if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Ramadan, Part III

Disclaimer: the following is not meant to disrespect any religious beliefs. I am only posting this to try and give an idea about what my personal experience is like living where I do know, having coming from where I do. That being said…

Imagine a scenario such as this. You are a new teaching assistant at a rural college, where you have been happily working for a few months. Just as you are starting to feel like you know your way around campus and are comfortable with the professors, one of the deans passing in the hallway tells you, “Oh by the way, starting Tuesday we will celebrate our annual chalkless month. One month without using chalk from your first 8 am class all through the end of your evening seminars. It’s great, you’ll like it. It’s not easy to give up chalk, but we do it to honor the Earth from which chalk originates. Then at the end of the month we throw a big party where we chalk up the whole campus. Can’t you just see it now?”

“Thanks, Dean,” you say, all the while thinking that the whole thing sounds pretty silly. “Give up chalk,” you think to yourself. “Why, I use chalk so much I don’t know what I’d do without it. And besides, no one gives up chalk for a whole month where I come from. I don’t know anyone who has. I’ll just keep using chalk, thank you very much.”

So the chalkless month begins, and each day your students and fellow teachers greet you, asking about the weather and how the chalklessness is going. “It goes,” you say, slightly uncomfortable, knowing their chalk is stashed away, while your hands are still caked in powdery white. “So, you’re not using it, right?” they say, happy that you are still new to town and yet eager to fit in. “Well…” you mumble, and then admit that you have yet to be able to give it up, that you’re just not used to it, and that it’s not a tradition you are familiar with. “But you can try it,” they respond, “help us out, support us. Try it for a day, at least,” they urge, seeming to take so much joy in their temporary boycott.

Each day the conversation is the same, morning and afternoon and evening, for two weeks running. You start to wonder if it is really worth the grief you’re getting, being the only one who’s still using chalk. It’s starting to wear on you. Maybe there’s something in this whole giving-up-chalk thing, you start to think. The other professors seem to still be able to hold classes, you see, the students aren’t rioting, and in fact everyone all around seems to pay a little bit more attention to their studies. One morning you happen to wake up earlier than usual, and think that if you just went ahead and prepared your lesson with markers on flip chart paper, you could leave the chalk alone for the day.

So you do. Your students come into the classroom for the first class of the day and greet you heartily when they see your clean, chalk-free hands, and your conscience feels clearer, knowing you are not still doing something that everyone else around you has, for the time being, given up. By the end of the day you are laughing with your adjunct professor, who invites you to sit in on his evening seminar. “Just wait til the end of class,” he says. “At 9 o’clock on the dot I give every student a piece of chalk and let them go at it on the board. After all day without chalk, they love it.”

You see that this is true. At the end of the day, having been deprived of your usual, everyday chalk, you realize how much you take chalk for granted. When the professor hands you a piece so you can join in with the students up at the board, you take it in your hand with a newfound respect, and are almost giddy at the aspect of actually using it. “So this is why they do it,” you think to yourself. Your head is swimming a bit from the sudden flurry of chalk dust, but you see the point as you wipe your hands on your pants and head home to prepare the next day’s lesson.