Our two week winter break was interrupted on Thursday for a
return to school. Fortunately, Mother
Nature had a blizzard in store for us Thursday night into Friday, so our new
mayor and school chancellor got to open their term by declaring schools closed. I returned to the warm corner of the sofa in
the den and continued my trip around the world through the magic of movie streaming. This week alone I have been to South Africa,
Tibet, Israel, Brazil and others.
But at least for a little while on Thursday I was back in my
corner of world, trying to wake up enough and get the few students who braved
the Artic-cold to wake enough to engage in that teaching learning-thing we are
supposed to do
By mid afternoon, with the snow already beginning to fall,
Marilyn was the only student in the Resource Room. She’s not my student, she’s assigned to the
other Resource Room teacher. Marilyn was
a mom at fourteen and lives with her mother and the babydaddy. Marilyn and the baby were born in the United
States, the mother and babydaddy were
not. I think about which country should
spend the next two hours on my wide screen TV, Marilyn thinks about what
country she and her family can live safely in.
Marilyn needs to pass the History Regents. Despite all those worries and responsibilities
at home, Marilyn works hard, and does fairly well, but the language dependent
Regents are a challenge. The other
Resource Room teacher, a whiz, at maintaining files of study material whips out
packets of, well, study material, especially for the history exam.
“Industrial revolution, what word that you know do you see
inside of it?” she asks Marilyn. And then adds, the word is “industry, so when
you see Industrial Revolution, think -machines.”
And I, never one to mind my own business, must add that it
so much more than just machines. I ask Marilyn to imagine what it must have
been like three hundred years ago on our own farms (or the landlord’s farm-more
likely for both our ancestors),trying to raise the food, weave the cloth and
protect our families without the help of supermarkets, department stores and
central heating. I talk about, how
people left the farms to work in cities, how large factories caused certain
countries to think they owned others just to gather the raw material needed to
stoke the machines, how large textile factories required large plantations and
large plantations required lots of workers and the idea of declassifying humans
as humans so they could work on the plantation for free. The Industrial
Revolution changed everything I add.
Marilyn listens intently and nods.
I cannot tell if she finds me interesting or useful, or if she is just
being respectful.
On the car ride home, I thought about how I had not even
mentioned the story of the moths in England, that we talk about in the Living
Environment Course. The moths the color
of soot were able to survive by not getting noticed by predators in the sooty
environment of 19th century England, and therefore were able to go forth
and breed more sooty colored moths- a story often used to illustrate natural
selection.
In the early morning Resource Room, the two students who showed and I read a article from the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff. It is
one of my standard operational procedures
to share true stories about how hard it is for people elsewhere in the
world to obtain an education. I figure
that should make one less inclined to squander one’s free available one. (data does not definitively support this conclusion) The Kristoff story was about a young woman
who preferred being beaten with an electrical cord by a family who sent her for
few hours a day of schooling in the capital while keeping her in indentured
servitude for the rest of the day, to living with her own mother and many
siblings far from an available education.
We ended up talking about birth control and how hard woman have
it, how difficult it is to survive in a destitute country far from the
factories and machines of the industrialized world.
And then the blizzard struck.
We all retreated to our central heated homes, in cities, far
from the subsistence existence of our ancestors. For better or worse we live on the Industrial
side of the Industrial Revolution. We live in a world of machines.
Here is a list of movies I watched on the machine that
produces it 10 feet away from my sofa if I figure out the right sequence of
bottoms to press. Unless otherwise noted
they are available on Netflix Streaming.
Master Harold and the
Boys South Africa (based on Athol Fugard’s play, Apartheid and
family drama plays out in a Capetown Teashop- dated but good)
Tsotsi
South Africa (More recent Athold Fugard story about the struggles of the
very poor and very rich in post Apartheid South Africa)
Himalaya (Michael Pallin’s 2004 Travel Series) (Stunning
travel show with Monty Python humor mixed in)
A Bottle in the Gaza Sea Israel and the Gaza Strip (teenage
angst between Israeli and Palestinian youth)
Sounds of Sand Africa (not specified) (When the travel is for
survival vs. stunning scenery, although
the scenery is starkly beautiful viewed from a home with running water)
Free Zone Israel and
Jordan (A young Natalie Portman illustrates her Mideastern roots-angst)
Lillyhammer Norway (The
Sopranos move to the North)
Matchmaker Israel
(Bittersweet story of Holocaust survivors looking for love and the meaning of
life)
La Sirga Colombia
(Surviving on the outskirts of war and the 21st Century in Colombia)
Shun Li and the Poet Italy (recent young Chinese
Immigrant and not so recent Slav immigrant search for friendship on the Italian
waterfront)
Unfinished Sky Australia (Afghani
refugee and crusty outback farmer find their lives intertwined)
The Middle of the World Brazil (available through Freegal- poor
family of seven bicycle from northern Brazil to Rio De Janeiro in an attempt to
find work)
The First Grader Kenya (Old man enrolls
in the finally free school system to learn to read)
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