Back Online for 1429

January 10

Had a spot of computer trouble recently. Sometime during the in-flight hours between Seattle and Denver my laptop decided it wanted to be the fifth Beatle circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; when I turned it on in Boulder it displayed everything in bright, gobbled colors with blocky graphics. MS Word was a delightful turquoise blue. The welcome screen was red. It was impossible to work on the thing without thinking of Schedule I drugs, so I sent it off to the experts to fix. Turns out the LCD screen needed to be replaced. Now my laptop is back with a brand-new, wonderfully vivid, easy-on-the-eyes display, and I feel fully human again. For the past week and a half I’ve been working in longhand, and while I told myself that if paper was good enough for Shakespeare it must be good enough for me, I have to admit it was hard to go back to scribing instead of typing. If you type reasonably quickly--which I do--you can write almost as fast as you think, which is a huge boon when that’s what you do professionally.

While computer-less, I also ran out the battery on my iPod (it’s a Nano, which needs a computer to recharge) and discovered it’s not a good idea to run out the battery on your iPod. I figured it wouldn’t be any different from running out the battery on a CD player; ie it would just stop working, and then I would plug it in, and then it would work again. Nuh-uh. If you run out the battery on a Nano, it doesn’t have enough power to turn itself on to start recharging. So after I finally plugged it in, there were a few minutes when I watched with morbid fascination as this little machine struggled to wake itself up long enough to start draining the power it needed to keep itself awake. I actually felt bad for the thing. It was a bit bizarre.

The bright spot in my week was a call from Egyptian writer and activist Sohair Al Masry, who is so wonderful and kind and wise that it’s a great pleasure to talk with her. She’s the author of a book for children called ‘Ana’ (Me) that focuses on self-awareness, confidence and cultivating individual talents. This is bread-and-butter stuff for people who’ve grown up in the first world, but in North Africa, where schools tend to focus on rote learning and memorization rather than critical thinking and child development, it’s pretty unheard-of. Al Masry believes, and I agree, that the biggest obstacle to children (and the children who are now adults) in the developing world is not technology or wealth but these key skills. The most precious things we are taught in the US are not math and language, but the ability to recognize, cultivate and create opportunity. To network; to follow an idea to its conclusion; to move comfortably from theory to application; to convince others of the merit of our work. In the modern professional environment these skills are as crucial as the skills they are designed to showcase and promote. Though in the US “feel-good” education is sometimes taken to an unhealthy extreme, the opposite extreme results in intelligent, capable adults whose talents are wasted because they’ve never been taught how to use or market them. And that is a tragedy. Here’s hoping that people like Al Masry bring about much-needed change.

In closing, kul senna w’entu tayyibeen. It’s Muslim New Year. Happy 1429.