Good book and new adventure

When scrounging the bowels of the library the other day in search of the Proceedings of the Geological Society of Poland, 1966 (no, we don't have it), I impulse-checked out an autobiography of a lady physicist, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove. Usually I would think that an autobiography of any physicist, lady or otherwise, would be like watching for mesons with a magnifying glass (ha ha) but perhaps my latent obsession with Dick Feynman drove me to check it out.

A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist grabbed my attention right away because Fay is direct, candid, and funny. The title seemed to imply that she made choices, I thought sacrifices, and I expected there to be some regrets. It turns out Fay is not a regretful person! Which may be the best lesson to take from the book, for female physicists and everybody else. The story of how her family escaped the Holocaust is alone enough to make this a worthwhile read. Her underdog success, aided by a few gender-blind mentors and colleagues, was enough to warm my cynic's heart. She also takes a few institutions to task, by name (Harvard, Princeton) and points out the second glass ceiling at the tenure review. It was gratifying to google her and see that her website at UPenn is still active, as she is no doubt still active, even after surviving cancer and her husband's health problems as well. Fay's voice is objective, awkwardly literal (as physicist types can be!) and she tells the story of her life without sugar coating, pointing out when her recollections might have been bitter and assessing whether she still holds that bitterness. I think anyone reading this book would come away with a deep respect for the perseverance of a woman who quietly found a way to do what she wanted to do, without tooting her own horn, and truly picked her battles. While on some level an inspirational story, it was also a reminder for me of how much patience is required to break through barriers on ones own. Cheers Fay, and thanks.

Amazon link for A Matter of Choices

I'm off to Windhoek in the morning for a meeting with our new research group - no idea what to expect there, but excited! Sila asked for a souvenir - he wants a snow globe.

Weird to be White?

I have avoided discussing race too much on this blog, for PC purposes. It is a factor of life here but having gotten used to the particular tensions in the particular places and faces that I see every day, I think less about it now. It becomes very acute when I leave the city, because the areas that I go in the city are almost entirely historically "white" districts. I can expect to see people that look like me and have similar income levels. They will, however, immediately know I am a foreigner before I open my mouth. I think I am too unfashionable to be mistaken for Capetonian.

I got an email from a very good, very short friend who shall not be named at this point, from a hotel in Nairobi. This friend has just spent several weeks in rural eastern Kenya for scientific purposes. This friend wrote of a white hotel guest being a rude bastard for not being served dinner after kitchen closing, in spite of the fact that the city is in a state of chaos. My friend writes,

"does it ever get less weird to be white in an african country? these types of bougey establishments make me so uncomfortable. "

I have wondered the same thing. I am often embarrassed when I see white people being rude. Likewise, I am embarrassed when non-whites expect me to act like the rude white people. Race is a huge factor here, much because whiteness is still highly correlated with richness. Right now rich black people have arguably the same effect on the poor black majority as rich white people do, but their existence means something very different to that majority. And it's only the left-leaning people trying to point this out, especially the white academic ones who insist that ultimately it's class warfare behind all these problems. Although I think I agree with that in a broad sense, alarms go off every time white people try to move the focus off racism. Is that the legacy of the PC police? or is it because everyone knows that everybody else is at least a little bit racist, whether consciously or not?

There are way too many issues to address in one post, but the one I want to address is the one my friend wrote about, that is, the discomfort. Now, I am not talking about discomfort in direct interactions between people of different race, rather about the discomfort in witnessing or being obliquely involved in some types of interactions. This type of discomfort derives from monolithic treatment of racial groups, by people either within or without the racial group in question. Some of the things that are going on among people of all races, that when combined with a gradient of power or control, are the source of institutional racism.

Whites in this country are being called to task for their racist views, which have caused so much damage which will take generations to heal. Non-whites in this country have not had a systematic exhumation of their racial views and there are a lot of issues there. But through the process of "transformation" - which refers to institutional as well as personal change - there is a dialog developing about morality, humanity, and social organization that is helping people examine themselves openly and not from a place of shame.

If I sound weirdly happy about this it's because I had a great experience this morning in Employment Equity Representative training. Not because the training was so good (though it was), but because the group of people around me is so passionate about moving South Africa into a better future, and doing it RIGHT, urgently but not so urgently that it is done wrong. I am often reminded that in spite of everything wrong with this country (and there is A LOT WRONG with this country), the engine of civil expression and civil participation is alive and well.

Some thoughts on teaching UCT students

A few weeks ago, my dad asked me this:


Hi Daughter,

Hope things are going well.

Riding back from yesterdays breakfast with [identifying details deleted to protect the otherwise insulted] I was pondering the skills of a teacher and wondering if [deleted] would be a good one. I was thinking that one
attribute of a good teacher might be the ability to see the problem thru the students view of things. That let to the thought to get your veiw of the issue and the question - are you seeing the world differently in teaching students from different cultures?

Love Dad

So you can see that spell-check culture has not been good to my dad. But more importantly, I wrote him a long email back with lots of thoughts. On 9 May. Since I haven't gotten any response from him, I posit the answer to you, dear reader (hi mom), with some minor edits:

>>
the simple answer is that anyone can be a good teacher.

The complicated way of saying the same thing is that billions of research dollars have been devoted to studying "good teachers" and developing a generalized idea of "best practices" - and that there is no consistency of practice between one good teacher and another, and no teacher is considered good by 100% of the students they teach.

In my opinion the key attributes are to have a personal style, passion for the topic, clear oration, precise expectations, and high expectations. [deleted] already has some of these and the rest I think he will be able to learn as he goes along. He'll do fine. Let him get advice from people in his field - because a key element of a successful class is that the teacher and students share similar expectations and none of us are qualified to help him develop that sense and how to moderate expectations students have about social science classes. Suffice it to say that as soon as he steps in front of the classroom he will likely have major readjustment of what his expectations are in his role as a student - as his role as a teacher
expands. Anyway that's all good.

