rolling scrubland, sloping as it was from Beacon Hill to the tidal marshes of Back Bay, he managed to sell the entire tract -- some 50 acres -- to these Puritans. In 1635 he settled on a river -- known eventually as the Blackstone River -- many miles southwest of the settlement that the buyers of his former place came to call Boston, and it was said that old William only returned to that area to bring back a young wife (actually a widow).

It was after that marriage that William produced his only son, John, who years later would beget a son, John II, who would beget his own version, John III, who on May 18th, 1776, the year America was born, brought forth Ebenezeer Blackstone. Years later as a soldier Ebenezeer went West to fight in the Battle of Tippecanoe in the Northwest Territory. He then settled in the bustling Ohio River town of Marietta, marrying a local girl by the name of Sophia White. In 1809, just after Ohio had become the 13th state of the young nation, Ebenezeer and Sophia brought into the world a boy named Vestus. It was this Blackstone who was the first of many born in Ohio.

On January 9th, 1842, Vestus Blackstone, at the age of 32, and Matilda Ann White, a young girl who like Vestus hailed from hilly Southeastern Ohio, welcomed their own baby, the handsome Horace Pearl Blackstone. Renowned for his good looks, Horace Pearl didn't take long to attract the ladies, and in 1861, not long after Fort Sumter, South Carolina, was attacked by "rebels," he was said to have married Sarah Bright, the daughter of a prominent member of the Hocking Hills community of Logan. On March 26th, 1862, their union brought into the world Simeon Blackstone, just as America's Civil War began to rage (HP joined the conflict as a soldier for the Northern Army). Fifteen years later, in 1877, Horace Pearl and Sarah welcomed into the world another son, Wesley Rader Blackstone. It was Wesley, the skilled carpenter and part-time farmer who had a tendency to drink hard, carouse more than he should, and unleash a terrible temper, who married Ethel Elizabeth Poling near the start of the 20th century. They blessed the world with nine children, including in 1913, Jeremiah Franklin Blackstone, my grandfather, just before Ethel Elizabeth died in 1919 during the Great Flu.

Jeremiah, or Jerry as I always knew him, was a strong-willed and ambitious country boy who left home at the age of 17, after threatening to strike his inebriated father with a coal poke in defense of his youngest sister. Four years later, while prowling the streets of Thornville, Ohio, in a friend's roadster, Jerry met Carrie Elizabeth Cooperider, the pretty teenage daughter of Ira and Rachel, and within months she was pregnant with my own father, Wayne Franklin Blackstone, born in February 1935. Dad, a bit of an Elvis type with greased back hair and a penchant for singing ballads, was not much more than a teenager himself when he met a farmer's vivacious daughter at a country fair in Pleasantville. Martha Elder was the youngest child of a devout church-goer named William Elder and his faithful wife Edith. When they learned that their little girl was pregnant by the Blackstone boy from over in Thornville, well, all hell was about to break out.

In the end though, it was just me that was born.

What's the moral to this story? Time and lifetimes may be fleeting, but the roots of each one of us are very deep. What was the year 1595 like? Probably in many ways similar to today, with love and hope and hardship and pain as constants in the human experience. What can we take away from this?

As the combined passion of my many forbearers suggests, live each day with deep feelings. Don't take anything for granted. And follow your dreams ---for the sake of yourself, your children, and your children's children's children. They're right behind you.

References

Blackstone, J. W. (1907). Lineage and History of William Blackstone.

various Internet sources, family accounts & the human imagination

2008-12-23T01:19:00.008+08:00

Can the Soul of a City be Found in Its Taxi Drivers?

December 19th, 2008

You know, I actually like taking cabs in Singapore, even though the price is higher than ever. The cars are clean, they're large enough for three people in the back seat (Toyota Crowns and other similarly-sized autos), they generally smell okay, and the drivers---compared to the ones in KL **especially**--are a delight. Just this Friday morning I had taken one from Toh Tuck Road to my office in the CELC building at NUS, and all along the way the driver and I had a pleasant chat about the state of the Singapore economy. I felt inspired as I exited the guy's car. Later in the day, I took another couple cabs (since I was rushing home, and then to the bus.) Both rides were very pleasant, and the one to the Nice Bus, with all our bags, courteous as the driver gave the usual assistance.

I've been ready for a holiday for weeks now, but was I ready for the KL taxi? After a lethargic five-hour Nice bus ride from Singapore's Copthorne Orchid Hotel, I arrived at the edge of KL last Friday evening. It was just after 8pm and the traffic, once we had passed the interchange by the Palace of the Golden Horses, was rather heavy but never bumper to bumper. Twenty minutes later our bus hugged the roundabout by the National Mosque, and we pulled curbside of the majestic Old Railway Station.

Billie and I got our stuff, bid farewell to the smiley bus driver (wearing a funny pink knit hat) and, after securing our suitcase from the belly of the bus, we moved up the sidewalk toward the street. Before I had a chance to try and flag any taxi though, an Indian gentleman with silver hair called from behind me, skirting the idling bus with the question: "Taxi, sir?"

"How much to Robson Heights?" I asked, knowing he wouldn't use his meter.

"Twenty," he said, bright earnings from the potentially ignorant mat salleh already twinkling in his eye.

"No way. Ten," I shot back.

"No, sir. Very busy now," he said.

I waved him off with shrug and drug my bag off the curb streetside. I was already impatient, thinking it would have been nicer to have someone pick us up. But what to do? Billie and I then stood by the fuming roadside for five minutes before the requisite rickety red & white Proton "Comfort Cab" pulled over in front of us. A middle-aged Chinese fellow exited, walked to our side and sat confidently back against his car's hood, where he made the same offer, wanting the same amount.

"Look," I told him, "I know that if you used your meter, it would only cost five dollars. So ten...can?"

"Cannot! Tonight very jam. Twenty dolla," he insisted.

"What jam? Look man, I'll give you ten."

"Cannot," he repeated, obstinate with folded arms. That inspired me to lecture him that KL was renowned for having the worst taxi service in the world. In the world, I repeated. He didn't hear what I said, repeating his own mantra of "Twenty dollars."

No frigging way. I pulled my bag up the street, not looking back. Within five minutes another Proton had pulled up beside us and a young Malay fella leaned over to manually roll down the passenger-side window, looking at us thru mirrored shades.

"Robson Heights," I said. "I'll give ya fifteen." Without a word he motioned for us to get in. "Can you give me a hand with my bag?" I continued, then pulled it to the trunk area. He popped the trunk, but stayed in the car. Welcome to KL, I thought.

Billie and I made it to Robson Heights that night, though as the taxi had turned off Jalan Robson onto the 30 degree grade that's Persiaran Endah, I thought the dude's dog of an auto was gonna die. In any case, the guy was pleasant enough, with no complaints and a "thanks" at the end, then we arrived unscathed. Would our luck hold out on a busy run-around town Saturday?

***************************

Saturday, December 20th, 2008...is long gone. Over. Kaput. Habis. Since that time last year, I've attended the 10th Anniversary of the E.G.G. Club in KL, flown in clouds high above the earth, and cruised the mighty Mekong in the Land of the Lao. Taxis? How about tuk-tuks and bicycles? Oh, there were vans to and from the low cost Air Asia terminal in Sepang and the van rides in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. But for ten glorious days, I was simply walking... between yet another temple and one more Beer Lao at such and such cafe, from the clutches of another traditional Lao massage to the next best bargain in the Hmong street market. For that reason, the Laos trip was peaceful, meditative, reflective and relatively cheap. It all helped me forget this silly topic. Rip offs in KL taxis.

And I say that with good reason, for that next Saturday past, the day after Billie and I had arrived in KL, it happened: The worst taxi ride ever (since another similar incident in KL years ago).

I won't go into great detail. Suffice it to say that following a little Christmas shopping at the Mid Valley Megamall, Billie and I were forced to ask a taxi driver who insisted on driving us in the wrong direction to stop at the entrance to the Federal Highway so that we could exit his cab. When I then assumed that the big round he had given us of the entire mall before heading to PJ when we'd wanted to go toward KL was complimentary -- and therefore free -- he freaked, jumping out of his car brandishing a club. The communications specialist part of me, the guy who wants to insure win-win solutions, the idealist, thought we could work things out amicably...until said club was waved in my daughter's face.

What do they say about never getting between a mother bear and her cub? What followed was a bit traumatic for everyone involved, not physically, but emotionally. I don't like that sort of situation, I don't like being forced to make a stand. Most of all, I don't like to bark and growl and spew lava. But I can if I have to.

What makes for these situations? Why are KL taxis so renowned? As is often true, it is most likely a case of sound government policies not being enforced. Obviously, taxis have meters for a reason. The fact that in KL the meter is so often ignored shows that A) the fare structure is probably inappropriate, and B) there is no government oversight. The very idea that a cab driver can tell a customer that the best way to go west (KL) is via the east (PJ) and then become so offended when the customer declines the service that he makes physical threats is cause for some serious alarm. I guess it is time for me to practice some of my letter writing skills and alert the relevant authorities. The question is, could anything that I write matter to the government clerk who has heard it all before?

