Emergent curriculum
Sarah: One thing I’m realizing is that the things you learn traveling are seldom the things you set out expecting. At the moment, I’m not even talking about philosophical revelations or new self-awareness or any of that, although there has of course been plenty, some of it surprising. Right now, I’m just talking about the random skills and odd bits of knowledge that I’m going to come back with; skills like knowing how to play chess and ride a motorcycle and estimate distances in meters, or random scraps of factoid like how drainage systems function in traditional Chinese shophouse architecture and how swiftlets construct their nests and the definition and mode of preparation of almost every single type of Indian bread.
The thing is, travel takes you out of your regular life and out of the contexts you’ve built for yourself, and puts you in new situations. Which is stating the obvious, like, duh, but part of what this does is make you reconsider some of your previously held assumptions about what you are and are not interested in (and thereby what you do and do not want to learn about).
For example, was I at all interested in riding motorcycles back in Philadelphia? No. But in Southeast Asia, everyone uses them, everywhere, and you can rent one for around $5 a day just down the block from our guesthouse, and it started to seem like a good skill to learn. Patrick was the more gung-ho of the two of us; he worked on me until I thought it was a good idea, and yesterday, we rented ourselves a bike and started practicing in a nearby parking lot. Patrick got good enough after a few hours of stops and starts and figure-eights in the parking lot that by this morning, while the day was still cool and the Saturday morning traffic light, we went out for a little spin, me riding on the back. (Both of us in helmets, and yes, we were very careful, for all of you with mothering instincts.)
In the same way that I wasn’t interested in motorcycles until they were all around me, I wasn’t nearly as interested in knowing the history of Islam and the details of Muslim practices of faith until I was living smack dab in the middle of them. It’s not that I was uninterested, exactly -- it’s just that, like with motorcycling, it didn’t seem like enough of a priority, or have quite enough relevance to my life for me to make the time for it. On that front, we were fortunate enough to stumble on a book called No God But God: The History, Evolution and Future of Islam, by Reza Aslan, in a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur. Both of us tore through the book, which is an engaging, fascinating read. I recommend it highly and wholeheartedly to anyone who finds themselves thinking “I wish I understood a little bit more about Islam.” It has a nice balance of storytelling and academic credentials, and Aslan does a commendable job of writing about religion in a way that is deeply respectful of faith while still allowing room for questioning and understanding the roots of sectarian rifts, politicization of religion, and more. Did I say I highly recommend this book already? Good. Moving on, and back to this whole notion of learning.
My mom is an educator, a specialist in early child development, and one of the phrases that’s coming to my mind now is one I learned from her: emergent curriculum. As I understand it, emergent curriculum means viewing the world around us as full of learning opportunities, and paying close attention to the questions children ask and the things they notice in order to teach the world as it comes. I’m sure there’s much more to it than that, but in my mind, the most important part is the attitude: the willingness to be aware of the world around us, particularly the parts that we don’t understand, and to seek out information about the things that grab our attention.
And the thing is, back in my regular life, I didn’t make much time for that kind of awareness. I mean, I read a lot back home -- more than I’m reading now. And I watched interesting movies and had interesting conversations with people, and sometimes took art classes or went to museums or lectures. I was certainly learning. But most of the things that I read about or talked about or thought about were things that I already thought I might be interested in.
We define ourselves by our interests, don’t we? I know I do. I think of myself as someone who is interested in writing, and American history, and politics, and art, and music, and so on. And it’s even more specific. We define ourselves by which authors we like, our favorite movies, our top five bands, our favorite restaurants. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I don’t think it is; knowing what you like, what you value, what makes you happy, is a good thing to know. But it can end up forming ruts that get deeper and deeper until it’s hard to see over the edges and remember you’re even in one. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the rut for you -- that’s how you got there in the first place. (Maybe one of the reasons emergent curriculum works so well with young children is that they haven’t formed their ruts yet, so they’re still interested in everything.)
So I guess that’s what going halfway around the world does -- it takes you not just out of those ruts, but way, way far away from them. So you’re not really able to fall back in, even if you wanted to. And in some cases I do want to -- there are certain parts of life back home that I miss frequently and reliably, and that’s a good thing, in my mind. I wrote in my journal that missing those things (friends; baking bread; walks through Rittenhouse Square; flowers from my garden; much more) -- that missing them feels like being pleasantly hungry before a meal. I have an appetite for life back home in Philadelphia, and I know that the things I miss are things I truly value. And I’ll get back to them.
But for now, I’m over here, kilometers away from my well-worn ruts, learning to ride a motorcycle and eating roti canai, thosai, idli or appom for breakfast every morning. This is the current routine.
This is another thing I’ve been wanting to write about: how fast the new becomes the routine. We’ve been in Malaysia for a month, and it’s been a slow month, largely due to a series of ailments that kept us from moving on from places as quickly as we might have. There was strep throat and heat rash and more strep throat and there were many visits to doctors. (At some point later in our travels, Patrick and I have vowed to write up something about our medical experiences abroad. So far, between the two of us, we’ve seen four doctors and been prescribed about fifteen different varieties of pills and creams and nasal sprays. We seem to be progressing toward full health, so knock on wood that it’ll stay that way for a while.) So while recuperating, we spent a full week in the Cameron Highlands, and now have spent just over a week here in Georgetown on Penang Island.
And after traveling for a couple months, it now takes just a day or so for a place to start to feel familiar, for each new guesthouse to start to feel like home. And so spending a week in the same place feels almost like living there. We almost immediately develop habits -- favorite restaurants, favorite streets. We start to recognize the dogs and the hawkers, learn the names of shops. We figure out which vendor has the best ais kacang (pronounced ice ka-chang; a specialty in Penang -- a mountain of shaved ice in a big plastic bowl topped with cola syrup, red beans, creamed corn, various jellies, and condensed milk -- you have to trust me when I tell you it’s delicious), and we determine which used book seller has the best deals.
And then, when it’s all so familiar that we’ve forgotten what it was like a week ago never to have been here, we leave. And the next place goes from exotic to familiar in the time it takes us to ditch our backpacks, wash some clothes, scout out the closest internet cafe and the first good breakfast place. Which is not to say that we’ve learned everything there is to know about any of the places we’ve been -- just that they all have come to feel approachable, relatable.
Tomorrow, we’re headed to Thailand, to Krabi and the beaches of the Andaman coast. It’s just a bus ride away, which makes it seem so close and easy that I have to keep reminding myself it will be an entirely different country, with a different language, different food, different culture. But even the process of making that transition may start to feel familiar, once we’ve been to a couple more countries. Changing money, getting new SIM cards for our cell phones, figuring out the first few key phrases -- those are things we have already done, and will continue doing throughout the months to come.
So I suppose that brings it full circle, to something else travel is teaching me that I hadn’t planned on: it’s teaching me that I can adjust to new things pretty damn quick, given the motivation. And that’s another good thing to know.