Damped and Driven

Thinking about my last post, i wanted to sort of mollify it with a comment or two. Sometimes i really don’t like/regret talking to people about how things are here (on the rez) because when we talk about it or write about it to someone on the outside it sounds so sensationalist; I think it sounds a lot worse than things really are. I fear thats how my post from the other day came across. I’ve chatted with Darius and others about this problem and thought i ought to address it in a blog entry and see if i can tease out some understanding.

One factor is that, like it or not, i think everybody is a rubber-necker. Our attention is grabbed by the unfortunate situations, the bad things, the craziness. Isn’t that why people watch NASCAR, and why those charity telethons always have video of pitiful children with flies on their faces? It’s terrible i know, but you can’t not look, at least for a bit. I think that same phenomena may be partly responsible when people talk about the rez, part of why the crazy stuff inevitably comes up.

Another issue i think is the inadequacy and limitations of language (writing or speaking over the phone to someone). It’s hard to soften the edges, explain the intricacies, the real situation, from afar. It’s not so accurate to talk about people when the person you’re talking to can’t talk to those people. It’s also a lot more difficult to convey the small successes, the regular, normal, school-as-you-would-recognize-it features of things, than the things out of the ordinary. But those don’t make the most provocative posts and as a result i think are not equally represented in the scheme of things.

For example say I mention something like a student stormed out of class today and gave me the finger. Say that discussion occupies half the time you talk about school. It’s not representative of the situation as a whole. For me that would only be the behavior of about 1.3% of my students, and only a few minutes out of a whole day, <1% of the day. It’s not an accurate picture of the day as a whole, but describing how we worked on the same lesson about kinetic and potential energy in all my classes isn’t very interesting.

Another thing is the indelibleness (is that a word?) of writing or talking about it. If you’re talking to someone or writing and you mention something bad, like “a student was high today in class,” that post is a permanent record and it paints a picture, a more lasting stain of a picture than actual interaction with people does.

We’re all messed up in one way or another. It just isn’t all documented, talked about. I dunno, so in reflection it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Does that makes any sense!? Maybe this post is just another piece of evidence to what i’m talking about. It can be hard to get across exactly what you mean through writing.