I’m teaching two classes at the Youth Initiative High School: Middle East and the Islamic World and Physiology and Alternative Medicine.  I’m glad for the chance to spend time thinking about both subjects, and for getting the chance to guide some minds that are young enough to be both flexible and demanding.

On teaching about the Middle East in the Midwest: When I heard a student say at the end of class last week that “Arabic would be a cool language to study,” I held a little victory dance in my heart.  We’ve started at the rise of Islam and have been emphasizing the degree of civilizational ferment that occurred throughout that empire from 800-1300 AD.  When Europe looked, at its best, like something out of Beowulf, lawyers and doctors and teachers were getting degrees at universities in the Middle East.  Polymath scientists were writing the earliest environmental analyses of pollution, and translators were burning through everything they could get their hands on.  We’re looking at a lot of maps in class: geographical, political, linguistic, religious, hypothetical.  This map show in particular, while lacking in some details, was a nice bit to put the passage of empires and the arbitrary nature of political borders in context.

The very awesome Sarah Root, of Root’s Herbal Remedies, was the first in a series of alternative health practitioners to come in for a conversation with the senior class on Alt. Med.  She told an amazing story about being prescribed an herbal remedy by a bonobo during her time working as a primatologist:

Her primary job was to practice and document communication with a group of bonobos at the Atlanta Zoo.  Her goal that day was to convince one of the females to take a pre-natal vitamin–these ladies were apparently too sharp to eat something hidden in their food.  Sarah attempted to make her case by pretending to chew on the vitamin while saying how tasty it was.  The bonobo wasn’t buying it.  Sarah ate a vitamin, but still couldn’t convince anyone else to take one.  Several hours later, nauseated, she returned to the bonobo, who could tell she wasn’t feeling well.  The female beckoned Sarah closer with her hands, and then gently blew through her mouth, encouraging Sarah to do the same.  When she did, the bonobo put her nose close, smelling gently and carefully.  She drew back and pointed to a cluster of plants in the corner of the pavilion.  Chives.  Sarah wasn’t an herbalist then, and to this day she hasn’t read any recommendations of chives for nausea.  She ate some that day, though, and lo, she felt better.

Is it wrong that I want a bonobo physician?  Until I can find one for myself, I’m going to spend some time with herbalists.