In a slip-up barely hours after the Shamshabad airport opened for business, a KLM flight from Amsterdam, which was supposed to land at Hyderabad, skipped the airport and flew across the country — first to Delhi, and then to Mumbai.

Imagine the ordeal of the 243 passengers on board!

This reminded me of something similar which happened to me about ten years back. I was on an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Ranchi and somehow the pilot got confused and headed to Jamshedpur to land, which is about 132km southeast of Ranchi. On his final approach he realized he was at the wrong place, and quickly aborted the landing and turned towards Ranchi. Everyone familiar with Ranchi, who looked out the window could tell the pilot was in the wrong city. It was only a few days later when we saw the news of the pilot error in the newspaper, was our suspicion confirmed.

Photo by: Mark D. Martin

Once when Picasso visited an exhibition of children’s drawings. He observed,

“When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

Photo Credit: Twistiti

Hubris n.
exaggerated pride or self-confidence

Etymology: Greek

Seems to be the word of choice to describe the Fall of Eliot Spitzer

But the Spitzer saga is really a boon to literature and religion teachers everywhere. Where else can you see such a classic, right out of Shakespeare and the Greeks, absolutely textbook, flesh and blood demonstration of hubris, the overweening pride that leads, inevitably and inexorably, to the collapse of a public figure?
- The Huffington Post

If you live in UAE, then the internet just got even more boring for you, with UAE banning Facebook due to ’sex clubs’ and unislamic lifestyle groups on Facebook. Facebook joins a long list of popular sites blocked in the UAE including: Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, BoingBoing, YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace.

If the ‘unislamic’ nature of the site is what leads to these bans, then I wonder how many Islamic terrorism related sites are blocked by UAE!? But I feel these bans are superficial, and probably there to impress the Islamic fundamentalists, because within UAE, in the free trade zones like Media City, and Internet City, none of these sites are blocked.

Now, if you are not in one of these privileged areas, then here are some ways you can access the blocked sites:

• If possible, VPN into an outside network, and if the VPN server is not blocked, you will be able to access all the sites.
• For Flickr access try the Access Flickr Firefox add-on which is supposed to circumvent filters in Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, and other banned locations.

Cultural Relevance has been an issue on my mind lately. I was recently asked by my principal if I would like to teach a culturally relevant pedagogy classroom next year. I asked him what culturally relevant pedagogy actually is and what I would be required to do. He told me that there is no curriculum for it and it is more of a way of teaching than an actual subject. My current class consists of Bosnians, Latin Americans, Tongans, and so many others that don’t fit into those categories. So I set off and did my own research on this topic. I must say that it seems this is a subject that is just beginning to bloom, and therefore there are not as many in depth explanations on the Internet as I would have liked to find. However, I did find a few things that caught my interest. I found a power point that was posted by a teacher named Tracy Wagner that teaches in a culturally relevant classroom and from her one power point my search expanded. I discovered a book entitled The Curriculum: Problems, Politics, and Possibilities. There is a section on Cultural relevance in the book so I am waiting for it to arrive and I am excited to start reading it.

This is the perfect time to be given the opportunity to teach a class around cultural relevance. We are at a turning point in our country right now. The white man, the woman, and the African-American are all in line to be our next president. If that doesn’t scream cultural relevance I don’t know what does. I am still wondering what has taken this world so long to reach the point of having cultural relevance enter the classroom. For so long it has been an actuality that we as educators have put on the back burner. I only wish I had the opportunity to attend a culturally relevant class when I was in elementary school. We cannot change the past only the future so I am just so glad that I will now be able to teach in a class centered around cultural relevance.