budding scholar

I’ve been thinking about seeing, but not really seeing things, how this can happen more in a city. The buildings are unchanging, and there are a lot of them, and I have somewhere to be. I’m lost in my head and my to-do list and worrying over my project. The other day I picked up my professor and her family at the airport, and one of the first things she said when we got into town was “I love all the wrought iron balconies”. And I said, “me  too”, and then thought to myself, “have I ever really noticed them?”. And I hadn’t. Not really. Today, I stood on a corner, looking up at the iron balconies of the building across the street above my metro stop. Really seeing them for the first time. How they stood out against the dull gray stone building. How they only started on the second or third floor level, above the trees. How different buildings swirl and wrap their iron in different ways. How my day, my project, my to-do list felt more tangible and possible once I forgot about it for a few moments.

What did you see, or (not) see, today?

More and more lately I find myself spending breaks from writing up pages and pages of fieldnotes reading blogs. Sitting on this black pleather rental apartment couch in the Eixample of Barcelona, or holed away in my windowless office, I follow links and photos to far-flung places where people write about their lives, and take pictures, and put it on the world wide web for all to see. New York, Seattle, more Seattle, San Francisco, Texas, Sweden, New Zealand (I think). And all the places these writers and photographers and foodies lead me through their links and inspirations, like Colorado, and Long Beach, California or Portland, ME and Portland, OR. My first love in blogging had long been my one and only, but the extra time home on the computer here, and lack of a social life in this new place, mean there’s more time to hop around from site to site finding new loves.

These escapes fill my mind with delicious food and images of neighborhoods and houses and places that are not HERE. They also make me think how HERE could be so much more through the effort of sharing it beyond our family and friend blog. What if I take a walk around my neighborhood every day and post pictures? What might I find, what might it add up to mean, when put out there in images and words, day after day?

Mostly they take me away from the frustrating process of trying to figure out how to do what I’m doing here. How to get access to people who will talk to me, get access to schools that will let me observe, and get over the hurdles of language and shyness. They provide connection to real people (mostly women) figuring out their lives. They fill some of the space left by not having friends here (yet).

So thank you, blogging world, for putting yourselves out there for the rest of us.

On the last Friday of every month, Maria Kalman posts a unique artistic story on her New York Times blog. Back in August, the topic was immigration, and how people got to America. I posted about it. Back in April, a piece about women on the Supreme Court. More recently, there was a piece about Thanksgiving, and going back to the land. I love her style, the way she’s taken the medium of a webpage and made it into a story, a way of displaying her art. How she mixes painting and photography, and complicated topics. An inspiration for sure.

The goal was to write 700 words a day this November. The result: an average of 678 per day, with the most being 2120, and several days of 0 (yes I kept track, in a spreadsheet!). On the whole it felt like an attainable goal, and I almost met it. Some days I used the writing time as a way of pushing forward on things like interview guides that had felt tedious and difficult (and thus led to procrastination). Other days it was a way of taking notes and reflecting on experiences, like the trip to meet a group of researchers in Jaén. Many days I wrote about research methodology, a necessary thing to think about right now. This feels like an important step in my career, becoming a regular writer. The goal for December is the same, 700 words a day, with a new focus: work on context/background material for my dissertation.

What are you working on, writing-wise this month? How’s it going?

Hey reader friends, if you are in for the December reading of Three Cups of Tea, let me know. My book arrived last week and I’m read to read. I created a blog for us on Blogger, so anyone with a google account can be added easily. Depending on peoples’ preferences we can make it users only or have it public. Either way I’ll register all members so we everyone can write posts.

So comment here or email me and let me know whether you’re in. Looking forward to the reading and conversation!

Missing conversations with friends over coffee today. An hour here or there, fellow Ph.D. students or other smart friends, coffees are a regular way to get together back home. This was a big way I connected with friends at Berkeley, and we always talked about our work, school, or just life. I’ve had it a few times here, but not much yet. I think I’ll seek out more people to talk with over coffee in Barcelona.

(1) Book Group

It’s a plan, we’ll do a book group, starting with reading Three Cups of Tea in December. I’ll do the job of finding a medium to discuss it, taking all your suggestions. And if we find after December that we peter out, well then it will be a one-book group. But if we find we the virtual, multi-country group works for us, well then we’ll keep it going.  Get your hands on a copy of the book (I just ordered mine from Amazon in the UK!) and let me know if you haven’t already that you want to participate. I’ll be in touch about it come December 1st!

(2) Government and Identity?

Anyone else read this article from the this past weekend’s NYT about Jewish schools in the UK? It’s about a lawsuit currently in the Supreme Court there brought by the parents of a boy who was denied admission to a Jewish school because he wasn’t Jewish according to Orthodox laws (his mother converted to Judaism, but in a progressive synagogue). I’m not Jewish, nor am I British, but I found this article very interesting for the questions it raises about culture, government, and education. Who gets to decide the boundaries of a cultural group? Who draws borders around who “we” (as Jews, as Latinos, as Muslims, as Americans) are, and who is included or excluded? What does it mean when the government is making rulings that shape who’s in and who’s out? Should a private religious school be able to exclude someone because they’re not ____ enough (in this case Jewish)?

So there are several of us interested in reading Three Cups of Tea. I was just reading a blog I visit sometimes, of an aid worker (formerly) working in Afghanistan, and she just read it. And then one of her commenters also had written a review about it. And I had an idea: let’s start a book group together! We’ll read Three Cups of Tea first, in December or January, and go from there. I love the idea of a book group focused on nonfiction books like Three Cups of Tea, but am open to other inspirations too. And maybe we could talk about it through emails, or through a discussion group of some kind, or even all get together on the phone or Skype. How many of you have been in a book group before? I’ve always wanted to, but never found (or started) the right group.

What do you think?

I sit and work on interview questionnaires. Organizing categories of questions, writing an introduction, translating English to Spanish. I consider different ways of asking people about their work, their ideas about immigrant integration in schools.

And my mind races ahead. This should have been done a month ago. What’s it going to be like to ask real people these questions? What if I can’t find schools to do my research in? What if my project changes? What if my project stays the same? How will I ever publish anything? Who will support my work? And on. And on.

Why is it so difficult to be in the present moment in my work? To have this be all. The act of sitting at my desk, thinking about my research questions, and putting together questionnaires. Thinking about these ideas I’m so interested in. Learning how to do my own study, learning how the day to day of research feels. Why does my mind take me straight over a precipice of worry? Tumble over dreams of future work, far away people, someday family? Rush over stones of expectation and shoulds about how I spend my time?

Is this part of doing creative or original work? Part of using the mind for work? A rite of passage of graduate school? Or just human nature?

People often see education as a panacea to fix all social problems. And this can be a problem, because people expect schools to do things they cannot, like fix broken homes or solve the childhood obesity problem in the United States. But I think Nicholas Kristof is on to something with this article. I haven’t yet read Greg Mortenson’s book he mentions about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. But I’d like to. And I’d like to support education efforts, like the work being done by the Afghan Institute of Learning. And I wish we all would push for schools instead of, or even in addition to, sending more troops to Afghanistan. Because schools are much more likely, long term, to make a real difference. We know from research that more educated women pass on the education to their children, and as Kristof says in the article, women’s literacy hovers around 3% in some of the most unstable parts of Pakistan.

Education is not a quick fix, but I think funding schools, and local people to work in them, is much more likely to promote stability in Afghanistan long-term. What do you think? Do you know of any good organizations doing work promoting education in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? How about organizations that work with the local people in exemplary ways around educational issues?