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Re: Something to keep in mind!



Leigh,

Thanks for the remarks; but I was a little saddened by the the use of the
"R" word near the end of your discourse. I hope that retirement from
teaching at Simon Fraser doesn't mean retirement from discourse on Phys-L!

Joel Rauber

PS
Could some of the current "private" discussion on the Hewitt falling chain
be brought back to the public forum? I was a most interested "lurker".


In this age of multiculturalism it is hard to find any commonality.

Right on, but I think it goes much deeper. There's just too much to
know in our world.

Gary wrote this in Texas. It is true *a fortiori* in my community,
Vancouver, British Columbia. What is not as obvious is that it has
been true for a long time, probably longer than any of us has been
around. Once, in the 1960s, My wife, a Roman Catholic, and I* were
out walking with an English visitor when he alluded to some historic
figure, a general, by name. Evelyn and I did not understand his
point, so I apologetically asked him to elaborate, saying that we
had not studied much European history in our California schools. Our
visitor broke into laughter, and after he regained his composure he
explained that the general to whom he had referred was mentioned in
the bible!

Here were three coeval, university scientifically educated people
of the same race, all of whom spoke approximately the same mother
tongue, and all three of us were from different cultures. We still
(more than three decades later) must often explain such allusions to
one another when we meet (our visitor is now a friend in Cambridge),
though my wife and I have grown much closer during the intervening
time, and we seldom have to do this between ourselves.

I think a better explanation is that there is just a whole lot more
information out there now than there was during the Age of Reason.
We have many disjoint subcultures within our own culture. Yesterday
I attended a Philosophy Department talk given by a faculty candidate.
It was very soon evident that the people around me (whom most would
consider to be of my culture) had a large intellectually orthogonal
cultural component.

The last person who knew everything died a long time ago, and there
will never be another like her.

When one recognizes that age difference, too, leads to cultural
distance it is no longer astonishing that my students don't
understand some of the things I say. I ask them to stop me if I ever
say anything they don't understand (especially a word they don't
understand) but they are often reluctant to do so. Still, they are
bright and wonderful to be around.

I have eleven students in my astrophysics class this semester. They
include two East Indian Canadians, a Ukrainian Canadian, a Korean
exchange student, two students who still use umlauts in their
surnames, a MacDonald (Scottish Canadian), and four others, none of
whom have anglo names. Vancouver is culturally heterogeneous. The
majority of school children in the Vancouver schools are ESL
students. The second most common mother tongue (after English) is
Cantonese, and I think Mandarin is next. There follow East Indian
dialects, and French ranks no higher than tenth. Italian, German
and Greek all being more common than our second official language.

The wonderful thing about most students is that they will share
their cultures if given the opportunity, and they seem interested
to hear my own stories if I simply take the time to talk to them.
I'm going to miss them very much when I retire. Teaching students
having a diverse mixture of cultures is not a challenge; it is a
privilege.

Leigh

*an atheist Californian from a Jewish community in Los Angeles.