Hi everyone, and welcome to the first actual blog post. This one is a bit of a freebie as you don't have to respond to anyone's post (although you can if you want).
Please introduce yourself to the group. Say where you are from, and/or where you are connected to, and give us an example of something you care passionately about. I'll go first. Mine is a bit long (because I've been around for a bit longer than most of you), so don't feel like you have to go into as much detail as I do. But something along similar lines would be good.
Soooo. Here goes:
My name is Chris Fung and I am a fifth generation Chinese New Zealander.
When I was young, my family moved to England where I lived for 8 years
so this has influenced the way I think about myself quite a lot. In some
ways I am culturally more English than anything else. I studied in
Beijing for 2 years right after college but I don't really feel all that
connected to Beijing, especially since it's changed so much since I was
there.
I have also lived in the US for a long time now, I came
to Boston to go to grad school and mostly lived across the river in
Somerville. I now live in Dorchester which I actually like a lot better
than Somerville (sorry Somerville). For ten years I lived on O'ahu in
Hawai`i. I lived in the ahupua`a of Makiki for most of that time and for
a short while I lived in Kapahulu/Waikiki.
My mother's family
come from Jung Sing and my father's family come from Siu Hing. These are
counties in Guangdong Province in southern China. My mother's father
owned a fruit shop in a place called Fielding, in the lower North Island
of New Zealand. His father (my great grandfather) was a terrible
gambler and actually lost the shop several times through gambling debts.
My
mum's dad was not a very nice man apparently. While he begrudgingly
allowed my mother to attend college (she was one of the first Chinese
New Zealand women to do so), he would only allow her to major in Home
Economics instead of Literature or Physics which were the majors she
wanted to do.
My dad's family were early converts to Christianity
in Guangdong. According to family lore, my great grandfather on my
dad's side was actually thrown out of the village for converting. During
the 1930s my grandfather and my great uncle in particular were pretty
high up in the Chinese Baptist Church. My dad remembers when Guangzhou
fell to the Japanese and they had to flee into the hills and live on
grass and leaves boiled up into mush because there was no other food.
After the Wars ended, my dad's family initially stayed in China but then
left in the early 1950s after my great uncle died (family lore says he
was poisoned by the Communists, but my dad thinks this is probably
incorrect).
My dad's family went to Hong Kong and then my
grandfather was sent to New Zealand to be the pastor of a Chinese
Baptist church in Gisborne on the East Coast of New Zealand. He was then
sent down to Wellington, the capital, to be the pastor there where he
remained until he retired. My grandfather loved to talk (this is
probably where I get my own over-verbal lecture style from). He died
from hypertension (too much salt in his diet) in his late 70s.
I
have two children now. The oldest, my son Isaac (14), lives in Kenya
with his mother. She's a marine biologist with the Kenya Marine and
Fisheries Research Institute. We met while I was teaching anthropology
back in New Zealand, and she was getting her masters in marine bio.
I
go to see them every summer but it's hard since I can only see him once
a year and he's now a pre-teen. Luckily Kenya is in some ways, a little
less challenging as a place to be an adolescent than the US is.
My
daughter Leomana is almost 11 months old. She has her mother's eyes, a
beautiful smile and is just about to start walking. She is very
interested in people for the most part and is a wonderfully good-natured
baby. Being a parent is wonderful but pretty tiring as well. I'm sure
it's going to be just as wonderful and just as tiring for the next 20
years or so. My wife and I were counting up all the places Leomana is
connected to by heritage and potential citizenship and we came up with
eight different countries!! Figuring out which other languages she
should learn is a pretty algebraic proposition, so we'll probably start
with Spanish (which is not native or heritage for either of us).
The
last thing I would say about my connections is that I have been a
musician specializing in traditional West African, Afro-Cuban and
Afro-Haitian rhythms for close to 35 years now. I started out playing in
the engine room of a Trinidadian steel band based at Weslyan University
in Connecticut and have studied drumming with a number of teachers over
the years. The most important are Nurudfafini Pili Abena and Jah Amen
Mobley (who were students of Babatunde Olatunji at the Elma Lewis Center
in Roxbury), Fode Oulare, Reggae MacGowan and Moussa "Pico" Bangoura. I
have been a semi-professional musician but I really love playing for
dance classes. I have worked with a number of amazing and generous dance
teachers in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago and St. Louis and strive to be
worthy of all my teachers as a human being and as a member of several
different musical lineages.
