Cocktails and Chinese Chicken.

I often receive compositions dotted with awkward phrases produced by cultural ignorance. That the sophistication of students’ written work reflects their limited personal experiences is unsurprising because we use what we perceive and cache in our memory. However, it can detract from the overall quality of their writing.

A very fluent student recently wrote an excellent composition about a man and a woman sharing an intimate dinner at a fancy restaurant. The setting was sumptuous, and each image fit very well with its companions, except for one glaring exception: when the meal arrived, the couple was having cocktails and fried Chinese chicken. There was no previous indication the restaurant was Chinese, and I can’t ever remember imbibing martinis while enjoying General Tsao’s chicken. It was enough to upset the balanced picture the student had so carefully crafted. At first it was hilarious, but it quickly became sobering.

This condition is directly connected to my students’ media consumption habits, reading in particular. Because Rwanda does not have a reading culture, students miss invaluable opportunities to expand their vocabularies and develop greater cultural nuance in their writing. The result is a worldview defined by too much television and too little literature, too many Youtube clips and too few bedtime stories, too many Victoria Beckhams and too few V.S. Naipuls, and this really concerns me.

The act of reading is a crucial part of child and adolescent development. Reading sustains our ability to think, and thus write, coherently. It teaches us to be careful consumers of information. It opens young minds to language’s creative possibilities. Without a culture of reading, my students are robbed of important opportunities to mature into thoughtful well-rounded adults, and instead they assault themselves with raunchy hip-hop music videos, banal reality television, and seizure-inducing advertising. For this reason I am contemplating issuing an open letter to parents next school year encouraging them to make reading an important part of students’ home life. Moral of the story: Read a book for everyone’s sake!

news bits...

The world has certainly taken an inauspicious turn in the past month. I apologize for the long absence. Work, news, and writer's block occupied my time.

The Middle East and North Africa continues to smolder and ignite piecemeal. So much to follow, so little time! Military intervention (always incredibly risky business) against Libya, violent crackdowns in the Persian gulf region, and a referendum in Egypt. Honestly, just stay tuned to Al Jazeera.

Japan’s devastation is shocking and tragic, and my thoughts have been with the many Japanese volunteers I’ve met here in Rwanda and their families back home. However, please be mindful about who you give to should you choose to support the relief efforts. The reality is Japan has among the best, if not the best, disaster response systems and personnel in the world. Also, keep in mind that Japan is not the only crisis in the world today. Many others, from Pakistan and Ethiopia to New Zealand and Haiti, are facing the terrible consequences of natural disasters.

In Africa, Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country, is preparing for presidential elections this year. AllAfrica has a nice webpage with lots of content. Nigeria’s immense resources, regional and continental influence, and history of conflict probably make these elections among the most important in the world this year. They certainly are up there with DRC’s election scheduled for the fall.

Concerning Rwanda, Think Africa Press has an incredibly interesting article on the Gacaca traditional courts handling the vast majority of genocide crimes. The interview is with a well-known professor at SOAS whose research on Gacaca (pronounced Ga-Cha-Cha) and general take on Rwanda seem very balanced and fair to me. Lots of progress, just as many problems, and no easy solutions.

Meanwhile, MTN continues to make life easier for tech savvy Rwandans and foreign residents, this time to keep that cash power topped up.

A New Times editorial whines about Libya, predictably. Everything's going well until that last little bit, where Gaddafi’s forty-year dictatorship is described cursorily as “a legitimate government which should enjoy the fruits of sovereignty.” No doubt the military intervention is problematic and cynical, but it’s a bit rich coming from the NT. I wasn’t aware that legitimacy was conferred by totalitarianism and graft.

In entertainment news, Pinetop Perkins, Boogie Woogie master, died yesterday at 96. He will be missed but forever a cherished part of my iTunes library.

Generalizing about generalizations.

Continuing the discussion about students’ writing, I had a revelation recently. I noticed a peculiar speaking habit among Rwandese that might help explain some of the difficulties I have with students’ writing. During a field trip with seventh graders to the Rwandan Information Office’s (ORINFOR) printing facilities and print newsroom, speakers repeatedly answered categorical or broad questions with rather specific examples. They often elaborated on these examples, straying further from the original idea the student probed.

I don’t know why it had never occurred to me, but this seems a common practice among Rwandese. No generalization is made, rather examples are proffered. I wondered if this trait was due to inability, unwillingness, or reasoned conscious decision and whether making generalizations or not, either initially or from an example, was indicative of education.

Admittedly making generalizations often requires inductive reasoning. We move from examples to generalizations because it’s practical. I am right now using inductive reasoning to make my own generalization about Rwandese from a vault of personal anecdotes. Although inductive reasoning is not perfect because it is technically impossible to justify, it’s often our only means of categorizing or distilling large amounts of information.

It seems sensible that the speakers at ORINFOR would use their examples to form generalizations, but why not think about the example and respond with a generalization? Perhaps the generalization didn’t occur to them, or maybe they expected students to make the connections themselves. Regardless, general answers to general questions were few and far between. In the ORINFOR scenario, I didn’t find it particularly troubling or inappropriate, but in other instances this habit can be problematic. It will certainly hamper my students on their IGCSE exams.

I suspect this habit has deep cultural and linguistic roots in the ways Rwandese communicate, but what those roots are remain a mystery to me. However, education must play some role. I often find myself politely badgering students with barrages of interconnected questions, trying to develop their ability to form generalizations themselves. If we have three examples of a character’s actions, what generalizations can we make about his or her personality? If we have seven textual details about a landscape, what generalizations can we make about the climate and geography imagined by the author? The Socratic dialogue often annoys students, but I believe it’s constructive. It’s precisely this type of method which was so tough in Nyagatare last year.

Jumping to more elaborate conclusions, what are the important cognitive implications of this ill-supported observation? Moving in this direction always risks political incorrectness. Who am I to question the autonomy and cognition of Rwandese? What right or standing do I have to judge? Images of condescending white colonialists pontificating about black Africans’ intelligence should spring to mind.

Obviously I have no proof, from a social science perspective, of any of my generalizations. Not of the trait, nor of its origins. But I can’t help escape the persistent alarm bells ringing in my head. My observations are in fact neither novel nor particularly defamatory. The Rwandan government itself has identified the population’s passivity, deference to authority (bleh), and historically poor education as sources of past conflict and barriers to future economic growth and socio-political stability. Rwandese’s characteristic passivity could account for many of the challenges I face using the Socratic method in the classroom. For the time being, I will be left wondering why some Rwandese have such difficulty engaging in lively discussions and transcending narrow perspectives often defined by exceptional or irrelevant examples, and others do not.