"O Man of Two Visions! Close one eye and open the other. Close one to the world and all that is therein, and open the other to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved."
- Bahá'u'lláh
Well, I'm feeling considerably better about school now. I met with the new coordinator of my degree programme last week, and I feel confident that he's going to actually take the department places. Before, everything lacked the sort of energy, optimism and forward movement that he's been able to bring. His classes are engaging but more importantly I can tell already that he genuinely cares about the students in the programme. We've already basically remapped my degree to be more in line with what I want to do, and we're working on some programmes to where I'm not limited to the very limited language offerings at my university to satisfy the fairly hefty language requirements for my degree. The fact that he's helping the students focus themselves on creating a degree that will offer practical assistance when we get into the "real world" is one of the best things that can be done at our university with so many non-traditional students, and I'm really pleased that he's securing money for us to study abroad and attend various conferences around the country on relevant topics.
I'm going to be concentrating on education and development for my degree, and I'm seriously thinking about a minor in Middle Eastern studies. I imagine that will take me to the Middle East at some point for study abroad. The coordinator is in the process of studying Arabic, which I think would be a fantastic if complicated language to pick up. I'd much rather learn Persian, but I think the opportunities for that are fairly limited since it's probably not safe for me to go to Iran, not least of which because I'm an American and a Bahá'í.
Speaking of which, just as important to me was the professor's respect for me as a member of the Bahá'í Faith. He has included "activism" as part of the requirements for the class, which sent up a red flag for me because we're not supposed to get involved in these sorts of political charged debates and activities that seem to dominate "activism" on college campuses. After he listened to my reasoning, he explained that I didn't have to participate in anything that would put me a position I wasn't comfortable with and that the activism of the class wasn't politically oriented.
In addition, when I introduced myself to the class, he encouraged me to identify myself as a Bahá'í (I'm still a little shy to do so after returning from a country with such a large and sometimes hostile Muslim population that it wasn't always safe or appropriate to do so) and explain the Faith to the class when he discovered that so few of them had ever heard of it. He encouraged the same thing during our Model Arab League/Model United Nations team meeting this evening and asked me to specifically highlight my year of service in East Africa and my reasons for doing it. It's important to me that he's so enthusiastic about exposing the students here in the traditionally religiously conservative South to something that's different from what they've heard and seen not just because more people know about my religion now but also because it helps broaden the vision in a place where vision tends to be quite willfully narrow.
1 comments:
That's so wonderful that your prof is supportive of the Faith and encouraging you to share it with others. I'm never sure when it is and isn't appropriate to mention that I'm a Baha'i, because I don't want to dominate conversation explaining the Baha'i Faith, or distract from the lesson plan of the professor. Right now, in my peace and conflict studies class, I actually have a Baha'i professor. This is almost an even trickier situation because I don't want the rest of the class to feel like our views are the only valid ones or that because I'm of the same obscure religion as the professor that somehow that makes me better or different from the rest of the class in some way that should be distinguished. does that make sense?
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