So I've had kind of a strange couple of weeks. I was rather low for awhile and this was compunded by my feeling foolish for feeling low and it took me a while to, first, give myself permission to not be happy and, second, to investigate why I wasn't happy.
This is a phase that I go through regularly; I want to say once or twice a year. I have to re-realize that being unhappy does not make me a failure, but it is probably telling me something important about myself. It trips me up and makes me realize I've been crawling. I have been thinking about this article (Depression's Evolutionary Roots, in Scientific American), which discusses depression as an evolutionary necessity, as the mental analogy to a physical fever-- an automatic response that helps to eradicate another problem.
Other than dealing with my emotions, as always, I've started seriously looking into education as a career. I'm looking into Iowa state certification, Chinese language teacher training, and Waldorf and Montessori certification. My ego will be a bit upset with me if I don't decide to pursue higher education in Science and become part of my generation's Badass Female Scientist League, but I think I might be happier as an educator. I see many of our problems today rooted in the fact that students don't learn to investigate truth on their own in school; they learn to mimic those 'smarter' (probably really only more educated) than themselves, so that after school all important issues easily become a competition between sides who have already decided what they think. (There will be more on education later, I hope, as I have yet to understand to my satisfaction the difference between the Waldorf and Montessori philosophies.)
Basically, after a couple of weeks of mental bewilderment, I have come to the conclusion that what I need to decide what direction to move in my life is a systematic exploration of topics I am interested in... like, maybe, a weekly blog series! I am too clever for myself, sometimes.
Title is from Jack Johnson's "Dreams be Dreams."
Friday, November 5, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Searching for a language that fits
I don't really like the way my "exploring the world" series is feeling. It's too vague, and not really helping be systematic in my decisions about myself and my future.
What I need to be searching for, or deciding on, this year is a language. Maybe German or Chinese or perhaps even Korean, but I don't feel I'll completely have to choose between them. I know that studying and reading books in foreign languages will always wake up my mind and my motivation and I'll be able to use them for whatever I do.
I have to choose an angle; I need a primary language through which to view the rest of my life's learning. I don't know if it should be a scientific language-- Chemistry's language of atoms and the push and pull of electrons between them driving life's processes, or Geology's language of the bones of the world. I could study the rise and fall of landforms and the dance of continents around the globe. Or then maybe Biology's tapestry of genes and food webs and the struggle to quantify what keeps life going. Physics would give my quantitative brain a lot of joy and would still let me zoom to any scale of study-- planets swirling through space-time or quarks spinning inside electrons.
Education is important to me-- I would like to continue teaching. I had the great opportunity to work in a Waldorf preschool while I was myself only in sixth grade. The Waldorf community speaks a language much more similar to the language of homeschooling than of public school. They both speak of children's ability and desire to learn on their own terms; to let children use their minds rather than push them to be used.
Living in Asia I have seen a different educational language: one that places discipline at the center and speaks not of what is in a student's mind, but what can but put there. Both of these have some wisdom-- I think it is dangerous to encourage children to search in their minds without also teaching them how to search outside of them-- but on the whole I think that it is more dangerous to teach them only to look outside themselves for wisdom and guidance. I am not sure how to translate these thoughts into a path.
So, in my previous post I tried a bit of writing in the Geologic tongue, and will find a different language for next Thursday.
What I need to be searching for, or deciding on, this year is a language. Maybe German or Chinese or perhaps even Korean, but I don't feel I'll completely have to choose between them. I know that studying and reading books in foreign languages will always wake up my mind and my motivation and I'll be able to use them for whatever I do.
I have to choose an angle; I need a primary language through which to view the rest of my life's learning. I don't know if it should be a scientific language-- Chemistry's language of atoms and the push and pull of electrons between them driving life's processes, or Geology's language of the bones of the world. I could study the rise and fall of landforms and the dance of continents around the globe. Or then maybe Biology's tapestry of genes and food webs and the struggle to quantify what keeps life going. Physics would give my quantitative brain a lot of joy and would still let me zoom to any scale of study-- planets swirling through space-time or quarks spinning inside electrons.
Education is important to me-- I would like to continue teaching. I had the great opportunity to work in a Waldorf preschool while I was myself only in sixth grade. The Waldorf community speaks a language much more similar to the language of homeschooling than of public school. They both speak of children's ability and desire to learn on their own terms; to let children use their minds rather than push them to be used.
