Young’s blog

The following story is what my friend and I experienced on campus a month ago or so.  

Theft

I received a phone call from my friend when I had just finished a class. He spoke in trembling voice that he had gotten his backpack stolen. Perplexed, I hung up the phone and hurried to go to the library. After a couple of minutes I met him at the entrance of the library and he explained what has happened.

He was taking a nap, sitting on a chair at the fifth floor in the library. He, being half awake, looked unintentionally down the desk where his backpack should have been and came to know that it was not there.

He was too shocked to properly deal with the situation, so I helped him take an action. We first went to a circulation desk in the library, and a librarian called the police after listening to the incident that we explained. A police officer arrived after five minutes, and my friend reports the case in detail. Next we moved to the spot and examined the surroundings to see if there was anything helpful. The officer checked the recorded tapes of surveillance cameras in the control room while we were waiting outside. It was taped that somebody tiptoed like a zombie up to my friend sleeping and take the backpack away. Very scary! We could, however, do nothing only with checking the tapes, and my friend was devastated. Just then a stranger called my friend that he picked up the backpack left at the Muni stop. The stranger opened the backpack, found my friend’s student ID, and called the school office. My friend could get his backpack back. In it was everything except cash. He lost about hundred dollars but it was ok. He got back his textbooks and handouts, an electronic dictionary, and credit cards and IDs in his wallet.  

After the incident we always put our backpacks just next to our feet and keep eyeing on them. It is quite bothersome for us while studying to watch over them. My friend’s was a theft case, but there are more serious cases on campus: robberies, sexual assaults, and acts of violence. I have seen posters reporting suspects related to crimes in campus. It’s really ridiculous that these crimes exist on campus. To avoid these crimes on campus, we have to be careful and take care of ourselves at all times.  

One of the films that I was truly impressed is Beautiful Mind, which is a biographic film of John Nash. Nash was a mathematical genius, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics with his math theory.

A Beautiful Mind

 The reason why his life touched me was caused not by the result, which is his academic achievement, but by the process that is how he made his great work.

Life of a great man is usually dramatic. The great men used to face crises and suffer from distresses, but they get through their obstacles and eventually make outstanding results. As for Nash, he had a serious mental disease, schizophrenia. He hallucinated and saw illusions. He was frustrated at first when his symptom was diagnosed as a mental disease. Nevertheless, he never gave up and tried to keep going so that he could reach his ultimate aim that was to make his original idea in mathematics.

Not as serious as Nash’s, obstacles have been around me during this semester, but fortunately I have never been discouraged by them. I guess everyone in the class has gone through some hard situations during this semester. We have already made the turn and are running at the finish line. As we have done so far, I hope that we keep doing so and meet with good results. Cheers!

     We have had three times of peer review in class. I know that peer review 

Scalpel

     Above all, when I most want to get out of a classroom is when I have to 

sit on an unbelievably small chair with tiny

Tablet Chair

 little piece of desk plate. I am a kind of a student who usually takes classes with both hands on the desk, one hand holding a pencil to take a note and the other hand placing with ease. But, when having a seat that gives me not enough room to do so, I truly feel inconvenient. If I put on my notebook on the tablet of a tiny chair, I can't place my arms on it. The small tablet on which is a notebook doesn't give me marginal room. Sighing in such case, I have to squeeze myself to fit in tiny space so that I can keep my position as usual. 

     One day in the classroom, I had no where to sit down but a tiny chair. Embarrassed, I had a seat. However, my situation was nothing compared to the situation that one of the classmates faced. Next to me sat a guy as big as a huge refrigerator or a phone booth. The chair looked like a miniature chair popping out of the dolls' world, and the tablet looked almost as small as his palm. Glancing at him struggling on the tiny tiny chair and giggling, I drove discomforts out of my mind and started listening to the lecture. 

At times I study in the CCSF library up to 8:45, the time when it is 

On And Off

closed. Twice, 30 minutes and 15 minutes before the library is closed, one of the staffs in the library announces that it will be closed. Right after the second announcement echoes from the speakers, the staff switches on and off the light a couple of times on purpose. Honestly, switching the light on and off was trivial but somewhat irritating. I thought that twice of voice announcements were enough to let students quiet get that it would be closed.

Then one evening after the library was closed, I was boarding on Bart to come back home, listening to music. Since the music was so loud, I couldn’t hear the announcement for informing stations, looking vacantly at my iPod. When I look up through the window, I perceived that I had just missed the station to get off, and the train started speeding up to head to the next station. Cursing my carelessness, I thought it would be much better if commuters were informed visually which station the train was arriving. At the very moment, a sudden realization came across my mind. I came to understand why the light should be turned on and off in the library. In the library, there could be persons with auditory difficulties, or there might be somebody who misses the announcement for a reason. Switching the light on and off was in fact a concise signal with visual effect.

