Archive for education
A man
This obituary in the Washington Post really struck me.
Just past 1 p.m. on Oct. 9, 1967, a young and trembling Bolivian army sergeant named Mario Terán pointed his M2 carbine from point-blank range at Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The long-hunted Latin American revolutionary, 39 years old and an international hero to Marxist guerrillas, had been captured by an army patrol the day before.
Guevara lay wounded and shackled on a filthy stone floor of a mud hut in the Bolivian town of La Higuera. He looked directly at his executioner and said, as Mr. Terán recounted years later: “Calm yourself. And aim well. You are going to kill a man!” …*
Although Mr. Terán rarely talked of the day he shot Guevara, Bolivian reporters who tracked him down years later quoted him as saying: “It was the worst moment of my life. I saw Ché large, very large. His eyes shone intensely. When he fixed his gaze on me, it made me dizzy.”
After the guerrilla told him to aim well, Mr. Terán said, he “took a step back towards the door, closed my eyes and fired.”
The presence of mind and the generosity of Guevara in these moments are startling.
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I doubt I will want another man’s image in my own obituary. But there could be no other way here.
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* Other sources phrase Guevara’s last words a different way: “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man!” The phrase “Shoot, coward” seems like an addition provided posthumously, as does, to my ear, the phrase “only a man.” Each addition would coarsen Guevara’s display of humanity.
The new term
My term starts on Monday (delayed a week because of Omicron). I can’t wait. This has been too long of a break, considering. I had to cancel a trip to Portland because of an eye operation, and then a visit from my partner and her daughter because of our crazy weather. It would have been a complete bust without a stack of books to read!
This semester’s classes are both for third- and fourth-year students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University: ‘Advanced Professional Communications’ and ‘Technical Report Writing.’ Very oddly, it seems, this latter class has become hugely popular in the last year or so; thirty people are on the waiting list. Technical Report Writing is no breeze!
My sister Jenny’s new project
My sister Jenny has been busy. The Brooklyn College Cancer Center “has a mission to enhance the lives of cancer patients through research, education & community outreach with a focus on Brooklyn residents.” Here’s the Center’s Facebook page.
Related
Back in 2016 a woman in my Dialectical Behavioural Therapy class told us she was “practicing not having Costco-size emotional reactions to 7-11-sized situations.” It became my motto.
Feedback
A theme in all my orientation classes is the primacy of feedback in communication: how you give it, how you receive it.
When you gratefully welcome feedback into your life from colleagues, you grow as a professional, because you learn. When you usefully provide feedback to your colleagues, they get better as professionals, because they learn.
That’s why defensiveness and unfriendliness are killers when it comes to the work of communication.
A short while ago a friend forwarded me a short memoir written by Phil Mott, a mutual friend from our university years four decades ago. It covers this theme:
My girlfriend encouraged me to write and set me up with the Prodigal Sun editor [Bob Basil], the entertainment section of the paper. He assigned me a rather harmless assignment of reviewing the movie American Gigolo. I wrote the review and sat down with one of the editors to review the article. Bob was a kind-eyed soul with a talent for writing and an affection for the spirit of Jack Kerouac. His stories took him on wild trips riding rails and visiting the less fortunate of the world. He sat next to me with a red pen and wrote more in red than I had double-spaced typed. I was crestfallen. He wrecked me in ten minutes and crushed any dream that I ever had of writing anything but a to-do list ever again. He then looked up at me with a smile and told me “looks pretty good. I like it. You made some nice observations”. His support was greatly appreciated and kept me from jumping out of a window. He passed the review on to the copy department, red marks and all, and, just like that, I was a writer.
In giving me permission to reprint this passage, Phil wrote, “I would love it if my addled brain remembrance is of some use. Take it as a grand compliment that your advice stuck with me all of these years. It helped me give feedback to my own college students.”
basil.CA 