Kali Tal

September 15, 2003

Stupid American Fashions

I was driving down Speedway in Tucson (once voted the Ugliest Street in America), when a fellow in a Saab 900 turbo convertible blasted past me in the right-hand lane, and then was halted in his zigging and zagging through traffice by a snowbird grandmother driving a venerable Dodge Dart driving in tandem with a beat white pickup truck that belonged to some backyard landscaping business. The man in the Saab--barely a man, really, since his frat boy looks and demeanor were what caught my attention in the first place--was wearing a sun visor. The sun visor looked strange on his head, but it took me a moment to figure out why. At first it reminded me of the way white kids imitate the B-Boy backwards baseball cap, but topologically it was still deeply disconcerting. The dissonance, I finally determined, was created because the sun visor was indeed worn backwards, but with the bill facing up (like a scoop) in the back. The absurdity of this (at least backwards baseball caps still cover one's head!) would have made me laugh, except that the kid was white and driving an expensive car and, I'm sure, utterly unselfconscious about any of it. So instead it just made me sad and tired

Posted by kalital at 3:57 PM

September 12, 2003

America Makes You Stupid Again

A South Asian friend of mine was at a local coffeeshop yesterday, while all the hoopla commemorating the September 11 bombings was taking place. Some random, middle-aged white guy walked up to him, huffing belligerantly. My friend looked up from his newspaper. "It's sure hard to commemorate September 11 with you people around," the guy snarled at this perfectly innocent brown-skinned man whose country wasn't even linked by George Bush, Jr.'s vivid imagination to those terrorist acts.

A man of great generosity, my friend merely said, when he told the story, that he thought the better part of valor was leaving quietly, since such incidents can escalate quickly into violence. "It must be hard," he reflected, "to be so angry."

Posted by kalital at 9:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Back to School

It's a new semester and I once again sit flabbergasted at what my students do not know. It's become my practice to start virtually every class I teach with a three-hour lecture on the most basic of the basics in critical thinking concepts: What is logic? What is rhetoric? What is subjectivity? What is objectivity? What is the difference between accuracy and precision? What is mediation? What is symbolism? What is a fallacy? And so on.

Every year, the students I get are less and less prepared to do work at what I consider to be a college level. These students are barely prepared for high school, in my estimation. It's not their fault, of course. Most of them are pretty bright; some of them are even motivated learners. But the state of public education in this country is appalling and we're reaping the fruits of twenty years of starving the public mind. The idea of teaching "upper division" undergrad courses is a joke--the grad students who are entering my institution are barely prepared for them.

In truth, I've gotten so disillusioned with teaching (not with the process itself, which I still love, but with the material at hand), that I've decided to leave the profession. I think I'll open a Bed & Breakfast up in Canada. I've just got a couple of years to fill out on my current contract, and then I'm outta here. The prospect of becoming a Canadian citizen is also pretty appealing, given the current sorry state of American politics. (Left? What left?)

Posted by kalital at 1:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack