Students may still wonder: Why did the Romans conduct their holiday ceremonies in the way they did? Who participated? Who didn’t? Recreated celebrations of ancient Roman holidays in today’s classrooms lack “deep” culture depth (though they may show an impressive degree of accuracy). Many Latin educators face this problem: excited to introduce genuine Roman cultural practice into their classrooms, some teachers focus more on the what and how of Roman culture rather than the why and who. But deep culture presents possibilities for students to gain a richer intercultural understanding and recognition of their own, perhaps underexamined, culture, and possibilities for teachers to learn a new pedagogy (from resources like University of Minnesota CARLA Institute’s bibliography on intercultural education). The relationship between these two aspects of culture, which have been helpfully differentiated by Luis Fernando Gómez Rodríguez, is dynamic-deep culture can influence surface culture and vice versa. One of the most common issues is that language educators tend to teach what is generally called “surface” or “shallow” culture (e.g., types of clothing, food, fairytales, music, art-essentially the ‘facts’ of a culture) rather than teaching the “deep” culture of a studied group (e.g., perspectives, values, history, narratives, ideas, beliefs, and background practices that attend the ‘shallow’ practices and cultural products). The move has been widespread, but has resulted in numerous challenges in implementation. In the meantime, expect to see more “solutions” like Trump's while the people we made responsible for this sort of thing concentrate on more important matters.Most language education programs have adopted the aim to teach culture in addition to language proficiency (hence, departments of “World Languages and Cultures” proliferate while departments of “Foreign Languages” have diminished). Regardless, when Daesh gets serious about us, we'll be seeing death tolls in the four figures (or five or even seven) for a single day once more. I wonder if he's being glib or simply not counting the nearly three thousand who died on 9/11? I suspect he means counting from now. Adams says he's willing to accept a thousand dead over ten years before he'll want to impose religious quotas on immigration. They're the result of effective propaganda and little more. It's not correct to call these “lone wolf” attacks, but they're not part of a well-coordinated plan. The attacks in the west are inspired by Daesh, but they're not planned, organized, or funded by them. They've got bigger fish to fry: Iran and Assad, Putin and the House of Saud. We're talking about a “ two-billion dollar war machine.” Drug-smuggling submarines are only just the beginning of what these folks could do if they were serious about hitting us.Īnd right now, believe it or not, they're not. Are we gonna put watch-stations every five miles along the coast and stop every boat that comes within a mile of shore? Remember, we're not talking about an impoverished family that's maybe scraped together US $100 to pay a coyote to smuggle them across the border. Until we're ready to pay that price, saying we're going to keep anybody out who's really dedicated and wants to kill us is laughable.Īnd what about all the routes by sea into this country? We have two massive coastlines. I think it could work, but it would be hideously expensive. Even Rick Perry has said a border fence between the US and Mexico is unworkable. I've seen parts of the Rio Grande where the “border crossing” is an old guy with a raft of lashed-together milk cartons and some 2x4s. There are just too many ways to get around this sort of thing: lying about where you came from, for instance, or sneaking into the country. Adams when he says this bit of nonsense is likely to lift Trump rather than damage him, and I think that says a lot about what we expect to get out of DC these days. But Trump's “keep 'em all out” solution is pretty much like every other “solution” to this sort of thing you see coming from DC: it won't actually do anything to solve the problem, but it doesn't inconvenience the DC crowd directly and makes the government look busy and concerned. What price do I put on religious tolerance? How many dead Americans am I willing to accept?
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