Episode 4 - Adaptation Teaches Us More

We explore how adaptation shapes both learning and communication, from a blind student mastering campus to a deaf parking attendant bridging a gap with pen and paper. We contrast academic and traditional learning and share how an Indigenous lens changes what counts as education.

• redefining education through lived adaptation
• observing growth without formal instruction
• traditional learning versus academic systems
• communication as understanding rather than speech
• pen-and-paper problem solving under pressure
• using an Indigenous lens to explain complex realities
• translating concepts like blood quantum for outsiders
• recognizing personal adaptation as real growth

Thank you for stopping by to listen and hearing these different thoughts, these different ideas, because for me, it kind of gives me kind of an outlet to express these ideas, to talk about it in a way that people can actually start to learn some of these things to get an idea of what I'm talking about
Again, thank you for listening, and wherever you are, whenever you are, I would say maybe have a good morning, a good afternoon, a good night, a good day
And again, like I said in episode three, create yourself a great day
Take care

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Transcript

What Counts As Education

SPEAKER_01 0:11

What does education really mean? Is it something that happens in the classroom? Or is it something we live through adaptation? I once watched a blind student struggle to navigue navigate campus during the summer. By the fall semester, that same student moved through like an expert without any formal training or anyone to teach him how. I also met a death parking attendant who communicated effortlessly, not through speech, but through writing. Those two moments made me rethink something fundamentally. Learning and communications are fixed systems. I will repeat, are not fixed systems. They're acts of adaptation. So today I want to explore how worldview shapes the way we define education and how adaptation might be the real foundation of both learning and connection. So let me take a step back. We're talking about adaptation. So basically, here's the way to look at it. So we think about education as something that is taught in school, but we're also taught at home. We are also learning from each other. So in this sense, education versus lived learning. And I'm this as this episode is not to talk bad about education in any possible way, academically or lived experience. And it's not to promote either one as well. It's just seeing it from that lens of almost seeing it from an outside lens, I guess you can say. So communication versus spoken language is another key aspect of this episode. So the key word I want you to hear and listen to is adaptation. So what if education and communication are both rooted in adaptation? Now that's an interesting question. So let me explain why. Let's move on to the next section. Education and adaptation. So a few years ago, probably over 10 years ago, I was observing this student who was blind. And it was during the summer and he kept on using his cane and he was bumping into other things. Not like bumping into them hard, but when he hit something, you could see that he had a struggle. And I noticed that this happened with sidewalks, with objects in his way, trash pans. And then I could see him really kind of struggle. And I was about to go ask him if he needs help. But instead, I stood, took a step back, and watched him go through this process. Not to be mean, and of course, this was no entertainment for me, but this for me it was about learning. And it was very interesting. Because a few times I seen him on campus, he was on different parts of campus, and he was struggling every single time I saw him. And I recognized him, but again, I didn't say nothing to him. So this happened probably I'm gonna say five times during the summer I saw him, and on campus it's very hot, so you can kind of assume that he was also frustrated by the heat. Anyway, by the fall semester, it was something really interesting. I see a lot of students walking back and forth, a lot of people get into from one point A to point B from one class to you know the bookstore or from another place. Everyone's consistently walking back and forth on the first few days, and guess what? The same blind student I saw was walking effort effortlessly. It was mind-blowing for me to see this, and it was kind of like an eye-opening experience. This was like wow, and to see it, it was like seeing something in motion of like trial and error, and now this guy's walking along with the with people, and it's like he's walking along with the crowd, and I he mastered everything. It was very it was so amazing because I actually followed him for maybe about five minutes. I not to sound creepy or anything like that, but I was interested to see how he was gonna walk from one point to another. And you know, I I was seeing him watching, and it was just interesting just to see him to do that. And you know, like I said, there there was no visible classroom instruction for him to you know walk around clo campus, but it was just interesting just to see him in that. So here are the two critical thinking questions for you guys to think about. And of course I'll ask you know, I'll try to answer as well. What counts as education? That's a really loaded question. But let's think about that. Is it only formal education or is it adaptation within itself a form of learning? So let's let's let's take a look listen to this again. What counts as education? Is it only a form of instruction or is it adaptation itself a form of learning? And I think in this sense, it's adaptation in it in its