Living in Asia I have seen a different educational language: one that places discipline at the center and speaks not of what is in a student's mind, but what can but put there. Both of these have some wisdom-- I think it is dangerous to encourage children to search in their minds without also teaching them how to search outside of them-- but on the whole I think that it is more dangerous to teach them only to look outside themselves for wisdom and guidance. I am not sure how to translate these thoughts into a path.
So, in my previous post I tried a bit of writing in the Geologic tongue, and will find a different language for next Thursday.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Sorry!
I spent the weekend in Seoul at the behest of the TaLK program. I was apprehensive about it, but it turned out just lovely. However, it put me behind for this post. I thought I could throw some links together at least, but my mind just won't show up for it.
On Thursday I will be posting a re-thinking of my second blog series.
On Thursday I will be posting a re-thinking of my second blog series.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Jeju Island Geology, for a start
I have been enjoying living on an island. It is perhaps the exact opposite, geographically, from living in the middle of Iowa. Jeju Island was formed by a volcano-- similar to the Hawaiian island. The volcano, Halla-san (san means mountain in Korean), stands tall in the center of the island, almost always shrouded in humidity and clouds, sometimes poking its head out above them. I have only seen the whole thing clearly once so far. My co-teacher says that it is usually only visible for 10 days a year, or that's what people say.
There are scattered around the island about 360 "parasitic" volcanic cones-- that means that for at least part of the time that Halla-san was active, the amount of magma underneath it was so great that the main volcano was not big enough to release it and it pushed its way through all over the place. The small peaks are visible all over the place-- in Jeju's dialect of Korean they are called "oreum." I have climbed a couple so far, and I love to see them in the distance and imagine the lava shooting out and pooling over the landscape. This would have been a truly dramatic place to live a few hundred thousand years ago.
There are remnants of Jeju's dramatic past all over: the sharp divide between land and see, sometimes dropping off from basalt cliffs to deep water; the oreum scattered across the island, sometimes with their feet in the water; and the lava tubes. Christian and I visited one lava tube called Manjang cave.
I wasn't able to get a good shot with my camera, so here's one from Discover Korea.
It is a place where lava pushed through-- perhaps taking advantage of a crack in the rock-- the outer layer of lava solidified and the rest kept flowing. This picture is of the end of the tunnel that is open to tourists (Manjang cave being one of two or three sections of tunnel open anywhere on the island, out of I think 5 or 6 known tunnels-- one of which is more than 13km long). As we were leaving, I noticed that a lot of the ceiling had light patches. I wondered what they were, and Christian suggested that they might be minerals leached from the soil above. I said, naahh, that's possible, I guess, but highly improbable. Well, one of the first sentences in the UNEP report is that that is exactly what happened, and that is it rare. So, I feel silly, but not completely silly?
It's a beautiful place! Come visit!
--Pretty much all of the information in this post that isn't a personal anecdote is from the United Nations Environmental Project Report on Jeju island as a World Heritage Site, which you can download for your very own self! It's only about 6 pages long, and chock-full of great information.
--also, please note that each of these 'exploring the world' and china series posts are labeled as such, and the tags are at the top of the list on the righthand side of this page. If you just want to view one of these series, just click on its label!
There are scattered around the island about 360 "parasitic" volcanic cones-- that means that for at least part of the time that Halla-san was active, the amount of magma underneath it was so great that the main volcano was not big enough to release it and it pushed its way through all over the place. The small peaks are visible all over the place-- in Jeju's dialect of Korean they are called "oreum." I have climbed a couple so far, and I love to see them in the distance and imagine the lava shooting out and pooling over the landscape. This would have been a truly dramatic place to live a few hundred thousand years ago.
There are remnants of Jeju's dramatic past all over: the sharp divide between land and see, sometimes dropping off from basalt cliffs to deep water; the oreum scattered across the island, sometimes with their feet in the water; and the lava tubes. Christian and I visited one lava tube called Manjang cave.
I wasn't able to get a good shot with my camera, so here's one from Discover Korea.
