A Different Kind of Pedagogy

We shall begin today by celebrating the return of fully functioning email
(knock on wood and cross fingers). I cannot begin to tell you how the
restoration of full service has improved the spirits of our cadets, crew
and officers.

However…

There is a teeny problem. To fix the bug, all correspondence within the
last few days was lost. Therefore, if you sent myself, or somebody else
on the ship, an email of great importance, you *could* take it personally
and think they’ve been ignoring you *or* you can simply resend it and hope
it isn’t treated as spam.

We are finally pulling out from the Balearic Islands today and our course
is set for the Straits of Gibraltar. We can expect to be there within a
couple of days, and then out to the Atlantic, and then the cool waters of
the Irish Sea.

At lunch and dinner today I had a conversation with two instructors who
told me just how practical the instruction is here.

In my prior posts, I alluded to the practicality of some of the exercises
(i.e. boat drills and plugging leaks). In this new exercise, the
instructor had the cadets wear self contained breathing apparatuses, and
then taped over the goggles so they were effectively blinded. He then
brought them into a room full of junk, debris, etc. The goal was to find
a mannequin and remove it from the room. That must have been F-U-N.

To the further disquiet of the cadet and purely unintentional, there was a
massive amount of hammering, drilling, and other sorts of work being done
on the ship. So not only were the students blinded and wearing this heavy
gear, but they were also afflicted with an auditory assault – and if you
have been reading this blog you may have a good sense on just how loud
this ship can get.

The stress of the voyage is starting to wear on some of the cadets,
especially those who are going home in Dublin. As the unofficial
non-alcohol bartender of this vessel, cadets somehow believe that because
I am sitting at this desk, that I may listen to all their problems with a
sympathetic ear. I believe their level of trust with me has grown due to
a) I don’t order them around b) they have gotten used to my presence and
c) I am the closest thing to a bartender on this ship. I even have rags
to polish the counter of my desk as well as complimentary tissues and hand
sanitizer. But I will let you, gentle reader, decide just how sympathetic
I am. The conversations, however, do provide some insight into the lives
of the cadets.

For example, all the underclassmen are housed in the holds, and some of
them are in large chambers with dozens of cadets berthed with them. These
chambers of course necessitate an inharmonious state if a few of the
inevitable bad apples end up with them. Loudness, music, games, etc
predominate – and although their condition is by no means squalid, it
brings to my mind immigrant tenement living. Such conditions provide
another test to these cadets: To live felicitously with their neighbors.

Perhaps it is in part the crowded living conditions that make the Doctor’s
sick list grow just as we leave a port. The primal instinct for tender
loving care makes one run for their parents (an impossibility on this
vessel), or for the doctor. Of course these sick cases drop off just
before a port which is a testament to the wonderful curative powers of the
mind.

However, the condition of our students is by far much better than it was
in the *old* days of the “St. Mary’s” or the “Newport” where the students
slept in hammocks and holystoned decks.

My thought is that the constant pressure of being in cramped quarters, on
a self-sustained floating city can do wonderful chicanery to the
imagination – particularly the underclassmen as they are deciding if this
is something they really want to do. After all – not everybody can be
librarians.

Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Joe