I See!!

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I See!!

I See !!!

The title of this page comes from a Latin American experience.

A teacher was working with blind adults. Adults that had been blind all their life.

The teacher was a drawing teacher; Drawing teacher for blind people!!!!

Sounds as if one is mocking these people.

The teacher was interested in forms. He wanted to catch the forms of the bodies, the faces surrounding him in the train as he was going to work. As it is an offense to catch the body or face of another human, he was keeping his drawing page in his pocket and drawing with a very short pencil;

He tried to apply this experience of drawing without seeing to his blind pupil.

They would feel the subject with their hands and then or at the same time draw what they felt.

And sometimes the miracle would happen:

<< I see!!!!>>

It is the same with teachers. One will use this method, another will use that method, but sometimes it happens, one of the students See the Picture!

Can you remember and can you name the persons who have changed your life?

It was just a normal day at the Agricultural College (Sveriges Lantbrukshögskola, Ultuna,

now Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).

We had a course in pedagogy. This course was probably compulsory, which means that as a student you would try and attend the course, get your “passed” certification and go on to something else.

The teacher was unknown to us students, it might possibly be better if you were informed in advance that you are going to meet a genius. (Pep Kort but the spelling could be wrong).

He told us a story. If you are offended by the story he told us, replace the subject by anything of your liking, remember that this is Sweden were theology is taught in the same way as any other University subject.

So goes the story.

The theology students were gathered for there first University course of the year. The teacher asked them to explain, one after the other if they believed in the Holy Spirit.

Some students were very vocal and well informed when explaining why they believed in the Holy Spirit. Some were as able to explain why they had there doubts about the Holy Spirit.

The teacher did something that was to come back into my life 20 years later with the FAO trainers, he tried to clarify the positions expressed by each of the participants.

Then he asked the students to say which one of these answers they thought was the best answer, or at least the answer you liked best. Already there he was making an important point, you can believe in the Holy Spirit and still prefer the argumentation presented by somebody who has doubts.

Then he asked for their permission (again this is an FAO technique) to say which one he preferred.

Out of the answers, the one he preferred was a very simple statement:

<< It depends>>

That was the story he told us.

I think I will not be contradicted if I say that for most of us the darkness of the World did not part to show the light of truth, that for most of us, this was another story, another fact to be hooked to the knowledge base we had to acquire for the final examination.

For me, the story was to remain and remain, it became a corner stone when confronted with opponents who disagreed with me.

Should farmers use fertilizers? When working as a technical officer at FAO we were constantly attacked by the green believers who wanted us to propagate agriculture without fertilizers. The first reaction is to get angry, here we were the good guys, trying to feed the starving world and we had to argue against such nonsense. But if I used the key words given by my pedagogy teacher, this became a very different meeting. Did I believe that fertilizers must be used? Well, it depends. Did they really believe that fertilisers should not be used? Again it depends on the situation.

This course in pedagogy was a very short course, a kind of introduction to pedagogy. Our teacher insisted on the importance of writing good reports, for instance he taught us that it was a waste of time and space to use a paragraph header*

<<Yield of Crops>>

And then develop in the paragraph what we meant with this. Our teacher wanted us to understand that most probably the reader would never read more than the header and that, even if he read the paragraph, he would not remember anything, therefore the header should have been:

<<Yields double with fertilizers>>

My teacher must have been rather young in those days, probably a young 50, as experience was to show that readers do not read, neither headers nor paragraphs and that they only retain what supports their own views.

My teacher was to die some few years later, he will never have known that in the pace of some minutes he changed my life.

This has been one of the great regrets of my life, that those who changed my life never knew that this uninteresting child, then student, was listening to their word, that the seed they planted took far too long to germinate but that it germinated and grew and bare fruits. At least one of them (Svante Odèn) committed suicide, tired by the stupidity of this world.

Well, as I am speaking of Svante Odèn let us speak of a super genius.

I have had the chance of meeting during my life some of these super geniuses. I have thanked life and fate for having made me so small that I could see the stars of heaven even if it meant that I had to bend my neck to see them.

I was working as a lab assistant at the Soil Science Department. For the first time in my life I was becoming interested in something I was doing. My intellectual life started in those years.

One day Svante Odèn came to my lab room where I was preparing the tables for the students and asked me to come to his experiment room.

I went with him, he stayed at the door and asked me to walk to the other end of the room, along the work bench. So I did.

Then he asked me to walk back towards him.

The beeper in the counter started getting hysteric!

Svante had constructed during the night an instrument that would measure how much the building was tilting due to the displacement of my weight!

This was possible as we were on the fifth floor of a building sitting or rather floating on a clay layer.