raw form. Because the student, you know, mastered it, he mastered it, and even the way that I'm discussing it right now, it's it's still mind-blowing for me to see that. And you know, for someone who's not blind, you know, I can imagine that this is something that, you know, there's schools that are actually designed for people who are visually impaired to kind of navigate through different things, different systems. One of my favorite uncles actually became blind later on in life, but he went to one of these schools and he actually learned how to navigate things on his own. So, you know, I I know those systems exist, but I never asked my uncle when he was alive how this affects him. And I think I was always scared to ask those questions of these things because I didn't I guess for me I felt like it was kind of being rude. But seeing it in this raw sense, seeing the student navigate through campus, I actually had a respect for you know people learning within this this type of method, and it was it was actually mind-blowing. So here's the second question. When uh when we observe growth, do we always recognize it? Do we recognize the learning behind it? And again, let me explain this again. When we observe growth, do we always recognize the learning behind it? So here's the thing to look at it. Traditional versus academic, those definitions of education is really interesting because traditionally, you know, for me as a tribal person, from someone who actually lived on and off the res, the traditional sense of learning traditional modes has a different sense compared to academic and learning by books, learning through systems, learning through certain sciences in a way. And again, I'm not saying one is better and which one is worse. No, I'm just talking about it in that sense because when we always think about education, we always assume, and this is not everyone, but the majority of people assume we're talking about academics. I've seen people learn different things by other traditional means that don't have academic roots, and yet they're experts. So for me, you know, I'm living on the res, I see people handling a lot of uh heavy machinery for farming. And you know, there's no education behind that in terms of academic. You don't go to school for that type of stuff. Sometimes you just see your relatives, see your older relatives, you know, handling things and asking questions and you know actually doing it. So that's what I mean by traditional sense of learning. So, you know, that's learning through repetition, but then through adaptivity, adaptation, I should say, learning through necessity. And I think that's the key part right there that I'm trying to express in this part, is that the student who was moving around had to get from point A to point B because he was going to school taking classes, and you know, he he didn't have anyone to rely on. So he was using his other senses to get from point A to point B. And I wish I would have I wish I could have talked to him and got to know him a little bit better, but this is through observation, this is through seeing it and just seeing it in that sense. And you know, I I look back at it and I felt like that was a missed opportunity for me to learn a little bit more from that perspective. So now let's look at communication, and I apologize for my sniffing, I'm still kind of a little sick. So let's talk about communication and adaptation. Now, this one is also dealing with a hearing-impaired person, so I apologize if I don't use the right terminology, so maybe I should have said that in the very beginning. But the death parking attendant story is also kind of interesting. This was at a different campus I was attending, and I had the opportunity to drive a vehicle onto campus, and I was running late, and I was behind schedule, and I was trying to find a parking spot, and I found one, and so I was getting ready, trying to rush to get everything out my books, my bag. Yeah, that's another story with dealing with bags. So, moving on, the thing is that I saw a parking attendant starting to write tickets, and I was like, oh no. I said, Am I gonna have enough time? Am I gonna have enough time? So I don't know when they start taking time or when they start considering when things are late, but a lot of times parking attendants do carry it around the machine and it tells you know them when things are past due for parking. And I didn't know that at the time. So I was trying to figure out when the meter starts, if I get have enough time. So I ran to the machine to try to get as much time as possible, and of course, of course, critical thinking, trying to figure out how long time I'm gonna take in class and if I'm gonna stay after class, and I'm gonna go get something to eat. So, you know, critical thinking again, but besides the point. So I'm thinking of all these questions, and I say, hey, okay, let me get purchase my ticket for this amount of time, and then I decide to ask the parking attendant, how much time do I have before he comes back around to seeing when I'm gonna start getting late fees or when he's gonna start writing a ticket. And at this point, I think I had a few late tickets, so I think I had a few tickets where I had to pay a certain amount of fee. I don't remember the exact amount, but I do remember yelling to the parking attendant, and I was kind of a good distance. So again, I'm running late for class, and I call out to him, I say, Hey, excuse me, sir. And of course, he continues writing. I said, Does he not hear me? And of course, this is my assumption. Sorry, I apologize. So I decide to get upset and I start walking towards him. I say, Excuse me, can you hear me? And again, I I apologize. Again, this is my assumption. And so finally I kind of walk up right to him. I said, Excuse me, I said, I've been calling out to you and I've been trying to ask you questions. And the guy looks at me and he points to his ears and shakes his head, and he points to his herinade, and and I looked at him and I'm like, wow, that I just made that bad mistake. And so I tried to talk to him and he shakes his head, and he kind of indicates that you know he can't hear at all. And that story might be a little bit different because I think he didn't have a hearing aid. He was completely deaf, if I recall correctly. Now that I think about it, it was he didn't have a hearing aid. So he pointed his ears and he said meant he kind of panned mine that he couldn't hear. And so I was like a little frustrated. So how do you communicate with somebody who cannot communicate with you? So I was like, and I was trying to learn my early sign languages, and the only thing I could think of is the sign for Apple and my name, and so of course I'm frustrated, and I have to get to class, and I feel so bad that I made this bad mistake, and I'm like, great, so how do I communicate? How do I say anything? And he does something really amazing, he points to me like he has an idea, and he motions to me. Wait, he digs into his vest and he pulls out a pen and paper, and he motions me to write. And like, wow, to me that was like you know, the Rosetta Stone moment, because I couldn't communicate with him, and he was giving me a form of communication. So I wrote down my question, like, how much time do I have? When do they start taking time? When am I gonna get a ticket or if I'm gonna tick it? So he writes on these questions and I hand him back his notepad. He looks over, reads it over, starts nodding, and then he starts responding back to me. And he writes, as he's writing, I start to think to myself, I said, This is the type of communication people should have. You know, we shouldn't just rely on one sense of communication, but people should learn another language or sign language or other modes of communication. Because I think there's gonna there's gonna be a time in our lives, and this is a most guaranteed fact, there's gonna be a time in our lives that we cannot communicate to somebody else, and in that moment, how are we gonna handle that? Let me ask you as an audience, have you ever experienced like this? And how did you handle it? What were the critical questions you were asking yourself in that moment? And as I mentioned in episode two, this one lady was speaking to me in Spanish, and I didn't know what she was saying. I knew Spanish, but the thing is, in my region, in my section where I live, has a different type of Spanish that is taught and that is learned and that is spoken, and that's a lot older Spanish than most of the majority of places in the United States. And I a lot of you are gonna say, well, I know where this is, but the th the fact I'm trying to say is that in this moment, I want to know a way to communicate with this parking attendant, and you know, he gave me a pen and pad to write my questions in English. And that's another thing about education. I think, you know, with these different shorthand text messages, you know, like LOL, and of course I'm showing my age. I think we need to start writing out things for people to understand instead of writing shorthand, because not everyone's gonna learn that. I mean, yeah, you can use shorthand like you know, Morse code, and I learned Morse code, just the basic SOS, like three dots, three long, three dots is SOS. And of course, you know, I try to learn different things along the way to communicate. So the thing about this in this moment, he read it and he responded, he wrote everything back, and like I said to myself, I would like to try to learn more to communicate in different languages. And so far, I have learned little bits and pieces here and there. Learn a little bit more Spanish, but I'm not a hundred percent, and I still mix up a lot of my stuff because of the way that I speak it is not really spoken. My pronunciation just is bad, let's just put it that way. And the way that I say to my Uber drivers when they want to know something from me when I speak you know Spanish or attempt to speak Spanish is and a lot of you Spanish-speaking people are gonna laugh at me when I say mi espinal is muy malo, mi palabras is muy muy limitado. So a lot of you probably laugh right now and say, Wow, he actually spoke pretty good. But I'm carrying my I'm carrying the communication, and for those who don't know what I said, I'll translate. I'm saying my Spanish is very bad, and the the words I know are very limited. So, you know, I do know how to pronounce certain things, and when I travel abroad, and this was I'll explain this into a later episode, but when I travel abroad and learn in Spanish, I actually learned three main things. I learned to you know, know where the bathroom was. Like Danda is bano, so you know, like where's the restroom? No, so that's one key thing. Another thing is learning to speak my favorite food, having a hamburger in a certain way, having certain ingredients, and of course, this the word that we all should learn to some form is you know, I'm sorry. Because sometimes as someone who doesn't speak the language, who doesn't know anything, you're gonna make mistakes, and even learning that kind of makes a huge difference of saying that you know you don't mean any disrespect and you're apologizing, you know, and in Spanish it's lo siento, or you know, for the people, forgive me, there's other ways to explain it, but that's a general sense of talking about. Getting back to the story, so I see him write back to me and I kind of acknowledge you know what he writes to me and I go on my way. So the