This will be my fourth trip to Oaxaca. It's now been about a month since violence broke out in Oaxaca between the government and the teachers unions. (I will once again point to Dave Miller's blog post for an insider's look at the conflict.) Since then, there have been blockades that have prevented food from moving around the state, requiring the government to airdrop food to some of the more rural regions. In fact, a recent report indicated that there were still around 20 roadblocks throughout the state. Dave Miller has taken some pictures in Oaxaca City within the last week. Usually around this time of year, it's a tourist destination (which is the only way that I've seen the city), so it's interesting to see pictures of it as empty as it is.
I'm reminded of a conversation that I had probably over a decade ago at my church in San Diego. We were just talking, and I happened to mention that there was an academic who had come to campus to give a talk about the Middle East and who was on her way back there to do more research. He looked at me with a quizzical look and asked why anyone would even go there. As we talked further, his mental image of the Middle East was a war zone, where everyone's houses were being shelled at random and people hid in bunkers all day long. (This was around the time that the Iraq war was either happening or about to happen.) I don't think I was adequately able to explain in that conversation that the Middle East is a pretty big place and that not everything looks like the images that are shown on the news. People still live their lives in these places, much like how our lives go on even though there's violence in our nation (Dallas, Minnesota, and Lousiana), and we all get up and still live our lives the way we normally do.
Granted, my trip to Oaxaca is going to the city where the protesters are, which makes it slightly less analogous. But while the blockades are disruptive, they're not violent. The reports are not about being being dragged out of cars and beaten or anything like that. And Chable's ranch, which is where we'll be all week, is outside of town and is self-sustaining. It's solar powered and there's plenty of food on the ranch itself (greenhouses, rabbit farm, turkeys, etc.). For the kids who go to camp, it's generally the case that this week provides more food stability than what they have at home. With the current conditions, that stability is probably magnified to general stability. So while it's certainly true that the risk this year is greater than in previous years, the overall risk still seems fairly minimal and so I'm just not that concerned.
It certainly is an interesting time to be traveling internationally. There was the truck that killed 80 people in France, and as I sit here typing I'm seeing that there's been a military coup in Turkey. When I go to Oaxaca, I'll be far more isolated from the news than I normally am (at work, I've often got some news source open in a tab on my browser). This would actually be the second time in my life that I happened to be going off the grid at a time of significant world news. Back in 2001, I was at an InterVarsity leaders retreat when 9/11 happened. My recollection of the camp was that it was down in a valley. That was before internet-enabled cell phones, and the only connection to outside media was a small TV that was able to pick up some broadcast channels. We knew the attacks had happened, but we weren't glued to the screen like most of the rest of the US, so we didn't have the same bombardment of images over and over again. It made it a very different experience for us than it was for most others.
I guess that's enough big picture contemplation for now. Time to shift over to the less interesting minutia. Work stuff has been a bit of a blur for the last couple weeks. I finished typing up my notes for the Real Analysis course and started into the Precalculus course. Those notes are much faster to type out, so I'm pretty close to halfway done already. I'm intending to go back to something I haven't done in a long time, which is timed arithmetic. Every class, I'm going to give them 30 one-digit addition problems and have them do as many as they can in 30 seconds. There are a couple goals. The first is just to get them to practice their arithmetic. Most of the students will probably need a bit of that. The second is to give them some exposure to stress-induced environments to try to desensitize them a bit. At the start of the semester everyone feels a fairly high anxiety with it, but by the end of the semester it feels like routine. There's a meta-lesson that I teach them about working through stress and understanding how they cope with stress, and that's something that they work through by doing the exercise. The last thing (though perhaps it should be the first or second thing) is that I'm fairly confident that improving their basic arithmetic will improve their overall performance in the class (especially since this is primarily a computational class). I've never been able to do a true test of this, but it's a gut feeling I have based on a reasonably large set of observations. I've got a couple theories about how it works, the strongest of which is the human RAM model of computation. Students have a finite capacity for cognition (think of it like RAM in a computer). The more they have to use for simple arithmetic, the less they have available for thinking about the actual course content. But with practice, the calculations require less cognition and hence they have more brain available to them for learning. At least, that's my theory. I don't really know how legitimate of an explanation that is.
Most of the other projects are on hold. (The big three are the book project, the horse racing project, and the gummy bear project.) I've spent a lot of time working on scheduling-related tasks. We're losing an A&P instructor, which means I'm needing to rearrange several other instructors to ensure that classes are covered. I had a few instructors get full time work, have shifts in their schedule, or decide to take a class, and so have informed me that they won't be able to teach. That's created a few holes that I've needed to fill. I also became aware of some of the life circumstances of one of our PTIs, which led me to try to find appropriate resources to assist in that situation.
In my church hunt, I'm at the point of being very likely to stay with Hope Baptist. I'm not going to try to get connected just yet, as I'm going to miss the next four weeks due to being out of town or recovering from being out of town. But I might try to start feeling out their programs at the start of the school year, which is generally the time that things are launched anyway.
I might find time during the week between Oaxaca and the faculty retreat to post something, but I might not. We'll just see how things play out.
