One student's food offering for the night: A bag of Tostitos and salsa.

And it was just a jar of Pace from the grocery store, right? Only it had been opened already. There were bits of dried gunk around the edges of the jar's mouth, yes? And most of the peppers were gone. And it was "mild", right? Oh, and the chips were stale.

Please, Ilyka, just say yes. Please?

And it was just a jar of Pace from the grocery store, right?

Ooh, so close. It was a jar OF TOSTITOS BRAND SALSA from the grocery store!

Which really sucks when you consider one can actually buy very, very good salsa in the grocery stores here. I mean, you would have to TRY to buy Tostitos.

And to the rest of it I am just going to say "Yes!" because you asked so nicely.

I really do not believe how much this cheered me up, that there are adult (presumably functional) people around who own so spectacular a degree of cluelessness that it makes me look so-fist-it-cated.

Um, being culturally informed (which many in your class were NOT) and being for "multiculturalism" (ie all cultures are equal who are we to judge?) are different.

Very different.

My husband and I honeymooned in France, July 2001. We were in some little shops in Nice, us with broken French and the clerks with fractured English having a great time. One of the clerks asked us where we were from... I said "California"

Huge smiles came across the two clerks' faces

"Baywatch!"

Cultural ignorance isn't just for Americans.

uh oh...sorry 'bout the double post, Ilyka! I got a "mu is stopping comments due to spam, try again in a couple of minutes" page.

So I did.

[blush]

Please delete as necessary.

Oy. Or, rather, OY!

When I was in high school, circa 1985, I took a comparative governments class. We did presentations on each country (the countries were determined by where various people had been; I had not been anywhere, so I teamed up with a girl whose father lived in Brazil, we suspect for the lack of extradition treaty), and food was part of that. Now, mind, this was 1985 in Connecticut, and I was 16 or so and had probably never had a decent chile in my life (well, until the girl who was from India brought in some stuff her mother made), but I managed to do some very basic, non-Internet research and find a recipe for black beans and rice.

So, um, what's the excuse in the Internet age?

So, um, what's the excuse in the Internet age?

That was the part that plumb blew my mind. You and I are almost 'zackly the same age (I turn 37 this June), so I know you remember as well as I do the days of hunting this stuff up in the encyclopedias at the library. I can remember when that PowerPoint presentation would've been done on a series of posterboards, too.

Whereas some of these kids apparently couldn't use freakin' GOOGLE.

The worst part?--My professor set up a links page of nothing but links to sites with tons of information about Colombia. To my way of thinking, that means she did half the research FOR us. And still, we get a drawing on construction paper of "an Indian, and he's sportin' some coffee."

"I can't really cook anything, so I drew this picture. It's an Indian, and he's sportin' some coffee."

Yikes.

But that is the guy we all want to party with, right?

OK, this post just reminded me of something that I must share, so that I'm not the only one thinking about it:

When I was in high school, a classmate of mine - spoiled rich kid who thought the world revolved around her, and who could blame her, because that's what she'd been told all her life - was talking about a trip she'd taken that summer overseas.

"It was SO WEIRD," she said, completely serious. "Like, everyone there had accents except for us!"

I have nothing of import to post here (so I prolly shouldn't, hey) but I just wanted to publicly say that I think you're wonderful.

That is all.

I'm with Darleen: I've taught kids educated in "multicultural" curricula, and they did not come off much better than this: the ed school version of multiculturalism tends to be broad and so shallow as to be a couple of atoms deep.

On the other hand, this level of ignorance and laziness (one of which begat the other in a vicious circle of stupidity that will keep most of these kids in entry-level jobs for the rest of their lives) is what made me such a pretentious twat when I was younger, when the subject ranged to speaking foreign languages and living in foreign lands.

Yes, I was lucky, in that I wasn't rich and opportunities and scholarships just fell my way to travel to the USSR in the Perestroika years, but dammit I worked hard for my As in Russian that landed me those scholarships. How much you wanna bet that the kids with the crappiest offerings (alfredo WTF, over?) are also doing the worst in the actual language study part of the class?

Ilyka- take heart, you may graduate in the same year as some of these twits, but, once unleashed on the workforce with your degree, you will rapidly rise through the ranks while they are still trying to figure out why they should do a little homework before Powerpointing. The downside is that you will be managing twits like them. Start practicing your lines now: “fat, drunk, and skilled at nothing except Microsoft Office is no way to go through life, son.”

Yikes! Now I feel lucky. A few years ago I took a spanish class at the local community college. The professor was Cuban and very enthusiastic. That enthusiasm was contagious I guess and the "kids" in the class went all out for our dinner. Their presentations were just as fantastic as their food. Not a Tostito in sight.

Thanks for the recipe for sobrebarrigas. I can't wait to try it.

Sportin' some coffee? Like hittin' it out of the park? Or kickin' it past the goalie?

As for las drogas, I'm old enough to remember when Ecuador was better known for pot. Then Columbia suddenly got the reputation, around '71, and the Ecuadorian growers started shipping into Colombia to connect with the buyers.

Ilyka- take heart, you may graduate in the same year as some of these twits, but, once unleashed on the workforce with your degree, you will rapidly rise through the ranks while they are still trying to figure out why they should do a little homework before Powerpointing.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! And you've been in the workforce how long? Though I wish it were true because I'd be vice-president of the World Bank by now.

Yay, stupid spammers.

Anyway. I think Tim was dead on in his response. He's taking a farkin' Spanish language class, and it's stupid to have to cook things for it. Or, for that matter, do presentations on Colombian culture.

Because it's a language class, not one on the history, culture, or food of any specific or unspecific country where said language happens to be spoken.

(Why not Spain? It's Spanish, after all...)

(And, yes, I hated the "cultural" stuff when I took German, too.)

Roxanne - 10 years. My firm is unf*rgiving of BS in the lower ranks (all the VP levels are full of it, in any industry). If that is not true at your firm, it's time to jump ship.

Sigvald - cooking might not be that great of a test of cultural flexibility, but there is no way to learn a language well without absorbing some of the culture and history. My first Russian books had some dialogs and stories that sounded pretty weird to me, but they were pretty good lessons in Soviet culture. I learned the word "shock worker" ("shock", as in military strike). Then we learned the history of the word, from the Stakhanov story. We all said: "the Commies really don't talk like that, do they"? Well, yes they did. One of my treasured possessions is a pin declaring that I was a shock worker of the All-Union Student Construction Brigades of 1989. How the heck do you learn what those words mean without learning some history, too?

Great. Now I'm all embarassed of Indiana again.

THANK YOU, TIM.

If it helps any, Lauren, I don't think he's actually a Klansman, so there's that at least.