I recently had the opportunity to meet with one of my students on the Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, U.A.E.
We discussed how certain marine life lived in, and created, the carbonate sediments of that part of the world.
She questioned everything I told her. She did this not because she did not believe me; it is the way she learns.
She is very smart.
She said she wished I could be her mentor; I didn't know what to say as no one had ever said that to me.

dead thing house

Stop to ask why before you move along.

If you do not agree with what you hear,
or if you want to change why something is what it is purported to be,
then at least you have thought about it more than most have, even if you are wrong.

Some call a shell washed up on the beach
(a beach of ground grains of older shells that support us now)
a dead thing house.

While the name of hers will likely be lost to time for most,
the lesson to me, as well as its teacher, will stay with me forever.


13 May 2003
Dubai


“I don’t like the name fossil, I prefer to call it a dead thing house.”


“We are always influenced by our past, but now it seems we are also supported by it.”

- J. M. my mentoree




Later I showed her two shells I found on another beach; one was small the other large. I told her that if I was going to be her mentor, we had to have something in common to connect us. I suggested the two shells as our nexus. I told her the one of us who is going to do the majority of the teaching should have the large shell and the one who is going to do the majority of the learning should have the small one – I gave her the large one.