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Travel, conversations and learning – How being part of conversations can shape your educational/ professional future
We often think of travel as movement. Physical movement to see people, places or attend events. But have you ever considered travel as a conversation? A conversation to enter a new space, a new way of thinking and new way of experiencing life? This is what I realized during my recent trips with my students.…
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To be a good teacher, be a student.
Here’s a paradox in learning that I have come to understand, at a deeper level: to be an effective teacher, one must be a student. What does it mean? It means that learning never stops and to effectively embody what it means to teach, one must continuously humble oneself, keep an open mind and challenge…
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How to make a political statement by learning Spanish
We are living in interesting times. Times when xenophobia, racism, and suspicion of the ‘other’ are going mainstream, at least at the level of political rhetoric. While one can excuse this as the misguided logic leading up to the primaries, one cannot ignore the amount of confusion this is causing- both domestically and across the…
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Book Review: Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an by Denise A. Spellberg
If the only thing you learn from this book is that the founding fathers had the wisdom to use Islam as a test case, to set the limits of tolerance in America, then that’d be sufficient. Denise Spellberg: Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a well-researched book, that locates the debates during the time (and before) Jefferson…
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Are the Saudis getting something right?
Are the Saudis getting something right, in terms of their foreign policy, both in the MENA region and around the world? Or is it all a big mess, much like American foreign policy in the region? In a recent article in the TIME magazine, Farid Zakaria[i] pointed out that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s foreign…
