Sunday, May 18, 2008

Goatscaping

I got a little delirious today after 8 hours of grading 60+ 10 page papers (though I was grading outside in the sun on the patio). In one of the many project proposals I read today, a student was describing the particular needs of running educational groups in the rural north of Namibia. She said it was important to reduce “goat scaping” in these areas. Naïve foreign professor that I am, I was picturing some rural technique that I didn’t know about in the North that was akin to landscaping, but using goats. It was only about 15 minutes later that it hit me that the student, who is a very smart student, but speaks English as her third language, meant “scapegoating”.

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