Can you find the airplane in this photo?

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Seeking Waldo helps us question
the world around us and embrace the unknown.
~ Where’s Waldo?
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When I lived in Beirut I met a young man who was on his way back to the US after two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural southern Iran. He had been an English teacher in a village there.

He told me a story about what it was like to use the US Peace Corps teaching materials to teach the village children. He talked about how easy it was to teach the kids to say the word ‘airplane’. They could pronounce it well.

But then he talked about how hard it was for them to grasp the meaning of the word. This was not because they didn’t want to learn. They were eager to learn. Rather, it was because they had no direct experience with airplanes. Thus, they had no model in their brains for ‘airplane’ as it was represented in the teaching materials which showed the image of an airplane on the ground at an airport.

“The difficulty,” he said, “was that the Peace Corps materials – developed by Westerners – were useless in this case.” The only airplanes these children had ever seen were those that flew overhead at 35,000 feet on their way to other places. And, needless to say, airports were a nonstarter.

The children were incapable of translating that tiny silvery light that reflected the sun as it moved across the sky. How could it be a huge machine that could sit on the ground? They laughed ’til they cried at the idea. And, even more, that people could be inside? “Absolutely impossible,” they said.

Photo by Barbara