Suomen Soliloquies

We have these mugs in our house that have Japanese-anime-style whales on them. Their smiles are wide and innocent, the shade of blue in which they swim is pleasant, not the sad kind that makes you cry inside. Years ago, my parents decided they wanted more of these mugs but the store they bought them in no longer stocked them. So we went online and discovered that there were yellow monkey mugs, and pink rabbit mugs too, a whole world of cute animal mugs that kept their chai hot long enough for them to slowly drink it each morning while they read the paper and ate khakra. So they ordered the monkey mugs. My mother only had my dad order 6 of them. Each mug is $12 so this felt like a splurge. The monkey’s joined the whales in the shelf, breaking up the sea of blue with their gentle yellow. She now regrets that decision. These mugs were already a Prized Possession then for their superiority to other mugs. But they are more valuable now because we can no longer find ...

Picture announcing the revival of the Ramyana and Mahabharata (bottom) When India suddenly announced a lock down for three weeks in March, it was a big deal. The entire country was now stuck inside with limited means of entertaining themselves. The TV networks took this as an opportunity to revive some favorites, specifically, two Indian serials from the 1980s that had held the nation enthralled while they were running. Both of these were based on Hindu epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata.  My family has also been watching the Mahabharata as a nightly ritual. This is quite a commitment since the serial has over 90 episodes that are each 45 minutes. Arjun listens to Lord Krishna tell the Bhagwad Gita But this is a commitment that I think we all hold onto eagerly (though my father admitted one evening that he as other shows that he wants to watch and so would be happy to take a break from it for an evening. He was overruled). This is because the Mahabharata, speci...

Two weeks ago it felt like the world was ending. The numbers from New York, which captured me with their stunning speed and the realization that I had left just before the situation became so much worse, grew rapidly each day. It began to dawn on the US that this was going to change everything. The grocery stores were filled with empty shelves. Empty shelves could only indicate that the world was ending. Until I heard the birds singing . I was on a run in a park when I heard them. They jolted me out of a reverie thinking about the headlines. Pandemic, economy, toilet paper. I looked around at the space around me in the park. The prairie grass expanded around me even in its dormant winter state. I saw the sky, blue with flecks of white clouds drifting above me. Nature is still in business. Even though the news is dire and the world we humans have built seems to be falling apart at the seams, buds are appearing in the trees. I see birds now on the roof through my childhood bedroo...

The past week in New York was jarring to say the least. Though the city still makes me overwhelmed by even the smallest of tasks (where do you go to buy a pack of cards??), I have begun to slowly get used to the constant movement of the city and everything that comes with it. The sound of airplanes flying constantly from La Guardia over my apartment doesn't register any more. I can estimate how crowded the train will be based on what time I am leaving my apartment in the morning or TC in the evening. And although the feeling of always needing to do more still raises the specter of anxiety to make everything I do feel inadequate, I've become resigned to its presence to the point that it is part and parcel of the city itself. Solitude is rare in the city, but last week it was the norm All of these things fell apart this week though, one by one, as another phantom seeped into our lives. Starting with an email from our college president that optimistically called off only no...

Summer classes are in full swing, but I’ve been having a hard time getting back into that workaholic mode that characterized the fall and spring semesters. There is time every morning to go through my elaborate morning routine that I consider to be my “me time” before I start classwork. And each day I try to go outside to soak in the sunshine and the few oases of greenery that are close by. The luscious yard of a home in New Jersey Yet for three days last week, I did none of these things. My morning routine went out the window, as did the chance to do any classwork. Instead, I spent it wrapped in the love and joy of family as a beloved aunt, uncle and cousin came to visit. My brother also made time to take a whirlwind trip from Boston so we could all be together. My cousin spent a night at my place and my aunt asked me if she was the first visitor to stay with me. I told her no. The bf has visited, as has a close friend and my parents. But as much as ...

The first year is done and so, in my effort to procrastinate on working on the dreaded certification exam that we have been hearing contradictory information about all year (the exam is required for first year doctoral students in my program to determine if we get to stay), I thought I would take some time to reflect on the other kind of learning that has happened this year. This is the learning that is not within the curriculum. It is not what is necessarily intentionally taught but is the growth that happens alongside the theories and articles and papers and statistics that we learn in the classroom. In education, we call this the hidden curriculum, which usually refers to the ways in which children are socialized to learn their "place" in society, such as along class lines. Making children walk the halls in quiet, orderly lines, emphasizing Standard English over student dialects are ways in which the hidden curriculum silently, subtly, teaches children what society deman...

The Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College has a reputation for being difficult, especially at the doctoral level. It isn’t difficult in the way my advanced data analysis class is difficult, where we are expected to learn complex statistical concepts while also learning how to code in the dreaded Stata software. Instead, it is impossibly abstract and theoretical, with most classes requiring us to write papers where we construct complex arguments supported by plenty of other people’s theoretical musings. These frameworks challenge us at our very core, a process that is fraught with emotional ups and downs, so much so that a professor in the department has called the program as a “Pedagogy of Monsters” and written an article about it. The program has changed the way I see the world. For example, I recently went to go see Isn’t it Romantic with some colleagues from the Writing Center. Besides the social aspect of actually going somewhere that wasn’t to work or acc...