{"id":2101,"date":"2013-11-21T01:15:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T01:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=2101"},"modified":"2013-11-21T01:15:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T01:15:39","slug":"dr-jones-dr-jones-husband-wife-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2013\/11\/dr-jones-dr-jones-husband-wife-colleagues\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Jones and Dr. Jones: Husband, Wife, and Colleagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fieldston News<\/b>: (to Alwin Jones<\/b>): Although your wife has been teaching chemistry here for a few years, you are new to Fieldston this year. How are you liking it so far?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: I\u2019m enjoying Fieldston very much. I enjoy my students, the intellectual culture is welcome and I\u2019m energized every day by our discussions. Our classes have a little bit of levity but I think a lot of us have been doing a lot of heavy work with intellectual inquiry and enjoying the journey that we share with each other as well as help each other along with. I\u2019m enjoying it very, very much, lots of fun things happen.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: What classes are you teaching?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: Themes in American Literature, in which we examine the relationship between literature and the idea of freedom, I\u2019m teaching a class in the Caribbean and Latin America in which we examine the immigrant narrative of home and migration. I\u2019m also looking at a Film and Literature class in which we examine several film and text both adaptations but also thematically related stuff.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: In light of your performance at the poetry assembly, how does your music career tie into your career as an educator?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: I am a professor of African and Caribbean literature at Sarah- Lawrence, so I\u2019m on a partial loan to Fieldston for the year. And part of my scholarly stuff is I do the research based on stuff that actually the other Dr. Jones was instrumental in helping me to gather in Guyana, since around 2009 we\u2019ve been going back home to record and interview. It\u2019s the beginning of my book project, the CD project.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: What\u2019s your book project?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: It\u2019s just a collection of poetry that I\u2019m working on that I wrote over the last year or two that tells the story of my family coming to Guyana from the Congo basin, while also telling the story of my grandmother and her growing up in Guyana, and lastly me and my growing up in Guyana. So it\u2019s a three-part work like a memoir done in poetry.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: So you grew up in Guyana. (to Paulianda Jones<\/b>) Where did you grow up?<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: I was born in Guyana, he was born in the country part and I was born in the city, and my dad was an agriculturist. He would travel all over Guyana because it\u2019s a very fertile land. One of the places that he would go for part of the year was called Lethem, and it\u2019s right next to Brazil. So I was there, growing up and taking classes with the indigenous Guyanese. I took classes in the woods, but part of the year I would be back in Georgetown. And then I moved to New York when I was six, but we left soon after, and then from age eight to thirty I was pretty much in the south. There, I grew up in Northern Virginia and I went to school, grad school, and college there. Post grad I was in Tennessee, but then after that I came here for a tenure track at a college but left the college and came to Fieldston.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: What was that decision like?<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: It was a very good decision for me. I had explored teaching high school right out of grad school, then I did the post doc and I thought about joining a pharmaceutical company like Merck and doing that type of research and work, but then I decided that the academic career was more friendly to having a family, in terms of schedule. So I gave the college education a try, but I found that I preferred the younger age. The students I had in college were more prepared to take a college level chemistry class so I wanted to work with the younger aged students to help them become more prepared themselves.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: When you were talking about your book project and the music, you said that the other Dr. Jones helped you with a lot of research. What role did she play in it?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: We got a grant from Sarah Lawrence to go and do some of the research, and Dr. Jones was instrumental in helping me to organize getting the trip there, but also as we were going around because it\u2019s very difficult at times, I needed to be not just behind the camera but in front of it because we were doing documentary work, so I needed stable hands. But also, just being present at one point, when I had a performance, being a friend and a familiar face and presence to say \u201cI got you, you can do this\u201d was instrumental in knowing she was there for me, and now it\u2019s been fifteen years doing this, helping me to rehearse and holding the script as I try to memorize particular lines or running by ideas for what to shoot or questions to ask, she may ask a question about something that helps to trigger a memory, but that\u2019s been a longstanding role in terms of memorization and getting my answers well rehearsed and correct.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: How long have you guys been together for?<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: Nine years<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: How did you guys meet?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: Grad school at UVA. On the basketball court.<\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: I was just working out.<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: Yeah, we love sports.<\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: We\u2019re very competitive.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: What would you say, aside from these projects, are your hobbies?<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: We watch our kids. If we had free time to do something?<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: We are avid tennis players. And basketball. Biking, long distance biking. At one point we were runners.<\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: I\u2019m the only runner now. So if we do something now, it\u2019s probably just a movie.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: Would you say you are a relatively competitive couple? You both are clearly very intelligent and you do a lot of activities together, so would you ever say that there\u2019s competitiveness from that?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: In sports, I would say so.<\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: But in terms of anything else, I wouldn\u2019t say so. We\u2019re very supportive of each other. We\u2019re a team.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: What\u2019s it like working together at Fieldston?<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: It\u2019s so big that you have to make an effort to see each other during the day.<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: And also different teaching schedules, we\u2019re on different lunches. The joint commute is good for the environment and us though!<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: Do either of you have the same students?<\/em><\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: None of our students overlap now, but I have a bunch of former students of Dr. Jones\u2019 (Paulianda).<\/p>\n

PJ<\/strong>: I think it\u2019s important for him to develop his own ideas about the students so we don\u2019t really talk about them or our impressions because I feel like many people can be different students in science than in the other subjects like English, the two don\u2019t relate at all. Some students are all around, but others are more one-sided.<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: You know, they see me around and so we try to have fun with it. We have played a few practical jokes.<\/p>\n

FN<\/b>: Such as?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: When people ask if we know each other, we pretend that we\u2019ve never met. I\u2019ll just say \u201cOh yeah, that guy has the same last name as me. That\u2019s funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: Yeah, that part is fun.<\/p>\n

PJ<\/b>: I\u2019ll say, \u201cHe has a daughter named Farrah too,\u201d and everyone just looks so confused.<\/p>\n

AJ<\/b>: Yeah, it\u2019s just not something you assume. Jones isn\u2019t an uncommon last name. So it works a lot of the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fieldston News: (to Alwin Jones): Although your wife has been teaching chemistry here for a few years, you are new to Fieldston this year. How are you liking it so far? AJ: I\u2019m enjoying Fieldston very much. I enjoy my students, the intellectual culture is welcome and I\u2019m energized every day by our discussions. Our classes have a little bit of levity but I think a lot of us have been doing a lot of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":2102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"coauthors":[97],"class_list":["post-2101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slider"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/interview-cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2103,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions\/2103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2101"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}