I am very proud to be a teacher at
UMass Boston. I have worked at four other universities, private, public,
elite and overseas, and I am 100% certain that UMB is the place I have
been happiest at. It's partly my colleagues, the students and the
location, but its also the urban mission and the sense that education is
a real gift that has value to people in the UMB community. It's not
seen as an entitlement or a mere transaction here.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Blog ground rules
Blogging Guidelines:
Blog
assignments: Entries will be
posted by students in the class page on Blackboard every two weeks or so on readings
or lecture topics chosen by the student. These entries are not reading
summaries but will demonstrate the extent to which the student is engaging
thoughtfully with the materials presented in class. Each entry will be 700 words (about 2 regular pages
double-spaced) in length minimum.
Blog
Responses: After each round of blogs is posted, students must respond to
blog posts by 2 other students (total responses = 12). Responses must be 1-2 paragraphs in
length minimum and must be constructive and analytical. The goal of responses
must be to add to the original post in a way that adds to our understanding.
Students may respond to a blog response on one of their own posts, and/or
engage with other commentators.
Exchanges which
are identified as worthwhile (by the students) will be given extra-credit
points.
Hostile, or non-constructive responses will
immediately be deleted by the moderator.
IMPORTANT: Write your blog post in a
word-processor program BEFORE you
load it onto the website.
Otherwise you run the risk of the website crashing and taking your post
with it. This is very frustrating
and can lead to all manner of bad language.
Other tips:
1. Try to read the source you choose actively. Ask yourself the following questions:
Who are the people involved here. What
issues does this address directly? What historical or political issues are
being drawn upon here by the author of the piece or by the people who the
author is referencing? What are
the other issues this raises that people are NOT directly addressing? Don’t worry if you aren’t able to come
up with the “right” answers initially:
If everyone were able to do this well, it wouldn’t be a class. Instead
2. This means reading the article or piece you have chosen for
each blog session at least twice. Once to get the overall idea and then again
more carefully bearing the discussion questions in mind. THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS. You may think
you can speed read your way through all these articles but you cannot speed
read for substantial content.
3. Respond carefully to your classmates’ emails. Say why you agree or disagree with
someone’s interpretation of the reading.
Don’t just say “I don’t agree” or –even worse “you suck”. The
goal of any email exchange should be to increase the knowledge flow and give
people a chance to discuss WHY they disagree with one another. This is not the same thing as shouting
one another down or trying to score points off one another.
4. Be
respectful of other people’s opinions. It’s easy to get caught up in your own
opinions online and sometimes it’s tempting to put other people down in a way
that you wouldn’t if you had to talk to them face to face. Bottom line is, if you wouldn’t say it
to someone face to face, then don’t say it online. This is really very close to point 3 but I thought it was
worth saying again.
I will be monitoring the discussions very closely so anyone
who flames others or who acts in a way that is disrespectful of others will
draw a reaction from me.
This is not to say that you cannot express your opinions,
but that you have to be able to
phrase them in a way that is an accurate reflection of how you feel, why you
feel this way and with an eye to treating other people with respect. A good illustration of this dynamic in action can be found
at
You don’t need to focus on the math itself. The tone of the discussion is the most
important part of the thread to pay attention to.
5. Be ready to
take the discussion beyond one response and one response to a response if you
think something needs to be clarified or explored in conversation with someone
else.
Referencing:
You don’t have to have a bibliography in your post, but do
refer to the sources you use in such a way as to allow your reader to identify
what it is.
E.g. “In a recent post on the “Indian Country Today” website, …” or “I like what Sissons says in chapter 4 where ...” or “ In
class yesterday you said …” or “This is confusing because in Trask’s article
“Lovely Hula Hands” she says …”
Greetings
I think I have finally found a home for the UMB Honors 490 blog. If you've been invited, you can post or comment freely. I will have a list of topics up in a minute, but for now I'm going to stop here. There will be two separate posts with the first blogging assignment (basically just an introduction), and the ground rules.
cheers
Chris
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