Whether this measurement is reliable is not the point.

Svante had constructed this instrument in his head while sailing in the Baltic. Then he had broken up the cupboard where we were keeping valuable products and taken the platinum sheets we used for electrolyse, and cut them up with ordinary scissor to make sensors. If you except the bits of platinum he used, the cost of the equipment could not have reached a thousand dollars.

With these sensors he then measured the redox potential difference created by the flow of water in a thin tube. All of this is very simple and can be done by a not too stupid student, it is the addition of the elements and the acceptance of the idea that it can be done which is the sign of genius.

Then the lid fell on this experiment as it could be used to trace Russian submarines trail in the Baltic waters by measuring the oxygen content changes of the water.

Today this is a normal technique, possibly even a primitive technique as much better has been done.

He died not knowing that he had an admirer, a grateful admirer. He died a bitter man. His death told me that brains is dangerous. So I was safe.

By now I should have bored you and you have left my page so I can freely continue to give tribute to great Masters;

When I was a young teenager, studies were not something I considered a well spent time. Reading a book rated much higher.

Being very young, a Natural Sciences teacher changed my way of proceeding, and what he did was really nothing, nothing at all. It should not have left any traces.

When we had to give a report (un devoir en Français) he demanded that at the top of the first page we leave a space where he would sign and write his comments; that does not sound like the invention of the wheel. Yet, I am unable to say what impressed me most, the demand he had on himself that he would take the responsibility and explain his decisions. Or his sense of space and geometry.

In a way, I was perceptive, as my Science Teacher whose love was for the workers, on a conflict with the Principal resigned on a matter of principles. Those were the decades after the Second World War when a Civil Servant never resigned. Too much to loose. This is what he meant by taking the responsibility for his comments and decisions, a very rare man of sincerity.

My history and geography teacher taught me two methods which were to remain with me for the rest of my life.

His teaching method was based on rewarding any step forward. We had therefore very high marks and wanted even higher marks. It worked. So, when I was on the dole, having managed to get a job as a physics and chemistry teacher for youngsters of about 14 years of age, I applied the same principles with the result that teenagers who used to have notes well below 20% suddenly found themselves well above 70%. Did it work, I do not know.

For my history teacher, it was essential that we should for all events understand the difference between the immediate reasons causing an historical event and the deep laying reasons, the forces of history to quote Marx.

He also wanted us to clearly understand the policy adopted by the Ruler, how he used the support of well defined groups, how he bought the support of well defined groups and how the Ruler in the end forgot why the groups were supporting him and having taken the support for granted, found himself gunned out of his ruling position. He even went so far in his reading of history that he made it clear for us that supporting groups, once they had got what they wanted, would drop their leader as they were no longer in a buying position.

Those lessons were to serve me well, why would a country like Denmark fund the Extension Service of Zambia, what were the deep hidden reasons beyond the spoken unreliable words and what were the reasons for my Director of Agriculture to accept that a foreign power comes and puts its nose into his Departmental Affairs, what had He to gain from that? As I was paid to be totally faithful to the Zambian Director of Agriculture (who happened to be one of my former students) it was written on the wall that my head would roll. It did roll. Expressed in a more dramatic way, my head and heart were torn away from me. (not to speak of my bank account).

How did I become laboratory assistant at the Soil Science Department?

Because my final examination with the Department Professor was very bad.

I had read a lot of books as this was my subject, some of them in German (I do not read German).My Professor had not read a book for a long long time.

At the end of the examination my Professor was in a quandary. He needed a laboratory assistant, this job was usually offered to the student of the year who had had the best results. So there we were at the end of the oral examination, both of us ruminating; Then after a long long pause during which I could see he was considering offering me a chance to go home and relearn everything on the subject, he kind of casually mentioned the need the Department had of a laboratory assistant.

I accepted

I got my pass degree with the lowest possible notation.

I became laboratory assistant.

I had never been assistant before, never shown any special gifts when working with chemicals. Now I was to prepare and guide le soil chemistry manipulations of 20 students during a year.

I entered into the laboratory were I was to reign for 3 years. Bottles and bottles aligned on lots of shelves, work benches, no laboratory assistant room, no folder with instructions, no handing over note.

When I complained to Svante Odèn about this minimized transmission procedure he told me how he took over the Air and Water Quality Network.

His predecessor, Bombus Eriksson told him:

Here is the key to the cupboard with the records. hej!

From that day I was never to leave Soil Science and life gave me what I expected, I loved Soil Science with all my brain (small) all my longing (huge). The day I left Soil Science, I left my life, to enter into the world of the rejected, then into the world of those in the living hell called Alzheimer.