  I live in the world as I feel, perceive, and think. How I look at an object and how I interpret an event go with my own reasoning. Sometimes, I miss simple truths because I was blinded by such an own reasoning. Without getting over my faulty reasoning, I cannot be free from being a slave to narrow insight. I see from the experience on Bart that I can defeat my ignorance through experiences and mistakes. This is why I think that an experience is a good teacher. 

For a couple of weeks, we've gone through in class over the meaning of education. Trying to figure out what was real education, I came up with a book, Tuesdays With Morrie written by Mitch Albom, since Morrie’s unforgettable lessons are close to real education.

Tuesdays with Morrie

The book is about a true story between Morrie, an old professor, who is suffering from a fetal disease and facing the death, and his pupil. It was not a kind of mind-blowing books for the first reading, I remember. Unlike those books so marvelous as to make me absorbed into their story lines, it quietly took my attention but gave no big impression. After a while, I came to see a TV drama about Morrie, one hour-length drama whose title is same with the book. Seeing the drama, my indistinctive memories on what Morrie said in the book came across and revived vividly through the scenes of the drama. Afterward Morrie’s lessons have stuck in my mind and never gone away.

What Morrie tries to teach his pupil is, after all, about life. To his pupil, how to live is important, meaning the pupil wants to build more careers in the field of profession and to make more money, even though already successful and rich. However, Morrie teaches what to live for, and the pupil has gradually been changed by old, wise man’s lessons. I believe that real education has power to change a person.

At times I feel like I am desperate to have more and obsessive about doing better, not knowing what I am really seeking for. If I become sick and tired of keeping going forward in life, I would like to pick up the book and to take Morrie’s lessons again. As the lessons were remedy to Morrie’s pupil, I hope them to be so as well to me.  

          Several years ago I had a chance to teach literature to fifth to ninth grade students in a private institute. The classes in the institute began late afternoon after the students finished school and usually lasted up to nine or ten o’clock in the evening. I became husky after giving each class and had to drink a couple of glasses of water to clean my throat so as to prepare for the next class. At times naughty boys drove me crazy, jumping all around, playing tag, and slamming the door. The other problem was that I had to bear hunger. There was one hour of dinner time, but I occasionally did my job without a meal under the pressure of extra work.

Fish Shaped Burns

          One evening I came in the teacher’s room after one class, feeling quite hungry as usual. It was then that the director of the institute entered in the room with a sweet scent. He was holding a paper bag in his arms, and there were fish-shaped buns in the bag, which were filled with hot, jammed red-bean and sweet like French toasts. He looked like Santa Claus, and the buns were shiny as nuggets of gold. All of the teachers gathered around and ate them well, and yet there was a behind story about the buns, which touched me. A few days later we had a teacher’s meeting. There the director explained why he had brought the buns before.

          One day the director was wondering if there was any problem with one student whose parents had not paid tuition fees for a couple of months, so he tried to have a talk with the parents on the phone but failed to reach them. The reason why he couldn’t tell the student directly was that the student was a sensitive girl in the period of adolescence, and he didn’t want to hurt her by talking about money and family matters. The director unwillingly asked around what her parents engaged in, and he found it out. The student had been raised in a single mother householder family since she was young. Her mother was selling fish-shaped buns as a street vendor. When the director went to meet her mother, the mother was making the buns at a stall on the street, fighting with freezing weather of early winter. He stared at the stall from a distance and came up to it after for a while. The mother talked about the financial problem, while the director talked about the daughter, who was one of the good students in both her school and the institute without any trouble. Finishing the conversation, the mother packed a bunch of the buns for teachers, saying once and again that she was sorry for unpaid tuition fees, and that she would pay the fees next month because people would buy hot buns more and more as the weather was getting colder.

          When I heard this story, I felt guilty about eating the buns without knowing what the buns meant to the student’s family. To me, the burns were filled with sweet beans, but to the family, they were filled with sorrow. I could not know but vaguely imagine how much effort the mother had made for education. She may have wanted to give educational chances, as many as possible, to her daughter who was one of the most promising students. A small paper bag of the buns cost just two or three dollars, but the mother earned two dollars each time as she sold buns. She must have made money for a living and for her daughter’s education as she sold the buns over and over in this way. Afterwards whenever I see fish-shaped buns or snack stalls on the street, I am reminded of the feeling of that day. Even further I couldn’t be free from thinking what the hack money was in this society. It has gone five years, I am not teaching anymore but studying economics and business. I wonder how many students can’t be taught what they want just because of money and wonder if there is a good way to solve this problem. I think all students, if they need, have to be given education by all means, regardless of so-called financial problems.

Waiting On The World To Change (Live)

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