critical questions in this part is what truly defines communication? Speech or understanding? Again, let me re let me say that again. What truly defines communication? Speech or understanding? For me it's understanding because you know I talk about critical thinking, and I also talk about what that means about understanding in a world where we live in currently, where we have a lot of wars, a lot of political discussions, a lot of different perspectives, and you know that's what I do on this podcast to explain. Express those things that we misunderstand. So for me, it's about understanding and communication. The second part of that is when our usual method fails, do we adapt or do we shut down? In these two times, these two different stories, they're both about adapting and rising to the occasion. And that's what it is sometimes. You just have to adapt. You have to adapt to the current system. So let me expand on that. Communication is prop problem solving. Because a lot of times you have to communicate something if you don't see eye to eye with someone. And for me, going to school, and again, I'm not promoting or you know saying it's bad, but me going to school, I've been able to articulate my perspective and efficiently, effectively explain through communication my perspective. And someone who's indigenous, who expresses their ideas in a mainstream society using their own language, their own type of understanding to express that has been able to for me to express a lot of my indigenous perspectives, the way that I see the world, the way I understand it, the way I see everything in general. So I I think I kind of went and said what I had to say about that. So the key insight is communication is not sound, it's adaptation. So let's take a few moments to reflect. In both stories, let's compare. We have the blind student learning through adaptation, and then in the the death parking attendant, communication through adaptation as well. So they're both adapting to the situation of their real world, of their the world that they live in. So let's zoom out of that. There's the traditional sense of education and lived education. It's very interesting when you see it from that perspective. And formal communication versus adaptive communication. As I mentioned to you, you know, for me, when I talk about my indigenous background, my indigenous perspective, my Native American lens indicates a different reality than most people will never grasp to understand. And their only insight is watching media that doesn't really reflect what American Indians, Native Americans live, think, breathe, and act within a tribal sense, within a tribal nation. See, I can talk about different things on the res, and then when I explain it to somebody who doesn't live on the res, they look at me kind of like the deer in the headlight look. And they don't know what I mean, they can't understand. So that's when I try to use different examples, different communication skills of expressing and painting a picture to illustrate my perspective, to let them know part of my reality. Because a lot of times, in those sense, it's very hard for people to grasp these concepts. Let's just talk about blood quantum for a second. Blood quantum is something that is a colonial tool that is designed for some tribal nations to use as kind of like a measuring stick to gain membership, to be part of that community, to have access to the tribal resources. And sometimes if you don't reach that blood quantum, you do not have enough tribal blood to be part of that nation. But you might say, well, how does that affect them? And that is another thing is how does it affect them? That is a good question. Because you know, there I do have relatives that don't have enough blood to be enrolled in my tribe, and they might belong to another tribe, but they might not have enough blood. But they're full Native American, but they don't have enough blood quantum to fit in either tribe, so they don't belong in either place to gain any of those certain benefits. So I try to explain people about blood quantum, and sometimes people cannot rationalize that idea. So for me, in from learning within an academic setting, how to express that for people in a mainstream society to understand these concepts, and even when you explain it to them, they still can't envision that reality. And it's a really interesting moment to see people in that moment to try to grasp that idea through learning, through communicating. But we're we're we're kind of stepping away from the formal idea of adaptive learning, communication So let's take a final look. So for my audience, where in life are you already adapting but not recognizing it as growth? Let me repeat that one more time. Where in your life are you already adapting but not recognizing it as growth? I would like you to leave I would like to leave with that question. So think about it in your sense, in your world, when that has happened to you, and try to think about education through that lens. And I would like to leave with this. Maybe adaptation is a quiet force behind both learning and connection. And maybe our worldview determines whether we see her or not. I do appreciate you stopping by to listen and hearing these different thoughts, these different ideas, because for me, it kind of gives me kind of an outlet to express these ideas, to talk about it in a way that people can actually start to learn some of these things to get an idea of what I'm talking about. So, anyway, again, thank you for stopping by. Thank you for listening, and wherever you are, whenever you are, I would say maybe have a good morning, a good afternoon, a good night, a good day. And again, like I said in episode three, create yourself a great day. Take care.