Neil in Zim: I can't escape Descartes, also music

I feel like Mr. Hill from Abbott Elementary in season 2, episode 3. He is one of the only white teachers in a low-resource school with Black and Brown teachers. Teachers comment that he won’t last in the school for too long - he’s like a firefighter whose hose sprays out joy and knowledge until he moves onto the next place. He is viewed as out of place and not integral to the community. I wonder if that’s what people see me like here: somehow who will be gone in a year, only here to share my skills but is not part of the true school community. Maybe these are my insecurities speaking.

Yet, I feel like one of the most integral parts of the school community. I am always on campus (because I don’t have anywhere else to go), and students know I am always here, especially over weekends when other teachers go home.

It’s college application season, and all the upper-6 students are busy finishing up personal statements, supplements, and portfolios. It’s been tiring, but really refreshing, to read some of their essays and help record music supplements. Brown requires a video essay, a bunch of supplements, and a peer recommendation. This line written by one of the students was so powerful imo: “[Name] is exceptional in the big things he does because he does the small things right.” I wish someone would write something like that about me. One of the students is applying to Stanford, and we’ve been working for a couple of months now refining his application. He has figured out what I like and don’t like in supplements, and told me that he keeps writing drafts but then throws them away when he realizes I won’t like it. I really think his writing has improved, it’s provocative, humorous, and tells a story – but maybe it’s because I had him read a lot of David Sedaris and his writing sometimes resembles it.

My second biggest flaw is that I do not know how to say no (the first one is that I’m really attractive and everyone is jealous of me because of it). Boundary setting always seems easy in theory, but in practice, I can’t do it. I think it’s because I want to be viewed as competent and capable, or perhaps because I have little respect for my own time. Is this an insecurity complex? Or maybe a superiority complex? Olivia’s therapist thinks they’re the same thing. The hard thing, though, is that the more I say yes, the more people expect me to say yes. At school, I have found little time for myself because I continue to help teachers and students, even when it extends beyond the description of my role. I have somehow become the school driver, the school photographer/videographer, the school nurse, and the school’s miscellaneous problem solver. To some extent, I enjoy getting to do a lot of things to exercise and expand my skillset, but on the other hand, I need to sleep and do laundry and keep in touch with friends and family.

I think it’s a two-way street – while I struggle to say no, other teachers have little respect for my own personal time and take advantage of that fact. Though, I ask myself: should I be willing to help? I was chosen by my fellowship to immerse myself in a service opportunity for this entire year (albeit, extremely low-paying job). What am I doing here?

A few weeks ago, I had to confront a few students who committed academic dishonesty in Research Methods. It was quite uncomfortable, quite frustrating, but in the end, I wanted them to understand the importance of integrity (one of the school’s values) and justice. I think the class has become a little more challenging, we finished our unit on quantitative methods – specifically, hypothesis-testing. In teaching about the concept of failing to reject a null hypothesis vs. accepting a null hypothesis, I had to extend my lesson into the philosophy of science. Students struggled a bit to understand why we can’t accept hypotheses in science, and why we can’t prove theories – and somehow, I ended up using David Hume/Descartes’ examples of the black and white swans (Cartesian uncertainty) that I learned in my high school senior year History of Philosophy class with Dr. Kiely. For some reason, this analogy keeps haunting me … every few years, it somehow makes its way back to me.

While I do feel like I finally am teacher-like, sometimes I feel like a student. While going on a walk around campus, a student explained to me that all fruits are green before they’re ripe. For some reason, I had never realized that, nor had I ever thought about it:

“Wow, they don’t teach you that in America? You teach me research methods, I teach you about LIFE,” he told me. That line went straight into his book of bars.

We had a long weekend last week, and it was really tiring. I was on duty over the weekend but got Monday off. On my day off, I took public transportation (for the first time) with two TAs into Harare, and we spent the day in town. They took me to a shopping mall (Joina City) where I bought a knock-off Gucci shirt. We then walked a few kilometers to a botanical garden, which was basically empty (because no one is going to a garden on a Monday morning) but had some really gorgeous trees. Rebecca (one of my supervisors) took me to a yarn store and then to buy iced chai (which I desperately needed – Hannah, you get it). The TAs spent the night in a lodge and then in the morning returned back to school. It was a good refresher to get off campus and re-establish my mental health.

It’s getting quite hot here, right now about 30C, and I’ve been wearing polos (golf shirts as they call it here), shorts, and my Birks. One of the teachers told me that my outfits remind her of the colonialists from her town…

I had to explain to one of my students that Katy Perry is not dead. Although some of the students are literally the same age as me or just a couple of years younger than me, there is a huge difference in the types of music we listen to (I don’t listen to Katy Perry). During my interview for this fellowship, I was asked about what cultural activities am I excited about in Zim. In my response, I talked about what one of my ethnomusicology professors (Vân Ánh Võ) told me in my final quarter at Stanford in regard to learning about different cultures: to truly understand a culture, you need to (1) listen to their music, (2) eat their food, and (3) speak their language. I have definitely been able to do all of the above, but have particularly enjoyed listening to the music that the students bring. Because students come not only from Zim, but also Burundi, DRC, Rwanda, SA, and other neighboring countries, there is an amalgamation of genres. Here are three songs that I’ve been listening to this week:

Ndoda – Nyasha David (A Shona love song): YouTube, Spotify

N’y pense plus – Tayc (A French song, no idea what it’s about): YouTube, Spotify

Ku Lo Sa – Oxlade (Nigerian afrobeats song): YouTube, Spotify