You learn a lot as a teacher. Over the years, I certainly have.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering journey into outer space. I'm relieved that my daughters know this landmark voyage was made by a Soviet; a handful of their peers assume that the first person in space must have been an American.
So did half a dozen of my students, when I taught refugees at a retraining center in San Francisco. On the last day of class, we played a modified game of Trivial Pursuit, and this was one of the questions: What nationality was the first person in space? A man from Guatemala raised his hand to speak, but he was interrupted by a young Vietnamese woman. "American!" she called out, beaming. The Guatemalan frowned, but he nodded. "American," he agreed. "Americans first in everything."
I had the book, so I knew they were wrong. The awful truth is, I'd completely forgotten that the first person in space was Russian.
This class was mainly Chinese, Indochinese, and Hispanic, but as it happened, there were also three refugees from the U.S.S.R. Before I could open my mouth to correct their classmates, they all started talking at once, spluttering in indignation. "Not American, Soviet!" they protested. "Yuri Gagarin, 1961!"
"Not American?" the girl from Vietnam said, tilting her head. "I think American. Americans go to moon."
The former Soviets assured her that she was wrong. I confirmed what they said and blushed to imagine how embarrassed I'd have been if I hadn't had the answer.
Today, I read an article about Gagarin in the Guardian. His daughter mentions that he enjoyed literature and, like almost all Russians, was familiar with Pushkin, widely considered the Shakespeare of Russian literature.
When I was in Cyprus, I had a few classes with Nigerian students. During one break, the subject of literature came up. I had just read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and was surprised to find that many of my Nigerian students had never heard of it. Then we got to talking about poetry and somebody mentioned Pushkin. "He was part African," one of the Nigerians said, "like Obama." (Obama had just been elected president in America, delighting and impressing every single African student on campus, and dominating most conversations.) "Pushkin's great-grandfather was kidnapped from North Africa and he was sold," my student went on. "He was taken to Russia, to live in the palace."
This sounded pretty far-fetched to me, so I looked it up. When I googled Pushkin, I found that his African genealogy is well known and well documented. In fact, his great-grandfather's life story is so incredible, fiction could hardly do it justice. Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, was abducted from Africa, sold to a sultan in Istanbul, then passed on to the Russian court, where he quickly became a favorite and was made a page. Russia's Shakespeare was indeed the great-grandson of a kidnapped African greatly prized by the Russian tsar. How did I manage to miss this? As a child, I watched Bill Cosby's Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, and if he ever mentioned Pushkin, I never picked it up.
I like to think about Yuri Gagarin, floating up there in space, reciting Pushkin to himself. His daughter says that he loved learning new things too.
