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March 24, 2009

Bananarama

My TOEFL students were shocked yesterday to learn that there's only one kind of banana in the United States.

This somewhat odd discussion came out of a listening selection on heirloom crops. For that to make sense, I had to explain the concept of selective breeding, giving cows as a basic example (ie, for dairy, meat, or in the case of Cambodian cattle, physical labor). The biology and environmental sciences students already had some idea about 'biodiversity,' the topic of one of our better master's programs, so this wasn't too much of a stretch for them. Then I explained how the bananas I ate in the states were generally grown in Central or South America, and since they had to keep fresh over a long travel time, they were generally bred for that quality above others.

Cambodia, in contrast, has a very short time-to-market, and generally isn't so systematized in its agriculture. So that means that without even trying Cambodia has many different kinds of bananas that might be considered "heirloom" in other countries. They are incredibly flavorful; I particularly enjoy the short, fat "chicken-egg bananas" you can get on the street in any number of ways. When wrapped in sticky rice and grilled, they're one of my favorite roadside foods.

It's the same with tomatoes (some of which, admittedly, come from Vietnam). But I should note that Cambodia isn't necessarily the organic paradise you might imagine. A lot of farmers buy pesticides and fertilizers with directions and warnings in languages they can't read, and drench their crops with these volatile chemicals in concentrations far above recommended or safe levels. The chemistry department has done some really interesting work in this regard, and education on the matter is an ongoing project for the NGOs.

Posted by flynn at 11:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 22, 2009

"On-on..."

Things are going pretty well, and I've actually been pretty busy. Over the past 2-3 weeks I have:

-started playing basketball at the US Embassy on a weekly basis. It really is like going to another country; they have their own water supply so you can actually drink the tap water.
Attended the CamTESOL Conference and listened to a great number of talks on teaching English and teaching thinking (more on this in a bit)
-Contributed to the development of Cambodian hip-hop through my technical assistance on matters of production, as well as by sharing with them some excellent sampling material. Peanut is doing some amazing stuff making beats out of old 60s Cambodian Rock.
-Run with the legendary Hash House Harriers. The Phnom Penh Chapter is something of an expat fixture (since '92), and it's a nice way to deal with both the desire for exercise, and the desire to meet new people. You also get to see random parts of nearby provinces, and drink a reasonably unreasonable amount for a Sunday evening. I also really like the way it's non-competitive, and how this is ensured by the course design: lead runners have to check out all the possible forks in a path when they hit a fork. By the time they've figured out the right path, the slower people have caught up. Plus you get to shout things like "on-on!" that leave no doubt as to its british origins (the songs after a run and before/during the drinking are also another tip-off).

Anyway, in between all this I managed to squeeze in a conversation with Pok Visalboth, one of my students from last semester. He's also studying Korean and a little Japanese, and we talked a bit about linguistics (he's a Khmer language and literature major) and language learning. It reminded me of a talk I attended at CamTESOL called "Teaching Space." I hope you don't mind if I geek out a little bit here, and explain it in brief...

Basically, the promised findings of universal human cognition haven't really materialized so far, and so cognitive scientists lately have had to pump their breaks and ask some anthropologists for directions.(at least according to the Belgian giving the talk.) While there certainly are innate parts of human biology, any sort of 'universal grammar' that obtains in the human brain is probably are just the hardware (or the programming language), not the software. Thought and perhaps even phenomenal experience are shaped at a very deep level by our native languages. If your language uses an entirely absolute frame of reference (no left/right, only north/south), it will be difficult for you to parse ideas or thoughts in english that make heavy use of prepositions and latinate prefixes (both of which are heavily based on a certain idea of space).

This is in essence a retooled (and probably less deterministic) formulation of Sapir-Whorf, a hypothesis I grow fonder of the more I teach. It was an interesting talk, and it made me realize that I'm not only teaching how to read/write/listen/speak in English, but also the tricks of thinking in my language, something I've been doing without knowing. I almost always try to put abstract concepts into visible space, and it's helped a lot.

Posted by flynn at 5:51 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack