Teaching the CNMI journey

At the start of my Social Studies Class each year, we begin with a big infinity symbol on the green board with a drawing of a stick person on the intersecting lines at the center. We then proceed with a guided reflective conversation among the students on significant events they recall in their 12-year some, mas o menos, existence. We peg those events in time, space, role played, and the significance they tell themselves about the event.

In another exercise later, they would write their recollection on a timeline, charting the number of years since they were born, cross-defined by the categories of who were involved when and where, and what they learned from the experience.

As an overarching context, we conclude the exercise with the infinity image, arrows emanating from the stick person backwards and back, swinging forward in mirrored distance and back. “A person can anticipate the future only to the extent that the same person can appropriate the past. One can envision so far into the future only as much as one can apportion the learning of history.” Unsurprisingly, not too many of the children can recall beyond the last family barbecue party at summer’s end.

This presents a particular challenge to the sixth grade Social Studies focus on ancient civilizations, a component of a CNMI K-12 rationale that begins with ‘My Island and Me’ and ends with the disciplines of Psychology, Sociology and Economics, and the Systems and Structures of the United States Government. If remembering the events of one’s 12-year some journey is a chore, the intellect is surely stressed to encompass humanity’s last 8,000-year some social existence.

The point is made at this midcourse in their Social Studies journey that historical civilizations are stable and creative when the memory of the past propels them equidistantly forward into their hopes and aspirations. This then begs the question of everyone: What images of the past does one chooses to appropriate? And how?

One four-millennium-old ethnic source that spawned diverse religio-cultural heritages claims the bodies and souls of residents in Southwestern Asia. All three traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam claim one source in body and/or spirit. Between the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf is the settlement of Ur from whence came the story of a wandering old man and his wife, Abraham and Sarah. They anchor one of the world’s enduring stories of origins.

The Teachers Institute of the Humanities Council in conjunction with the Public School System and the Northern Marianas College was launched Saturday at the VTC (video-teleconferencing) room of the PSS central office. Comprising six eight-hour sessions held on consecutive Saturdays from Aug. 27 to Oct. 1, 2005, the Institute provides a detailed overview of the history and cultures of the Northern Mariana Islands to CNMI K-12 teachers in both public and private schools. The Institute features presentations by regional and international scholars in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and political science.

It is said that an intellectual makes complicated what appears to be simple, while the poet simplifies what appears to be complex. When true and faithful, both serve the cause of what is verifiably real and experientially authentic.

The Institute is an intellectual exercise that will challenge the participants’ data processing—accessing and retaining—capacities while they wander through images of the CNMI journey. Beginning with the hazy settlement of the Marianas, on to the mysterious Latte period, academic sails navigate into the advent of mercenary European naval explorers and the fanatical Iberian religious colonization. Then shall be visited the short-lived but disciplined German administration, followed by a cursory view of the Japanese Imperial domination during the post-Meiji restoration. WWII will follow a Hollywood script, of Hirohito’s gore and the GI’s glory. The secretive U.S. military presence gets a light anecdotal touch, not intentionally but out of the shortage of available and shifted declassified information. The American administration’s benign neglect under United Nations indifference shall be couched in a different language but the discerning will see the veil of USIS propaganda. The local Covenant to enter into a relationship of perpetual dependence on the United States will be told as an act of self-determination. Maybe, a brave soul may verbally wonder whether the democratic thrust evident in enabling documents proceeded from those whose signatures attested to them, or, whether they were but the well-intentioned ideological contributions of the advisors who penned them. Whatever.

Dr. Brian Butler, the Teachers Institute’s initiating pedagogue, made it clear to the intellectuals. There are no static judgments, and the clear-minded would be wary of those who make absolute pronouncements. Certitude is for demagogues; statistical probability is the province of the contemporary scientifically guided intellectual. The Institute’s intellectual will have to turn poet in the classroom. Encapsulating enabling images in morsels that students can appropriate as their own remains every educators’ eminent task.

I recently ran into one of my former female students who now attend Hopwood Junior High. Red-mouthed, I asked if she dipped into her younger sibling’s candy jar. She proudly beamed: “No, I’m chewing my culture!” Betel nut had replaced chewing gum. Along with attempts to replace the girls’ tifi with morally correct grass skirts, history gets revised daily in a rapidly changing world.

The world today is on the move, and people are creating urban centers where the cultures and the religions of the world vie for prominent hearing. Descendants of Hammurabi and Alexander, Pericles and Aristotle, Aton and King Tut, Julius and Jesus, Moses and Mohammed, Ashoka and the Aryans, the Persians and the Hans have descended on our shores with their lifestyles and cuisine. How does one teach contemporary minds that the gifts of humanness from the world’s cultures and religions are not only free for the taking, but has become requisite for survival in a global village?

Spain’s social system favors the aristocracy and the elite. Working with one’s hands is frowned upon. The toiling masses produce. Charity is practiced as occasionally moving resources from the elite to the poor. No one saves. Consumption is a virtue. The vice of false pride, of showing off, runs rampant. Politics is practiced as the dueling art of dodge and slight. Substance takes a back seat to style. We have appropriated these traits, and more. Unexamined, they define us. But now, the rest of the world has nested next door. May we now engage in a lively time of revising and recreating the CNMI journey tale?

We can only go so far into the future as we can appropriate the learning of our past. Let the intellectualizing begin, and may the poets find their way back into the classrooms.