No idea how I will end up organizing this in the final version.
Before I got religion about taking pictures of my guests at Surfin, Dallas visited. It was early in the trip. She was from Dalles and maybe working for AT&T. She was in HR? supporting minorities? I don’t know a lot more about it. She grew up in Alabama. Her mother is Asian, Hong Kong? Her biological father might be black. He has moved on but she sees him. There is a step father and her mother has had more children. I would love to know more about the family as I am sure you would once you read more. I gave her a card and even an excuse to write but silence.
At this early stage in my trip, I was emailing with a college classmate and his son. We were talking about education, legacy in college admission, what to do with the Trump non-respect for selective universities and their research publishing standards. So I asked Dallas, and all other visitors, about their thoughts on education and the creation of curiosity and their growth as a critical thinker.
Dallas was mainly home schooled by her mother. Another example of parent effect on education, her mother is the one who helped her with curiosity and critical thinking. AND, was an Asian tiger mom. Dallas had started out in regular school. She was clearly very bright. Her parents asked that she be tested for admittance to the special gifted program. Their black teacher said she would be glade to have it done but that only white children from the richer section of town ever got into the gifted program. Dallas got top scores on the test but of course was turned down. Her mother took her out of school. The area were Dallas lived had a robust home school environment that is totally new to me. All kinds of support. You could go to the public school for special classes like music and athletics and skip the rest. You could go to community college. Dallas was in a community college class and got her first B. She said it was mainly a result of not understanding how to put assignments into the Blackboard software. Her mother cried and said she might as well just change her course of study to cosmetology and set her goals to being a hair dresser. I told Dallas that Dallas cried also!
I tried and failed to learn more about these, maybe local?, types of home school support systems. Dallas reported that there were a lot of families in her area doing home schooling and they pulled resources. Sometimes one parent would teach a course in one subject, another in another. Real team effort, real attempt to put the kids in a classroom.
Dallas goes to college to become a teacher. She teaches high school history. She does some graduate education. She lands a job as assistant principle in a middle school. She lasts at least a couple years. She assures her history teachers that she will protect them from teaching the blasphemy that one of the causes of the civil war might have been slavery. She tried to get her teachers to try new things in the light that what they were doing clearly wasn’t working. Theire school was in a poor district and was under heavy pressure to show results. This bad situation was compounded by constant testing and teaching to the tests. Dallas recently has given up and moved to her present non-teaching job. She felt it was just too hard as a young person to be given the respect she needed from the older life-long teachers to really make change.
One of my favorite places in Cancun is Parque de las Palapas. Don’t trust me but I think of it as plaza of the children. As I have certainly said in other year’s write ups and probably here, the plaza comes alive at night with food stalls and particularly children playing, driving rented electric toy cars around the plaza. I always talk it up to tourists I meet. As I mentioned in my first day writeup, this year, I found the Plaza closed for construction and the food and children moved to a another plaza near by. All that as a long introduction, I recommended visiting it to Dallis and commented on how I had seen the same thing in Ronda Spain. Children out at 10PM with the whole family in a central town plaza. I am sure that it happens all over Spain and other countries, Ronda is just the place where I saw it and it made the greatest impression on me.
Dallas is a great believer in the concept that it takes a village to raise a child. Her home schooling had a village component. She has a friend from Spain who complains about how hard it is to raise a child in the US as the mother is expected to do it all. The mother feels lonely in the US. Dallas has some anti-capitalism ideas. She would love to be involved more in group living, housing were families are gathered together and share responsibilities.
A wonderful conversation! At the time I did not realize that she really had her life on her back, she might have been just traveling with a backpack. She took it over to the hostel across the street and I met her again walking into the beach entry that is right South of Surfin. I had finished my lunch, gone in there to take my normal daily pictures and was on my way down to Coco Bongo to repeat the picture taking at that beach entry. A lost opportunity. I think she was open to spending some more time talking. In fact we only left Surfin as the waitress came and asked us to settle up before that waitress ended her shift. This all happened about day 4? Maybe later in the trip I would have been more aggressive. As a 77 year old man, It is always hard to know when I am being too forward. Wife Kim would say always! Dallas was not the only single woman to mention that she would love to travel with someone but was tired putting off adventure until the right life partner came along. How lucky I am to have Kim. The dance of attracting and maintaining a life partner really is difficult and full of pitfalls. Again, Kim might speak up and say that instead of talking to strangers in Bars in Cancun, I could be at home playing my part in a relationship.