It is a place where lava pushed through-- perhaps taking advantage of a crack in the rock-- the outer layer of lava solidified and the rest kept flowing. This picture is of the end of the tunnel that is open to tourists (Manjang cave being one of two or three sections of tunnel open anywhere on the island, out of I think 5 or 6 known tunnels-- one of which is more than 13km long). As we were leaving, I noticed that a lot of the ceiling had light patches. I wondered what they were, and Christian suggested that they might be minerals leached from the soil above. I said, naahh, that's possible, I guess, but highly improbable. Well, one of the first sentences in the UNEP report is that that is exactly what happened, and that is it rare. So, I feel silly, but not completely silly?
It's a beautiful place! Come visit!
--Pretty much all of the information in this post that isn't a personal anecdote is from the United Nations Environmental Project Report on Jeju island as a World Heritage Site, which you can download for your very own self! It's only about 6 pages long, and chock-full of great information.
--also, please note that each of these 'exploring the world' and china series posts are labeled as such, and the tags are at the top of the list on the righthand side of this page. If you just want to view one of these series, just click on its label!
Monday, October 11, 2010
我整天做梦 (a beginning exploration of Chinese language)
My first introduction to China was through language. I chose to start Chinese my sophomore year of university because I had studied German and a little Spanish and wanted to try something away from Europe, and farther historically, culturally, and linguistically from the US (Europe and the US have a lot of important differences, but many of our differences take place upon common assumptions and values).
Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.
There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.
Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.
Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.
Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'
The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.
A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind, English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.
Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.
*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.
The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"
Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.
There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.
Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.
Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.
Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'
The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.
A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind, English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.
Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.
*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.
The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"
Friday, October 8, 2010
Be careful what you do-- because the lie becomes the truth
One of the most important things I learned last year in China was about myself and about how I am motivated. I was used to being a good student. I was used to getting good grades because I did the reading and the work, because I was intelligent and ready for class every day, and perhaps most importantly: because I am mentally quick enough to keep up with professor lectures (many of which cater more to the professor's mind than the students').
I was not a good student in China. I struggled to make it through half of the reading for most of my classes. I did finish, but rarely. My Chinese ability was average for my classes-- meaning that I ended up with passing grades but was not ever the smart one in a class. I couldn't keep up with lectures, felt a fool many times a week when a professor asked a question in class and I couldn't answer.
I am embarrassed by how thoroughly feeling like a poor student threw me completely off track, even when I was getting through just fine, really. I was embarrassed to talk about how well I was understanding course material, and had trouble staying motivated to do reading because it took so long to look up the characters I didn't know, and even when I did my comprehension was low.
When I did actually talk to classmates about schoolwork, we were always in more or less the same place: struggling and embarassed about it. A friend who was in a different program in nanjing said she thought herself lucky she had already had so many experiences as a good student-- she remarked that if feeling this way had been her first experience in school at five years old, she would probably never have recovered and would have spent her whole life thinking of herself as a bad student. This put into clearer focus some thoughts about the way that my brother and I were treated and spoken of when we were both in elementary school, and about the education system in general that I will hopefully explore more fully in a later post.
It was definitely not my best year socially, either, and I'm still working on trying to figure out why. In some ways it was a product of my surroundings-- living in close quarters with large groups from different cultures left a lot of differences of understanding in the open, and it also underlined how much more comfortable people were overall with classmates with the same native language. There were many friendships across the Chinese-Foreigner line (and I'm happy to say some were mine!) but much of the time groups from one background or the other dominated people's social lives.
I know there is more I could have done, was capable of doing, to improve to social feeling in the Center. Trying to pick up the pieces and get more out of last year will, I think, be very important for how I feel about myself this year.
Title is from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", which has been stuck in my head for the last few days because a friend of mine introduced me to this excellent cover by Aloe Blacc and The Grand Scheme.
I was not a good student in China. I struggled to make it through half of the reading for most of my classes. I did finish, but rarely. My Chinese ability was average for my classes-- meaning that I ended up with passing grades but was not ever the smart one in a class. I couldn't keep up with lectures, felt a fool many times a week when a professor asked a question in class and I couldn't answer.
I am embarrassed by how thoroughly feeling like a poor student threw me completely off track, even when I was getting through just fine, really. I was embarrassed to talk about how well I was understanding course material, and had trouble staying motivated to do reading because it took so long to look up the characters I didn't know, and even when I did my comprehension was low.
