Skip to main content

GTOT

I'm back!  This training at Pretoria was the general training of trainers, shortened to GTOT in accordance with Peace Corps' acronym fetish (similar to bureaucracies everywhere, I reckon).  The next group of South African volunteers are coming in late January, so they gathered everyone involved to figure out how it's going to work.  There were four PCVs, a few staff, and about 20 language trainers.  We spent the greater part of the time reworking all the sessions they had laid out, making sure they fit into the lesson format that Peace Corps has adopted.  Here are the characteristics they wanted to be sure could be identified in every instance:
1) Performer
2) Performance
3) Standard
4) Condition
Performer is who is doing the learning, the performance is where the learning takes place, the condition is when, and the standard is how learning is measured. In my opinion, it's a cumbersome and unnecessarily vague format, but that's not what really tripped us up. We spent the better part of a day trying to get everyone to understand the format, and another day arguing back and forth as to how the format should be applied, to no obvious benefit.  Neither I nor most of the language trainers had much to add, and what we did was swamped by the endless bickering, and the actual content of the sessions was often forgotten while trying to jam things into the format.  It seemed like the kind of task that should be accomplished by one or two people without such discussion.  The most important part of the training—who is going to do what session when—got pushed all the way to the end, and one of the other volunteers had to spend an extra day cleaning up the mess into a workable draft schedule.

Oddly enough, this kind of stuff is one of the reasons I did training in the first place.  Nearly everything Peace Corps does here is encrusted with a Byzantine layer of obscure bureaucratic language that tends to suffocate whatever it surrounds.  It's almost a problem of writing.  I'm always reminded of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, which for its faults is still razor-sharp on this issue:
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
My desire is to break away the obscurities surrounding these sessions to reveal their cores.  Take the problem of communicating in the village.  The American style of communication is not at all appropriate there, and one needs to be sensitive and intelligent to get a good bead on people's thoughts.  Peace Corps' idea is to put this under the umbrella of "Appreciative Inquiry," which has the following characteristics (just to give you a flavor):
Appreciative
Applicable
Provocative
Collaborative
Just exactly the kind of abstract meaningless sloganeering Orwell was talking about. We'll see how successful I can be—at the training for SA22, there were something like 15 PCVs, for SA23 there are only five, so I will be doing a great number of sessions. Those poor suckers.

Comments

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Turns out you can't edit comments. Sorry about that. Let's try again.

    You're a better man than I. I shivered with disgust thinking about the week you just went through. And don't be so hard on yourself. I am confident your sessions will be first class. Your aversion to b.s. will inject some useful information into training.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Let's hope so. I'll be the first volunteer that bunch lays eyes on; I better be on my best behavior.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe