our universe ticks

Today is the spring equinox, and there is also a new super moon and a solar eclipse which will be seen only, I’m am reading, by far flung Scandinavians and hungry polar bears.  Polar bears in Scandinavia? 

What’s to the triple cosmological coincidence?  Yawn, nothing.  Not all coincidences are meaningful, perhaps  the flighty and fanciful hold out for cause and effect occurrences but we have too much science thanks to hungry seeking rationalists, so the fables and the myths have been relegated to the pages in the fantasy section of your bookstore.

I think I first heard Keith Green use it;  going to church doesn’t make you a Christian like going to McDonalds doesn’t make you a hamburger.  Well I didn’t go to mass this morning but I did go to McDonalds for breakfast, sat at the community table, read today’s paper and noshed on a sausage egg mcmuffin.  Look, if I don’t feel right in my head and in my heart about attending mass I’m not gonna go because I see myself as a hypocrite.  I can find communion with God and the saints who may I unabashedly call spirits too, anywhere.  While the Catholic church doesn’t have that huggy touchy experience the evangelicals seem to think is necessary in fellowship, they do have the solemnity and mystery in buckets.  And sometimes if you put your mind to it you can find that solemnity and mystery in nature or in your home.  Light a candle if it helps.

After breakfast I went to Choitrams and Lulus, and spent $68 on food not available in Buraimi and when I returned to and crossed the border I looked to my left, a long convoy of cars waiting to enter the country, the first car with abu dhabi plates sat two anglo-saxons and I did a shake of my hand when the blonde in the passenger seat and I looked at each other to say, what is this, you wait, I go, and I swear, I started singing, I love you Oman.  As for this city, sigh….

On Wednesdays my students do the exercises in their workbook and then I collect them and check their work.  I know they work together and here I look for patterns in the chaos and it is terribly disconcerting when I see students copy incorrect sentences.  After the break I drew two circles on the board and wrote above one circle ‘community’ and the other ‘individual’.  In the community circle I drew a few dozen happy faces  =) and in the individual circle I drew one happy face.  I wrote an incorrect sentence on the board:  Can you help me wash these bowls?  Only in the book the illustration the man asking is another man to wash a sink full of pots.  I circled one of the happy faces in the community circle and went into today’s sermon.

“One student in this class wrote bowl and half of you wrote bowl and you didn’t question if the object was a bowl or a pot which is what this is (I drew a pot and pointed it out in the book).  You copy incorrect words and I want to know why.  Why copy something as if it is correct.  Is it laziness, some yes, is it indifference, some yes, or is it an inability to discern the difference between a bowl and a pot.”

Small mistakes you think, I’m making something big out of something little.  No, I’ve noticed the pattern of students copy incorrect grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and on and on for a while.  In another exercise a woman is going on vacation and the students look at the photo of a woman in her living room with a fish tank, a cat, and mail on the ground.  The students have to write requests.  All of them wrote “Can you feel my cat while I am away?”  It’s a one letter mistake, ok, copied incorrectly 26 times.  That is shameless.

Next week I will introduce a contrast-comparison writing exercise and perhaps I’m jumping into an  academic quandary that is still in its infancy, but I want them to see the difference between helping in the community and the expectations an individual is held to in a school.  This certainly is an issue that could be researched more fully and I could do it but do I have the chutzpah to do it well?  I don’t know but I’m certainly miffed when they copy wrong and don’t care.  I told the engineering wannabes and the businesswoman wannabes and the nursing wannabe who actually is a good student that I don’t want to drive on a bridge built by a dishonest engineer and I don’t want to do business with a dishonest businesswoman and I certainly don’t want to go under the knife of a dishonest doctor assisted by a nurse who doesn’t know the difference between a scalpel and a sponge.

It’s like turning the switch, temperatures go up.  I cleaned the air conditioner filters in the bedroom and living room and we’re close to returning to the artificial environment.  It is not a choice unfortunately, it is a necessity. 

The Faroe Islands, the moon is 400 times closer to the sun right now…1:40pm local time. The woman in the plane describing it is giddy:  a diamond ring, wow, stunning, the sun’s corona, wow….and the eclipse is gone for another 85 years.  “the shadow engulfs us, it is eerie,  the wind has shifted, the moon flying by at 2,000 miles an hour, the feeling of astronomy the clockwork of the universe.  It is extraordinary.  Bailey’s beads, the sun pours through the moon’s valleys…wow….such prominence, glowing plasma gas a million degrees...

ok, science can still be exciting without the mythology.