What do you think?

2008-12-09T21:28:00.020+08:00

Here, There, Anywhere

I went to a lecture today at Singapore's National Institute of Education, given by B. Kumaravadivelu, a "famous" applied linguist from San Jose State University in California.

The essence of his talk was that in light of globalization, educators must adopt a new view of the educational process. Because today's learners are "digital natives" (a phrase that he didn't use) who are "internetized" (one that he did use), there should be a paradigm shift, "beyond methods." He also claimed that "multiculturalism" is passe, as outdated as the racist concept of assimilation. For this reason, educators, whether teachers, teacher trainers or scholars, need to look for new ways to interpret the contexts of their charges' lives, need to understand the complexity of their evolving identities, in order to inspire their learning. (He also leveled a well-worn charge at the sort of assessment methods considered paramount and used widely in Singapore, stating that, essentially, there is no good reason to believe that such methods measure what many folks might hope that they are measuring.) He sees the present not as multiculturalism, but as "cultural realism." (no drum roll please!)

I basically agreed with everything the speaker said, finding his ideas enlightened, but neither novel nor revolutionary. In fact, what struck me most about the talk was how self-evident most of the information was. Here was a guy (I guess) who, as an "Indian" living in the US, experiences the world much like I do as an "American" living in Asia: he identifies with what he is doing (teaching, researching, eating pasta one day and curry the next) and with many aspects of the life he has lived, but not always with the community where he lives. That community seems narrow at times, attached to hardened definitions. However, his "house" is wide open, and the winds of culture blow through it, giving a shape to an existence that is far grander (in his eyes) than that felt by those among us who still limit themselves to a highly defined and a specific ethnic/ racial/ religious/ gender-centered/job-affiliated universe.

Yes, I can relate to these ideas, because my house is also wide open, and it has been like that for a very long time. I have a US passport, can vote for the president, am required to file an annual tax form, can sing the Star-Spangled Banner, follow US college football, etc., but do I feel "only" American. Am I limited by that concept of identity?

No.

Was I a victim of the tribalism that gripped so many Americans when 9/11 came crashing down? Did I want blood for the attacks? Did I see an inevitable "clash of civilizations"?

Not really. If anything, I see humans as organisms first, then as an individuals both unique and common. My own citizenship, or national identity, and my ethnicity, are both very far down on the list of what makes me who I am. (Which is not to say these factors wouldn't influence the way I'm viewed by others. To wit: the group of ethnic Indians killed in Mumbai recently because they carried American passports!)

Frankly though, I have a hard time seeing any of us as so different from the monkeys that collect garbage on Toh Tuck Road. Of course, there are recognizable differences. But generally, this is a case of SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT. (Read Jane Goodall's Through a Window, before you argue with me.)

In the same way that the skin I now inhabit is different from the skin I wore when I was 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and so on, the values, beliefs, norms, habits, ways I spend my day have been altered, even from two years ago. Two years ago I was a member of a small town community in rural northern Japan, I lived in a well-worn traditional-style house facing padi fields, in a cedar forest, with a "silver-singing" river a one-minute bike ride from my doorstep. I saw mostly Japanese faces and heard and spoke some form of Japanese every day---and I felt comfortable there generally, even when I didn't fully understand the language used around me, because I felt in context, thanks to an acclimatization process that evolved over 17 years. At the same time, in Japan I always remained very "outside," mainly because I was an "eigo" (English)-centric human who had been dropped into the Land of the Rising Sun in the same way that Bowie appeared as alien on the set of The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Today, my reality is very different, and I have changed. I could hardly see a rising sun even if I tried. I live in a concrete box beside a concrete pool towered over by other boxes by other pools, in a city of tens of thousands of such boxes. There are people all around me speaking in various Englishes, speaking in myriad other tongues, through faces of every conceivable human color and shape. Part of me continues to be the organism that was living in Mukaino, Yuwa, Akita, Tohoku, Nihon. But part not. There is a spirit blowing through me now that is more trade wind than shakuhachi breath, more urban guerilla than ploughman. And though I may "communicate" in spoken sounds and nonverbal acts that make me comprehensible to a broad range of others who understand those as well as they understand the fingers on their hands, we may or may not fully comprehend each other. For the words and spaces we inhabit may seem the same but can be very different in meaning.

Case in point, I have been communicating regularly with students from the National University of Singapore. At times, we speak the same language, watch the same movies, read the same books, laugh at the same jokes, eat the same foods, hear the same songs, know many of the same things---share many tidbits of information, via face to face discussions in class and in writing on blogs, Facebook, e-mails, whatever. I really really like many of these guys. But are we on the same plain? Do we share a vibe? Are we, or could we ever be, soul brothers/sisters/mates? Homies? Are they members of what writer Kurt Vonnegut called my "kurass."

Well, of course, to different degrees with different people. But overall I'd answer "Not really." It takes me having dinner at a Peranakan place with a guy from Toledo, Ohio, who just happens to teach at NIE, who just happens to have also lived in Japan, who just happens to have also lived in Malaysia, who just happens to be married, like me, to a Malaysian, who similar to me likes particular musics and films, and who has the sort of personality that I feel comfortable with, for me to feel "home." He and I share so many variables that we give "context" to each other. The same can be said for my spouse and my youngest daughter. (Of course, even they and I are different, in many ways.)

There is a clear "cultural realism" in all of this, with an emphasis on shared values and experiences determining closeness in interpersonal relations. There is also a "gumption" that has carried me to this point, that has fed my various "dreams", allowing me to be here and there at the same time. It has been that gumption and those dreams that have propelled me on this particular journey of world exploration and self-discovery. (And in a very real sense, I can never go home. I am now beyond culture.)

As a teacher, would I recommend this path to everyone? Absolutely not. Is travel and shucking one's original cultural skin a must for everyone? Nah. In fact, it can be damn disconcerting. (ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!) There is a reason "comfort zones" are called comfort zones.

A conclusion? As a well-travelled hillbilly friend once told me: If ya can't run with the big dogs, don't get off the porch. (That may be a bit overwrought though, since it implies "bigger" is better.)

It may be better to sum it up this way: Each person's path is unique. What seems important in education (and I think Kumara would agree) is for each learner, each of us to come to reflect upon the options before us and on the consequences of those, and to make an informed choice.

2008-12-03T23:18:00.016+08:00

A Meditation on the Instructions to Make a List of 10 Random Things about Myself

It's late. I'm tired. And so much in life seems random.

1. As a kid in Thornville I attended the Trinity United Church of Christ (UCC), the same Protestant denomination that Barack Obama famously attended with Jeremiah Wright as his pastor. What I remember most from "church," aside from all the Bible stuff, is that, in the 60s and early 70s, the UCC's national leaders opposed the Vietnam War, welcomed racial integration and were called "ultra-liberals" by many in the "religious establishment." Ironically, my family was rather conservative and generally supported the US war effort, but in church at least I learned of different perspectives. Narrowly missing the draft (by one year), I grew up to strongly oppose the war. In 2008 I would go to Vietnam for the first time, and while visiting the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I felt such great shame at my country's military actions that I actually shed tears. What weighs more on the scale of human atrocities: random acts of violence or well planned ones?

2. I was delivered into this world by a Japanese doctor working for the US Air Force, one Dr. Suzuki, at Shepherd Air Force Base Hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas. According to my mother, the first words I heard were Japanese. The hospital building where I was born was destroyed several years later by a tornado. Today, both my daughters are fluent in Japanese.

3. The first childhood fantasy that I remember having is this: I was standing under a tree in the yard of my kindergarten, a one-room former church/then school house in Washington Court House, Ohio. The old wooden building began belching flames, and I ran in and heroically pulled my teacher, my first love, to safety. How random are dreams?

4. In sixth grade (Primary Six) I was randomly asked by my teacher, Mrs. Redd, to help a visiting teacher carry a slide projector and a large screen from his car into the school auditorium. The man I helped that day was gentle, good-natured and talkative. (I can still remember taking the equipment out of his car's trunk.) His presentation was about a trip he had made recently to the then Soviet Union. I watched with great interest. Four years later, as a first-year high school student, I signed up for Russian language class taught by the same man. On the first day of class, the guy, Mr. Ed Taylor, said my name had no Russian equivalent and so jokingly he called me "Viktor" with the patronymic "Venovich" (My father's name was Wayne). When I later studied at Ohio State University, I majored in Russian language and literature, thanks largely to the enthusiasm I had developed for many things Russian (including the Cold War mystique). To what degree was any of this random?

