Of Time Machines and Airplanes

 Of Time Machines and Airplanes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am in Paraguay teaching Elementary Statistics.

Hop into a time machine and go back almost 40 years. It would be 1984 or 1985.  My father was still alive. He only had a couple of years left, but we didn’t know that.

A group of my friends from graduate school went to an Oklahoma Academy of Science meeting that was being held at East Central University that year.  It was only a little further from there to my family’s home, so I took my friends to meet them.

We were modest working people.  Our house was small, but we owned it. My friends met my family, and my father was very impressed as to how nice they were, how well brought up, how well-presented. 

They were nice, they had been well brought up, but I knew then and I know better now that they weren’t perfect. Not that anything in particular was wrong with them, but they just weren’t perfect. No one is.

What I know now is that this was a meeting of classes, a place and time where boundaries came together.  My family was working class.  The people I was going to grad school with were middle class.  These are not the same.  Someone who knows something about sociology--which I do not--would know how to classify all the differences with great nuance.

For my part, I will stick to what I’ve seen as one who’s made the journey from working class to middle class.  All I know is what I’ve seen with my own eyes, interpreted through my own lens.

Fast forward four decades.  And I mean fast.

Now hop on a plane and fly 5000 miles south to Asuncion, Paraguay.  I’ve got to wonder what Dad would’ve made of it through his lens.  He’d been to Europe, both England and the Continent, with a group of close friends of his (about a million of them) in the early 1940s.  He and those friends made quite an impression on the place.

He was also an avid reader of National Geographic and daydreamed about visiting the Pampas of Argentina, which is not far from Paraguay.  It would be nice to see the places I’ve been reflected back through his eyes with the benefit of his insight.

I guess I am seeing that to a certain degree when I am interacting with my students.  They are polite, respectful, friendly, and kind.  They are sharp in their studies.  They not only study, but they know how to study.  They have been taught.  

They have been in private schools where the instruction has been in English for at least half the day from Kindergarten on up.

Now, as said above, they are not perfect. No one is.  Indeed, they may have faults that working class kids never dreamed of having because money and privilege open all sorts of doors, not all of them good. 

But one thing I’ve seen, and this is important, is that they are able to interact with authority figures with an ease and comfort that I could never have dreamed of at that age.

As I said, I am in Paraguay teaching Elementary Statistics.  Most of my students will be coming to the United States eventually in order to finish their education. I would like them to come to Pittsburg State because I believe the rest of our students can benefit by being around them.  

While a great deal of this is the value of being around students from another culture in the sense of being from another country, a lot of it is the value of being around students who’ve this level of people skill, who’ve been raised so as to be confident and at ease around authority.

Looking back, I realize I benefited from that myself with my middle-class friends from graduate school.

There are all sorts of poverty. The sort of not having much money comes to mind.  But there is a poverty of experience with reality.  For those of us who came from a rural environment, that’s a big thing.  You don’t meet many different kinds of people; you don’t see many different kinds of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s TV; there’s the internet. 

It ain’t the same thing.

There is something to being there. There is something to seeing it with your own eyes.

Were I to have my own way, I would drag every student in the university down to Paraguay to see it with their own eyes.  I can’t.  Many can’t afford it financially, which is understandable; many would have a poverty of the spirit, which is a shame, but which can be fixed with time. 

But to bring a bit of Paraguay to Kansas, to Pittsburg, Kansas is something we can do.  To let our Kansas students meet the Paraguayans; to let our Paraguayan students meet the Kansans, it is a good thing.

I think my father would like it.  I think my father would like them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.