When I did actually talk to classmates about schoolwork, we were always in more or less the same place: struggling and embarassed about it. A friend who was in a different program in nanjing said she thought herself lucky she had already had so many experiences as a good student-- she remarked that if feeling this way had been her first experience in school at five years old, she would probably never have recovered and would have spent her whole life thinking of herself as a bad student. This put into clearer focus some thoughts about the way that my brother and I were treated and spoken of when we were both in elementary school, and about the education system in general that I will hopefully explore more fully in a later post.
It was definitely not my best year socially, either, and I'm still working on trying to figure out why. In some ways it was a product of my surroundings-- living in close quarters with large groups from different cultures left a lot of differences of understanding in the open, and it also underlined how much more comfortable people were overall with classmates with the same native language. There were many friendships across the Chinese-Foreigner line (and I'm happy to say some were mine!) but much of the time groups from one background or the other dominated people's social lives.
I know there is more I could have done, was capable of doing, to improve to social feeling in the Center. Trying to pick up the pieces and get more out of last year will, I think, be very important for how I feel about myself this year.
Title is from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", which has been stuck in my head for the last few days because a friend of mine introduced me to this excellent cover by Aloe Blacc and The Grand Scheme.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Exploring the World Series Introduction
Writing goal number two!
Is to think about/research again something involving environmental science, different countries, education, economics... basically to try to organize my thoughts about what I have learned and experienced... um... while I have been alive. Mostly not involving China.
I have spent time as a homeschooler, which allowed me to spend a lot of time figuring out how I learned; experienced my parents' divorce, which allowed me to deeply examine how I thought and felt (as in, the processes that lead me to various thoughts and emotions, not just examining the thoughts and feelings I had then); gone through grades 7-12 in the Ames public school system; earned degrees in International Studies and Environmental Science at the University of Iowa; and been able to spend time in Germany, Egypt, Korea, and China, last year earning a graduate certificate in Chinese Studies.
Sometimes I'm happy with what I've done so far and where it seems to be taking me, but overall the last year or so I don't know what I want to do with this range of experience. My goal this year is to calm down and let myself figure that out (as my darling mother assures me is inevitable). I know that teaching will be stressful, especially at first, but I have always enjoyed working with kids and after a while I think I will be able to settle into a routine and relax. Especially since my contract involves working only 15 hours a week with comfortable-living's pay.
These posts will go up on Thursdays, as this one is, and I'm hoping that I'll find some answers about what my focus should be by what topics I am drawn to explore. I'll be starting out looking around where I am more in depth-- Jeju island geology and a little history, the Korean language. I've been looking for more music from China and from Germany, to better keep up my language skills, and I'm not sure if the things I find will just surface here as post titles and asides or if I'll find an idea to tie together a whole post or two. I would really appreciate comments and questions, as always, to help me root out all the corners of each topic. Thank you! Love!
Is to think about/research again something involving environmental science, different countries, education, economics... basically to try to organize my thoughts about what I have learned and experienced... um... while I have been alive. Mostly not involving China.
I have spent time as a homeschooler, which allowed me to spend a lot of time figuring out how I learned; experienced my parents' divorce, which allowed me to deeply examine how I thought and felt (as in, the processes that lead me to various thoughts and emotions, not just examining the thoughts and feelings I had then); gone through grades 7-12 in the Ames public school system; earned degrees in International Studies and Environmental Science at the University of Iowa; and been able to spend time in Germany, Egypt, Korea, and China, last year earning a graduate certificate in Chinese Studies.
Sometimes I'm happy with what I've done so far and where it seems to be taking me, but overall the last year or so I don't know what I want to do with this range of experience. My goal this year is to calm down and let myself figure that out (as my darling mother assures me is inevitable). I know that teaching will be stressful, especially at first, but I have always enjoyed working with kids and after a while I think I will be able to settle into a routine and relax. Especially since my contract involves working only 15 hours a week with comfortable-living's pay.
These posts will go up on Thursdays, as this one is, and I'm hoping that I'll find some answers about what my focus should be by what topics I am drawn to explore. I'll be starting out looking around where I am more in depth-- Jeju island geology and a little history, the Korean language. I've been looking for more music from China and from Germany, to better keep up my language skills, and I'm not sure if the things I find will just surface here as post titles and asides or if I'll find an idea to tie together a whole post or two. I would really appreciate comments and questions, as always, to help me root out all the corners of each topic. Thank you! Love!
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