At first I noticed the cultural contrasts more than I do now (oh so far down the road...) but I think they just add to the spectrum of understanding/background/learningstyle/expectations that is a complex network of connections between each student, the class as a whole, the instructor, and the materials (physical and esoteric) that collectively direct the events in the classroom. Culture would be a different issue for, say, a white teacher going to an Inuit village where cultural relevancy and context needs are somewhat uniform across the student population. Here there are so many cultures coming together that between some individuals, their first common culture will be science. So I have the responsibility to initiate students to the culture and language of science asap - while still balancing the burden which is the white-male-eurocentrism of that scientific culture. One tool for balancing this is to really emphasize the dynamic nature of the culture of science, which is taught in secondary schools as a static thing! Because if the world is static and it's all whiteoldmale now, it's a totally different message than if it's dynamic, and it's all whiteoldmale now. I tell anecdotes about geologists and students I have known in the past and emphasize nationality, race, gender, language - trying to paint a picture of the changing face. Teaching students from all these backgrounds really helps me clarify for myself which elements of the culture are really elements of science discourse, and the way that the discourse manifests in different populations. For example when we're in the field and the students are discussing the geology in another language than English - Afrikaans or Sotho or Xhosa any number of languages which are shared in any small group of students - they have different analogies, turns of phrase, etc. I have always felt that a real test of a scientist is to explain ones work without the use of jargon. The proverbial "tell your grandmother what you do" test. And here we have my students, in the field, bouncing between languages which don't even have the geological jargon, sometimes inserting English words where necessary, but basically exercising the "grandmother test" on their own.
>>

Khuluma Workshop

I've spent two of three days at the Khuluma Workshop - it's a sort of voluntary challenge day for any staff of UCT that wish to attend. I've been to plenty of diversity workshops and leadership camps and what have you before, and although there are some elements of this experience that recall those, Khuluma has been quite different. In our class of 16, I think we have 2 white men, 3 white women, 3 Black women, 1 Black man, 2 Coloured men, 5 Coloured women. They are from various staff offices and schools. The facilitators are a Black woman from Soweto and a white woman raised in Kenya and Uganda by British parents. They are both very very good. Embodiment of gentleness. Embodiment of authority.

First of all - when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you experienced discrimination":

A Coloured man related the forced relocation of his family from a neighborhood which was reclassified as "white".
A Muslim Coloured woman related being ejected from "white" beaches by the police and threatened with arrest.
A Coloured woman related the story of her green-eyed Coloured boyfriend who was able to "pass" or "go for white" and purchase a house in a white area. This necessitated getting the signed permission of everyone in that neighborhood for him to move in.

And that was just from my small group.

And when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you discriminated against someone":
Initially, I was the only person in my group who had a story. I don't think there's been enough time and dialog going on for lots of people to think about that way. The history is so one-sided.

Today (the second day) we talked more about the history. I had read about some of the laws and some of the resistance in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom but there were far more laws than I knew of, the system was more insidious than Mandela's book expresses. I assume this is due to Mandela's famous spirit of forgiveness and effort toward Reconcilation. It is amazing to hear first hand what it was like. And it's not like going once a year to meet the 1906 Earthquake survivors at a special ceremony, it's not history. Everyone you see on the street who is older than about 10 has memories (scars) of life under aparteid. This includes the whites too - whether actively involved in "The Struggle" or not. What was terrifying for me to realize is how the first 20 years or so of aparteid were basically barely different than the segregation laws in the US. Where the ZA National Party made laws after that - many of them were identical to the unwritten laws that governed the life of American blacks prior to the Civil Rights Movement. I went into the workshop planning to be an observer and feeling somewhat naive. But what I heard started to sound uncomfortably familiar.

We were divided into white and non-white groups today - the term "Black" here is used both for genetic Africans and as a general term for "People of Color" - I didn't realize before that this is how UCT achieves its "50% Black" statistic - but that's another story.

To be sent into another room with the other white people was a horrible shock. After spending 1.5 days really digging into the experiences of my new friends and really being touched by their stories - to be sent out felt like redrawing the lines in the sand. The other person who was really troubled and had difficulty leaving the room was a white man in his mid-50s - like other white males he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force at 18 and sent to the Border wars - he lashed out against the commanders for what he was being asked to do and was imprisoned by the government.

As the white group we made a list of how the legacy of aparteid had hurt white South Africans and the country as a whole. Many items on our list will sound familiar to Americans as well -
-the "Pale Male" syndrome where white males feel rage over being disenfranchised, but a survey of the positions of power still shows extensive control of economy and media by white males.
-fear of non-whites as bringing crime, incursion into neighborhoods, "property values"... living in fear
-white families separating as white people left ZA (thinking of white South Africans I've met in US... all arrived circa 1995)
-Hard to form new alliances of real trust - now racism has gone "underground"
-whites afraid to give anybody feedback/criticism at work - overplaying of the "race card"

We are not so different after all! I could have made 75% of the list about America.

What WAS different - is the reaction of the Black/Coloured group to our list - many people were genuinely surprised, and even terribly sad and hurt - to see the extent of the fear among whites -
I think the communication has been so ABSENT between communities that many people never thought about the motivations behind white racism and resistance to change. Nobody tried to justify those things of course - but I think for some people present it put a human face on the "white menace". One Coloured woman came to tears to see that Transformation was coming at so great a cost for some people, as a white woman related that her sons had left the country in 1995 and made homes in Europe - never to return.

Tune in tomorrow after the session on WHAT WE CAN DO AT WORK