5. As a young kid, I had a cow lick in the front of my short hair that was impossible to comb and it always embarrassed me. As a high school student, I had heroes who included the British rock singers Mick Jagger, Roger Daltrey and Robert Plant. One thing I liked about them was their wild manes of hair. Though I was "by training" quite the jock (lettering in high school cross country, basketball and track), I really wanted to look like a hippie. This was a point of contention between my father and me. He said his friends called me "a girl," and we had numerous "knock down drag out" fights over my hair's length. For university, I moved away from home, and with my newfound freedom, I grew my hair down the middle of my back. At some point though, just into my second year, I suddenly had the urge to cut my hair, so I went to a stylist, and I had my hair curled. For two years I sported an afro and had to "pick" my hair. Eventually, I grew it straight and down my back again. In the early 80s, living in Portugal, I started teaching for GM and so had my locks cut in a style that a friend said made me look like a fisherman. Today, my head is clean shaven, some folks calling me "a skinhead." I've had it every which way.

6. I lived in Japan for 17 years, and drove to work, but never managed to get a Japanese driver's license (which is a long story). I've never paid US income taxes, aside from Social Security (which is a longer story). I don't much like to cook, but I can eat virtually anything. Does that mean I'm "easily fed"?

7. My great-grandfather, Ira Cooperider, a small-time farmer and lifelong factory worker, collected native American artifacts throughout his life. First with his kids, then his grandkids, then us his great-grandkids in tow, he would walk through the fields between Thornville and Bruno Grange, between New Reading and Cramer's Corner, and all along High Point Road, looking for and salvaging flint pieces and "arrowheads." His collection of scrapers, lances, bird and spear points, adzes, knives and hammers would eventually number three thousand. He meticulously organized many of these suspending them by wires on thick cardboard panels. Along with a collection of old guns, tools, toys and various oddities, they were all stored in a large room above his garage.

Of all of Ira's great grandchildren (over 20 or so), maybe I lusted for his collection the most. Unfortunately, he died before producing a will, and when I was living in Malaysia, his "museum" was auctioned off. With my grandmother's help, I managed to purchase one panel though, with some 50 well worked flints on it, which is now hanging in the room across from me as I sit here typing. What ancient warriors' charms have ended up in this place?

8. Like Louis Armstrong said, I'd agree there are two types of music: good and bad. But I've never met a genre that I didn't like: blues, jazz (New Orleans, big band, bop, West Coast, whatever), rock, punk, hip hop, trip hop, eletronica, Cajun, Karnatic, rembetika, gypsy swing, fado, enka, waltzes, chant, spirituals, bluegrass, folk & pop. Billie was surprised recently when she bought and brought a Katy Perry CD home, and I liked it. I also like Prince, Tupac, Radiohead, Green Day and Duffy. I don't quite like the music of Madonna and Michael Jackson, but I recognize their talents. Still, some bands bore me. Bon Jovi, Guns N Roses and 99% of the metal bands, and smoothies like Kenny G never did it for me. So-called Christian rock? Give me a break. And Japanese pop may be one of my least favorite types. But even there, I could occasionally find myself humming along with Hikaru Utada and some other syrupy songstress. Soundtracks are hard to escape anymore. So what to do?

9. I could never "clean" fish. When I was young my family would make yearly pilgrimages to a rustic cabin on Crow Lake in southeastern Ontario. It was an idyllic place for kids to race through the woods, practice oaring skills, and catch frogs, snakes and turtles. Though the cabins had no modern amenities (we even had to toilet in an outhouse), we all loved that time of the year. My father and grandmother were ace fishermen and fish cleaners, able to whip out fillets from a keep full of perch and blue gills in a heartbeat; my granddad was the king of quiet nights on the lake and the big fish stories ("whoppers"), and us "youngins" --hearing the loons, chasing down raccoons with flashlights, playing cards after dark by Coleman lantern--were forever imbued with a taste for the outdoors.

One year, when I was 12 or 13, I went out early morning fishing with my dad and brought in a three-pound largemouth bass. That was my trophy of trophies. I have a black and white photo of me holding that baby. But to this day I cannot and will not clean a fish. (Why did I evolve into the person I became? Just a matter of socialization? The hand of God? Hard wiring? Random combinations of this strand and that? Why on earth can't I clean fish?)

10. & Rules? It's ironic that a guy who by nature has made a point of questioning the norms, the rules, the ways and means, would become a bit of a grammarian, an occasional pedant and a teacher at a university in Singapore. What's the message here?

2008-11-19T23:43:00.000+08:00