Earthquake, Pollution, Voting

It’s been a busy time lately, and New Zealand was once again on the international news with the 7.8 earthquake that devastated Kaikoura and also parts of Wellington. It was different from all of the other earthquakes I've felt here so far: over a minute of a gentle rocking, like being on a houseboat rather than in a house. It wasn't scary, although apparently the tsunami risk goes way up if a quake lasts for that long, and the evacuation plan for the coast is, well, not quite formulated very well. People ended up stranded for hours on a narrow peninsula and would have been engulfed if an actual tsunami had gone. Needless to say, residents over there are ticked.

I went to my first hui, which is the Maori term for a meeting, and that was an interesting experience where the topic was a very contentious political issue regarding children. I also went to a talk on freshwater pollution in New Zealand, which was very illuminating. New Zealand bills itself as clean and green but the reality is quite different. 74% of NZ freshwater fish are threatened or in decline and in a few decades there won't be any left. Plus, there is no protection under NZ law for them. 43% of NZ lakes are polluted and have too many nutrients (causing algal blooms). 67% of NZ waterways are polluted and the Canterbury region (which is where Christchurch is) has some of the highest rates worldwide of gastrointestinal disease. They're sobering statistics for sure.

algal bloom from report on freshwater in NZ

In the academic realm, I have gone back and forth on my thoughts on its function in today’s society. In discussions with some professionals outside of academia, I discovered that people outside the ivory tower have a surprisingly low opinion of academics. Their view was that many academics are the people who never left school, have little understanding of the ‘real world’, and couldn’t necessarily be successful having to work with other people in another job. They saw academics as more likely to be dysfunctional, which then explains why things like aspects like discrimination and backward-thinking still proliferate without much consequence. I have to say I’m starting to agree with some of this viewpoint, because of the resistance to change and lack of dialogue about critical issues that I have found this past year. Also, when I was helping tutor a student, I realized that they weren’t relating the book at all to their own life and struggles, and it occurred to me that we’re failing as educators (or the lecture system is failing) if they aren’t connecting what they’re reading and learning to their own life.

As part of this system, I had the opportunity to do several teaching sessions this year and experienced first-hand the issues with the lecture-style of teaching, because it is such a one-way, non-engaging style. It is still quite persuasive though, and allows you to shape others’ opinions. I also have been able to do more public speaking in front of hundreds of people, which I certainly wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago. Practice definitely helps. I helped organize a conference and a different seminar and in the process found a great TED Talk on how technology distracts us. I keep coming back to it (especially his bit about how checking social media updates is like gambling) so I think it’s a good one.

Other things that have happened were good celebrations of Halloween and Thanksgiving with friends. Funnily, I put out candy on my office hour but the New Zealanders were largely too timid to take it while I was there, but then when I came back most of it was gone. In the U.S., that wouldn’t have lasted a week! At a weekend festival, I tried fried pumpkin for the first time and it was yummy. And finally, I voted via email for the first time and it was very easy, and I hope that in the future electronic voting can become more of a thing, because I think it would increase the percentage of people who actually partake in elections.

 

China, High School, and Democracy in Disasters

I had some interesting conversations with some Chinese students about food and displays of affection. They had no idea about kids' menus in restaurants and picky eaters, so I told them about the problem of "latchkey" kids who come home to an empty house and pretty much make their own dinner and take care of themselves. This leads to them growing up on frozen food and things they can easily make on their own, like mac n cheese and spaghettios and breaded chicken nuggets. Or they get fast food several times a week and don't tolerate anything not on that kind of menu. The conversation arose as I was asking what kind of food a young Chinese child was being introduced to and she said it was the same things the parents were eating, like rice and such. I showed her some examples of kids' menus online so she could see what I was talking about. I also learned that the words tea and tofu originated in China. Regarding displays of affection, apparently it is not common for parents to hug/kiss their kids. The society is a lot more conservative than others, and the students said that they find it unusual how much affection is shown between families on Western tv and movies. As I reflect more on it, what is on tv and movies isn't necessarily the norm for a lot of Western families either, but it is the image we project to the rest of the world and how they think we all behave.

I spent two mornings as a tutor for high school students who were attending a week-long school camp at a nice resort called Living Springs over the Port Hills from Christchurch. It was very disappointing discovering that everything I've learned about the NCEA education system was largely true, with predigested assignments given to students without context or connection and no incentives for doing any better than the bare minimum to pass. Most of them could not even articulate basic ideas like what subjects they enjoy or do more than give plot summaries. I enjoyed teaching the 5-paragraph essay structure and helping out with talking through assignment guidelines and arguments. What was ridiculous was that the NCEA worksheets (which should be given to teachers, not students, because it has hard-to-decipher learning outcomes and policy things like the number of credits all printed right on the front) had errors themselves. You really shouldn't give students examples of things that have spelling and punctuation errors on them. Who created these materials anyway?

The Living Springs camp is nestled up in these hills

The view from Living Springs

The view coming down the road to go home

I substituted as a note-taker in a class on New Zealand politics, and it was really interesting to hear about the lack of democracy in disaster areas. Basically, politicians and governments use disasters to enact emergency powers and shut down discussion and debate. We watched a clip from Naomi Klein about her idea of "shock doctrine", where politicians quickly pass legislation that might be unpopular while people are still recovering from the shock of a disaster, either human-caused or natural. In Christchurch, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) was created after the 2011 earthquake to handle the recovery process, and it has a lot of power and is not elected, so people here are still living in an area with a suspended democracy. It was supposed to return power within a certain timeframe, but that seems to keep getting delayed.


There was an interesting lecture on China as a Great Polar Power, but it is based on unpublished research so we aren't allowed to discuss it. Suffice it to say, I didn't know about the recent Chinese movements near the Aleutian Islands and we might want to be concerned.

I can't understand why people are okay with sausages being served in white bread slices instead of buns. It's just not the same.

There were massive winds unlike even the worst ones we've experienced so far. Weather reports said there were gusts of 150-160 km/hr (90-100 m/hr). The glass in the window panes was shaking and it sounded like a massive storm. All kinds of things were blowing down the street.

We prepared and planted the garden with new seeds and are hoping for another successful year. I bought more strawberry plants to add to the existing bed, but everything else is starting from seed.

Returning to New and Old Things

I enjoyed flying back over the Southern Alps covered in snow. What a lovely view of New Zealand.

What's been happening in the month since I returned from Australia...

In the Neighborhood


Construction finished on the new Pak N Save store next to the old one. The good news is we spotted insulation, so hopefully it was actually used! (Rare sight to see insulation in New Zealand.) We went to the old store on the final weekend -- of course they didn't advertise this the previous week lest people wait for the sale -- and it was almost bare because they had a 20% off everything in the store to try to clear the stock. It definitely worked, and we bought a bunch of extra items in preparation for holiday parties.

On our street, a couple more houses were demolished. No idea if and when these will be replaced.

At Home

Our landlords were nice and got us a new dishwasher without us asking when we mentioned that the spring had broken on our door so it would slam down. They are easily the nicest landlords we've had, and they said they can put off doing earthquake repairs for a few years if we want to stay.

Our car failed its every-6-months Warrant of Fitness (WOF) because two of the rotors were going. Getting new rotors and an oil change set us back a bit, but that's cars for you.

It snowed in August! It wasn't enough to stay for long, but it was fun to see it falling. The heat pump struggled mightily to keep working (again, they are not designed to work in freezing temperatures!) and the electricity bill for that day was almost $20. You can see how people end up with massive energy bills in the winter here. 

Our cat is really happy we are home. He likes impeding work and setting a poor example by lounging on blankets.

Healthwise

I picked up some kind of cold at the last conference, but it wasn't too bad and I was on the mend by the time we got back to New Zealand. Everyone else seemed to be getting sick though with either colds or flus. It is strange being sick in July since that is winter here. D got sick once and now is sick again with something else.

I went to a dental hygienist that a friend recommended and got a cleaning (called a scraping and polishing) for $80. They weren't as good as places in the U.S. and didn't seem to realize that you have the patient wrap their mouth on the suction tube occasionally so the saliva and water don't pool at the back of their throat and cause choking. Just a thought. The cleaning took a half-hour and I was on my way. Possibly couldn't help stopping at the only Wendy's in town that happened to be across the street to get two value Frosties...

We decided to finally buy a parking pass to be able to park on-campus because it was getting too cold to walk all the way from off-campus in the freezing cold and wind tunnel by the library. I have been enjoying this luxury a lot this winter.

Learning

Several dozen of the Arts postgrad students are taking a no-fee 10-week "tutor training course" designed to help us improve our tutoring and teaching skills. Some of us wish that the instructor were actually from the Arts and not the Sciences, but this is whom the university offered. I found it interesting when we were given the children's story Goldilocks for an activity that the story is not universal; then I began wondering what sorts of stories and fairy tales kids learn outside of the Western context and what messages we actually absorb from all of our early reading.

The Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Arts gave a presentation entitled "What if Studying the Arts were the Best Thing for the Economy?" where he, a music guy, lamented having to give these kinds of talks defending the Arts instead of ones celebrating all the great things about them. The good news is that at least in New Zealand, earnings potential and employment rates are pretty much the same for most Arts and STEM graduates after a few years.

I'm learning more about Digital Humanities at the new weekly seminar series on campus. When one presenter asked the audience if they knew what OCR was, and a group of middle-aged lecturers all answered no, it really reminded me why I want to push for basic digital literacy as a requirement for university students everywhere! It’s what runs our world; we should have some say in it. I did some informal polling among some of the postgrads on our floor and none of them knew what OCR was even though they've all benefited from it. I just assumed everyone knew. It stands for Optical Character Recognition and is when the computer converts an image of text into text that can be read by a computer and manipulated in a lot more ways. This happens when items are digitized and then the text becomes keyword-searchable, able to be copied and pasted, etc. If you have a picture of a text (like the page of a book), you might be able to read it, but you can't do much else with it because the information is locked in the image. OCR isn't always perfect -- it's very difficult to do this accurately with handwritten things, old manuscripts, and anything not standardized. The presenter also mentioned scanning images into 300dpi TIFF color files, and though he didn't ask this time, I'm pretty sure a sizable portion of the audience didn't know what he meant.

How I got away with it for this long I don't know, but I finally read Edward Said's Orientalism and it was really good and surprisingly readable and accessible. He wrote it in the 70s but it could almost be written today, so much of what he discussed regarding stereotypes about the Middle East are still used. I'm using his perspective for the journal article I am writing and it is perfect since there are a lot of references to Islamic and Arabic culture and practices in my text. I think Orientalism should be required reading at university level and our education system should actually teach students about non-Western areas of the world in modern times, not just in ancient history where it's "safe".

Public Speaking

I participated in the university's Thesis in Three competition where you boil down your research and why it's important in three minutes. I also convinced several other Arts postgrads to do it and use it for presentation practice. Unfortunately there is a bias toward Linguistics students who win every year (didn't know this going in) so none of us made it into the finals. It was nice learning about other research going on though.

I had the opportunity to help plan for and co-teach a session at the skills center for students with English as a Second Language, and it went well. They are so appreciative of the chance to practice their English with native speakers.

Making Change

After I discovered that I hadn't been invited to be a representative at the postgrad focus group that was set up because of my complaining about the lack of culture last year, I was finally invited and am getting the chance to air my complaints and propose solutions, as well as meet some of the postgrads around campus. On my wishlist is to have a holiday party with hand-mailed invitations (because getting another email is so easy to ignore). We'll see if that happens.

I was also given the opportunity to sit down with the newly-hired International Student Experience Advisor (I think the university is finally realizing there's a problem) and tell her all of my issues with being an international student. She is lovely and really wants to improve things if she can get some resources. (She's also been outside New Zealand so knows how things are supposed to work!)

Some of us went to the New Zealand International Film Festival's screening of She's Beautiful When She's Angry about the birth of the women's movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. It was good, and fun to see older women being interviewed now about their past experiences and then have the scene jump to them back when they were in college and agitating for change. Putting faces and personalities to the big authors (Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, etc.) was cool.

Socially

The Alumni office invited me to go schmooze with alumni and donors at a party and I got a little peak into how the university positions itself to them. I met a couple interesting people and had a long discussion about what's wrong with New Zealand politics. It was great!

There's a new young lady from China in our postgrad room so I'm excited to learn more about her country from a female perspective. She seems really nice and not as shy as other international students. I also met my first person from Kazakhstan, and I'm having to put aside all the stereotypes from the movie Borat which is probably the only encounter most Americans have had with that country's name. It shows you the power of popular culture in shaping our perspectives.