If I had a hammer

Well, it was indeed a long day yesterday; went well, though.

We had two days of diversity training, and Dr. Tafari said that was probably a good thing because that's about all most people can handle. When he first said that, I wasn't sure I agreed with him, but I think he's on to something. Toward the end of the second day, people weren't really able to discuss things objectively, and most people were simply sharing personal experiences. Not that that's not valuable in and of itself, but that's no long diversity training, that's some sort of process group. I don't think he meant that people can;t handle extended periods of diversity training because they get angry or resentful or hurt or anything; I think maybe he meant that people just can't stay focused on something like this for that long. And he didn't call it diversity training; he called it humanity training, which wasn't nearly as ominous as I had feared.

Humanity training, as he calls it, is really just a way of approaching diversity training from a more individual (external) perspective. We've seen this, to some degree. It's not like a person who immigrated from Haiti is claiming an African-American perspective. And it's not like a white guy from New York City really has the perspective of a white guy who grew up in rural Georgia. His bottom line was that you never really know what someone else's perspective is like unless you ask them, which sounds like pretty good advice.

Todays concludes week 3.

9-11:30 / The critical multicultural imperative

If it's anything like critical theory, I predict a rough 2 1/2 hours, but I'm curious to see where it all goes.

This afternoon, I might head into Banner Elk Falls with Jason and a guy he knew in college (who's flying in this morning). Otherwise, I'm hoping for a fairly sedate weekend. Next week is the big coup de grace - Hunter Boylan's week, I guess they had no choice but to save it for last, but I have to think most of our heads will be elsewhere - we return home a week from today.