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I felt like I was watching the dog whisper while reading this particular chapter.
"In the hands of unskilled but aspiring lay trainers like me, using strong negative reinforcers and punishments is foolish as well as unnecessary, in no small part because we get it wrong and do more harm than good..." (212 of When Species Meet )
I simply enjoy the light-hearted temperament and the several engaging methods adopted by Strolin-Smith in the article. She worked with Tekwan during an important transition period for children learning literacy, from spoken words to pictures then to print words. Much attention was focused on Tekwan's personal and cultural backgrounds, such as his pictorial reading, community configurations and familial stories. In her words, it was using "students' primary discourse" as the foundation for learning and honoring their cultural asset or "funds of knowledge".
Throughout the reading, Ghosh deals with a theme of foreignness. Our main characters are both displaced from their comfort zones, put into unfamiliar spaces and in contact with some unfamiliar folk. Kanai navigates his divides along class boundaries, and Piya wrestles with her American upbringing, class divides, language barriers. On another level, both have just begun their indirect encounters with the mysterious Sundarbans, dense mangrove forests which defy human conquest and colonization.
It’s been a crazy last few days. I avoided going to my site for a while because I had so much on my mind. I didn’t trust my ability to go and observe, nor did I have any faith in my capacity to just be, when my head felt like it might explode from snowballing anxieties, doubts and frustrations. Finally, I decided to just go and let it snowball. So I apologize if this had little to do with the site and just leaves you hanging in the madhouse of my head. I left class on Thursday more than a little frustrated—not at the class, but at my inability to articulate anything I was trying to argue. I meant to meditate on that at my site, but once there I couldn’t even remember what it was that I was frustrated about. It was all faded and seemed like it was eons ago.
I feel to exposed. There is so much that is muted. There is hardly any natural protection. I feel stuck, continuously losing focus when a new person walks by. It seems more like a sociological observation than a natural, ecological encounter.
The spot feels strange; in order to get to a seat, I had to climb over a mound of snow, yet when I arrived, I didn’t feel any more removed from the campus.
The snow is dense, compact, durable, impermeable. This was indicative of the feeling of constancy, fixedness, and firmness.
It seemed that the spot had been trampled, overused, abused, and at the same time, neglected. I desired more mixing, transplanting, converging of different species, plants, textures, shapes, and colors.
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I am writing this on a bit of a high, because I just got back from our book club session at PIC (not the real name), a women’s prison, which went really well. There inevitably were hiccups getting in, and we had a group about a third the size of last week, but it meant we got to have some great small group conversations. One of my favorite aspects of the book club is that I get to learn and hang out with a wonderful group of women. These women often have quote different perspectives than myself, but while I am there I try not to focus on the differenences, but rather on how I enjoy my time and conversations with these women, and how I hope everyone in the club shares the same sentiment.
This past weekend was a really tough one for me because I got into a huge fight with someone I love dearly, so my trip to my site today was very cleansing. I had spent all of yesterday hardly able to leave my bed or open my mouth without crying, and if I had gone outside yesterday to do my site sit, I probably would have described everything as bleak and cold and dead. However, last night I spoke again to the person and we resolved our argument and feel closer than before. So today when I went outside, instead of focusing on the frozen, cold, and dead, I found myself looking at life, healing, and regrowth in the nature around me. The river that last time had been moving along so strongly, was largely frozen over now, but some movement remained even with its partial frozen cover.
After the class meeting, the kids take a science test (Ms. Nielsen gives worksheet with questions and reads the questions aloud) and a math test from their workbooks. A few kids look at the paper next to them, ask their neighbors for answers. Some tell Ms. Nielsen that someone else was cheating. Ms. Nielsen says aloud to me, “We have a big cheating problem in this class”. She moves one student over a desk, but otherwise does not punish kids who cheat or try to stop them from doing it.