9 Little Indians

What a day. I put together two sets of primary documents: one from Ibn Battuta and one from the Ming Dynasty's traveler Zheng He. They didn't go for them half so much as for the Sogdian letters I did on Monday, perhaps because it was nothing personal. That, the Sogdian lady of the 4th c. was pretty pissed at her husband and really let him have it.

The real problem is maintaining any momentum or continuity. They just don't show up for a 3.30 Friday section. In fact, the woman who made an appointment with me for 11.00 this morning to discuss her failing grade didn't show at all. My basketball player is really working hard, so he tells me, but didn't make it to class either. Even the young woman who has been so diligent, who told me last week that she is the only person in her family to go to college, that her parents never encouraged her to go to college, didn't show today.

I honestly don't mind, don't get angry about it and wonder whether taking attendance will actually make a difference. To see I'll make attendence a huge part of the grade next term and rely on the quality of the classroom experience to keep them coming. On the other hand, having only 10 people in a room is a much better way to educate them, 30 is 5 or 10 too many.

I spoke today with one student, parochial school graduate, who came to my office to discuss her paper. She's always been a bit angry, about what I'm not really sure, but she doesn't seem to have an interest in history to put it lightly. Today she revealed that she wants to become a nursing major. It's hard to make the case for the value of liberal arts in the face of human services training. All I can say, and perhaps I will say this in my final day, is that the kids who tortured people at Abu Gharab should have known better, and would have known better if they had been well educated. That's not so say they wouldn't have done it, and it's not to say that highly educated people don't do evil things, but I get the sense that they wandered into it, that they let a dumb American sensibility take over and all the time they should have known better. Perhaps they did.