Three Timely Books on the Impact of Refugees on the West

I recently read three novels with a similar theme: Chris Cleave, Little Bee; Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; and Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone. The three authors from England, Pakistan, and Germany, respectively, all write about refugees from the Middle East or Africa in the West.

Each of the novels makes the point that the boundaries we establish between nations and between the West and developing nations are arbitrary, often cruelly so, and that one of the often-overlooked casualties in creating these boundaries is the humanity of well-to-do westerners.

The authors made me think about how much energy that I and people like me put into obscuring and ignoring the profound and undeserved privileges that benefit us and the powerful economic and political forces devoted to maintaining these cruel advantages. Beginning to dismantle these privileges and cruelties is not the work of an afternoon. But profound benefits await those who start trying, not least of which are a much deeper sense of our common and vulnerable humanity.

Hamid puts it this way: "we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed [one of the novel's protagonists] felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. . . ."

Sending Professors Back to High School

As I near my one-year anniversary of volunteering weekly at Reynolds High School, I am beginning to appreciate how much I have benefited from the experience.

Over a decade ago a participated in a program that worked the other way around: Teaching American History projects that entailed exposing elementary, middle, and high school teachers to academic historians. Some of them confided that there was often a big gap between what we wanted to teach them and what their students were interested in and capable of learning in the here and now, the world in which they operated.

Many high school students present challenges that university faculty are unaccustomed to. They may be actively hostile to learning, to being in school. Some are many years behind. Others are dealing with various types of trauma.

But these are often the students who are the most rewarding to work with, as their successes are so consequential. There are all these little awakenings that you get to help ignite or at least witness. As class sizes grow, schools need more of us to step up and provide the sort of attention that makes such awakenings more and more common.

I love working with high school teachers because they teach me so much about teaching. I have learned that engagement always comes first. University professors often expect our students to rise to whatever level we set. Teachers who are expected to help every student improve must instead find a topic or activity that engages them and then work from there. It doesn't always work, but it often does. I have also learned from high school teachers that students are much more likely to care about learning if they have reason to believe that their teacher cares about them, that there is a highly relational element to teaching and that if you can find part of a student's work to praise, she or he will usually work harder.

For many intellectual types, high school was a difficult, awkward time we were glad to put behind us. But going back has been very rewarding and a boon to my own teaching. find myself caring much more about my university students and much more engaged with my own classrooms, plus I get to get to be part of little miracles, moments when youth recognize their potential to be somebody.