Don't Speak, I Know What You're Thinking

I wish I could read minds.

That would make life much easier sometimes. For example, this afternoon when I interviewed someone for my Field Studies class as both practice and as hopefully a beginning into research topics for my independent study. I'm in the process of transcribing and listening to the tape I made now.

I apologize to anyone who has heard me talk, especially for long periods of time. Which is perhaps anyone who has met me. The tape hopefully is just showing me at my worst -- nervous, uncertain, and relying on poor grammar and annoying phrases when I can't think of anything else to say. Yes, I'm referring to "like" and "mmhmm"

My interview went pretty well but not in the direction I thought it would. I interviewed my history teacher about how history is taught in the Czech Republic. If anything, this whole experience has shown how much I want to be involved with education when I finish school. I thought that some of the differences between the Czech system and the American system were fascinating.

The talk was supposed to be more focused on how teaching history has changed since the fall of Communism and how modern history is taught, but it veered off from that especially towards the end. At one point, when the independent research project came up, we started talking about multiculturalism and the Roma and Vietnamese populations.

I think we take multiculturalism for granted in the United States. Yesterday, I saw a black person. In fact, I saw two. Now, this is not an unusual occurrence at home, but I had to stop and think how long it had been since I'd seen one. Five weeks. I'd gone 5 weeks without seeing a black person. And the ones I saw were American college students.

I don't think that Poland, Slovakia, and Austria are really any different -- those being the places I'm heading off to this weekend! We'll spend several days in Krakow before heading to Bratislava. After the Animal Collective shows, a few people from the program and I are hitting up Vienna for about 30 hours before hopping on a train and heading back to classes and real life. It's like a midterm break, except that it comes before our midterm crunch.