Hollister - the Creeping Calaveras Fault

Every region has its particular strengths and weaknesses with regards to the type of geology which is easily accessible for student field trips. In the areas surrounding UCT, we have some seriously awesome geology but there are at least two things my students have to accept without seeing any really clear direct evidence in the field:

1. plates really move
2. plates really subduct.

Since I have a student from UCT with me in San Francisco this week for the AGU meeting (who gave a badass poster presentation by the way), it's a good opportunity to fill some of these gaps. We took an afternoon drive down to Hollister and San Juan Bautista to see some evidence for recent fault creep offsetting sidewalks and walls.

Hollister is positioned just north of the split where the Calaveras Fault branches from the main strand of the San Andreas Fault. The Calaveras Fault is creeping through Hollister, but rates vary along the fault in space and time from 3-18mm/yr (http://funnel.sfsu.edu/creep/SiteTable.htm).
(Map from http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/)


My student is clearly excited by this right-lateral bulge in a garage wall.



Tension gashes where the fault crosses the street at a high angle and disappears straight under the middle of a house.
wonky sidewalk
another wonky sidewalk
seriously wonky sidewalk, and the steep small hill on the left of the photo is a pressure ridge
wonky sidewalk
more tension gashes in the street
carly will be creeping to your right as you look at this photo.

It's cool to see how different sidewalks and houses of different ages have accumulated different amounts of offset. We also couldn't help noticing new skirting and lots of concrete repairs which presumably addressed the larger offsets. Also - in some places the total offset was accommodated by narrow strands (usually ~ 1m wide) but in others, the deforming zone seemed to be much wider (10m). Seems like this depends on local soil conditions as well as the rigidity of the surface features. Sometimes it is wide under a sidewalk and sometimes all the strain seems to accumulate on one joint between sidewalk panels, as in the last photo.

Today we are off to Ring Mountain with Åke to see some evidence for #2.

Rock of the Week #1

When we were out in the field, the third years told me they felt they needed more practice identifying rocks in hand sample. Of course I asked myself, "What would Hilde do? She would find a way to give a prize." Thus was born:
Each week I will put a new and different rock out in the office with 3-pts worth of questions and all the students will try to identify the rock and submit their answers. Winners for each class level are named at the end of the semester. Just for fun, I'll post the RoW here on my blog as well and you kids can play along at home. This is the e-RoW. No handlens, knife, or acid on the monitor.

RoW#1:
1. What is the dominant mineral in this rock (1 pt)
2. How was this rock formed? (2 pt)
Some third years examining RoW#1 in Shirley's office:

First day of school

Yesterday, this was my coffee cart. Mine alone.

Pictures of People

Here we are, the 3rd year class after mapping a fast 2-days in the Nuy Valley Several of them have expressed interest in doing an Hons thesis with me. So exciting! I'm off to the CGS (the Council for Geoscience, USGS equivalent body) on Monday to find hanging projects in the mapping division. Should be some kick-ass Western Cape Structure coming out of my (future) research group in the next 12 months. Very exciting.

There were also some people out there

Apparently there is only one person who reads my blog, and that person is a sarcastic SOB. That would be Crazy Jonny who sends me rude emails about formerly extinct fish. Anyway just to reassure you that the next 10 posts are not all going to be about rocks, I will provide you with some images of students using compasses (with varying degrees of success).

Anyway I like this class, they were fun and big and boisterous and generally ok in the kitchen and each and every one of them has a whopping personality. You can't tell from these photos though, because these depict the "learners" performing

Here we have Oarabile measuring the trend of a nice tight plunging anticline with some consultation from Tshidi. Some signs suggest that OB knew how to use his compass at this point, although for a practical only 2 weeks earlier they had to repeat a single strike/dip measurement 10 times and calculate the standard deviation. Several students were showing standard deviations of up to 50°. Not sure physically how to do that unless you have an iron peg in your compass arm or something.


Next we have demonstrator Nic Laidler indicating the attitude of the axial planar cleavage of the fold he is standing on with Tanya and Caitlin. You can see from the look on Tanya's face (yellow shirt) that she is not too impressed with my "roadside geology" methods of waving your compass toward the trace of the axis. Tanya likes specifics! Caitlin is more trusting, perhaps.

This is the second group to map the Floriskraal Anticline. I accompanied this group on their first day to make sure they escaped the downfall of the first group, who maybe just a little bit didn't find the anticline in the Floriskraal anticline. Future students: if A overlies B, and you see the sequence A-B-A on your map, let anticline be your first working guess... until I tell you about faults that is (evil laughter)

Now I know what Barb secretly wants. She wants me to tell you the name, home language, life history and religious background of each of these students. But who would I be if I kept such data? I would be John Rogers! So Mom, if you want such data, you should write to him directly. I will tell you we had a 7th Day who had to be given an extension because he couldn't write up on Saturday. There are many different religions among the student body, a small subsampling of the more observant ones in one class will mean that there are students who don't work Friday, students who don't work Saturday, and students who don't work Sunday. Now imagine trying to run a field trip - which at that cost and time investment - can not be run multiple times. It looks like the department is going to move toward a "work or receive no credit" type policy with wiggle room for accommodating anyone's needs as possible (but no guaruntees of allowances). Awkward feelings about this.

Why I don't skype you

And this is over vacation when the dorms are empty.

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.
>>

Paradise Office

Ah, the sixth floor office. In spite of numerous warnings from all sides that it's going to turn into a sauna, I have all the windows open and I am loving it! Loving it up here. and the thighs of steel will be thanking me too. I hate the lift! It's creaky and humid in there.

These two pictures are both taken from the north wall of the office, from either side of the bank of file cabinets. The office is L-shaped and huge. It was the department chair's office for the old PreCambrian Geology department that was later absorbed. So it has a little secretary's office adjacent, with wacky old phones, which I will now refer to as my "bike's office".

I love the bookshelves. Love love love! Can't wait until my books get here. All those rocks belong to my predecessor, they are rad ductile stuff (most of them) which I will cut up and see if I can make thin sections and start working on the teaching collection! My thin-section-ductile-structure is a bit rusty after years in mothballs at UCSC.






Oh yah, and here's a link back to when I first discovered this office with this view!!

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

right kind of siding

Having lunch today at the UCT club with a couple other young women i met in the staff orientation, one from zoology and one from mathematics ("maths"). I knew I liked the club right away. There are a few reasons for this. One is the location, overlooking cape town and adjacent to the rugby fields. One is the menu. One is the bar, called the "laboratory", with old rugby jerseys, older science equipment, and some kind of taxadermied wart hog thing. But the best thing has to be the Malmsbury phyllite siding on the outside walls:




On my walk home last night after a little rain, I was overwhelmed by a beautiful scent that reminded me of Hawaii. The rain knocked some flowers off the tree so I took some home:

I'm going to miss the Daniel Family trip again this year, I got my teaching schedule and I have a seminar that runs June 11-29. At least there are plumaria here. Maybe I will make myself a lei.