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Teaching - Unit in Review

Unit I: Teaching Requires a Flair for the Dramatic
My teaching career began with wild hand gestures and loud movements in front of an astonished crowd of five middle-aged Chinese-Americans attending a five week intensive English program that dualed as a training course to earn my international teaching certificate. Their English skills being quite basic, I usually assumed my students didn’t understand anything I said, unless Connie, the most advanced of the group, translated softly until her classmates’ heads bobbled up and down with comprehension, giving me the sign to continue. Teaching English at that level required a knack for acting skills, comedy, and art, as well as a fair singing voice for demonstrating the “Hokey Pokey” and “The ABCs”.

Frankly, I felt more like an entertainer in the classroom, though I knew the students were there for more than simply entertainment. They were there for survival, because their inability to communicate in the language of this strange new country limited them daily. They wanted to be in that classroom and to learn, even without the incentive of high test scores and grades, because every new word was cause for celebration.

My students laughed when they didn’t understand me; they laughed when they did understand me; I laughed when I didn’t understand them. And every evening ended with appreciative smiles and echoes of “sank you, sank you” as they filed out the door and back to their homes. I often left wondering if they had really learned anything.

Unit II: Teaching Requires Discipline
I expected a similar thirst for knowledge from my Czech high school students when I entered my first classroom at Gymnazium Sokolov in West Bohemia, Czech Republic. But tests, and homework, and grades, and hormones soon doused those original, naïve expectations. These students didn’t want to be there – they were forced there by their school’s English language requirement. Nor did they particularly like the idea of me (a probable war-loving, dumb American) teaching them. I discovered quickly that their advanced English level required more than the parade of games and chalkboard doodles that had sufficed in my previous classroom. Rather than praise my obvious English genius, thanking their lucky stars for the opportunity to improve their speaking skills, they actually questioned my command of my native tongue, constantly bringing up exceptions to whatever grammar rule I attempted to explain and assuming these discrepancies in the English language were solely my fault.

In a nutshell, I was in their element, and I was the one who must learn to survive. I studied Czech, read books on Czech culture and sought advice from other teachers at the high school on standard classroom discipline. Overnight, I transformed into the infamous, hawk-eyed high school teacher that still haunts the nightmares of grown adults, prowling the classroom in the name of educational justice. I perused pencil-boxes for carefully prepared test cheat-sheets in script so small it could barely be read; my ears perked with canine alertness to the faint clicking of cellular phone buttons during lectures; and I surprised students with my acquired knowledge of Czech curse words that sent unknowing offenders home with disciplinary essay assignments.

Don’t get me wrong - we still had plenty of fun, or at least as much fun as a teenager will allow themselves in the classroom without jeopardizing their popularity. But it was an adopted, cautious sort of fun on my part that balanced my true personality with a need for adult responsibility at an age and within a culture where I wasn’t taken very seriously. And my students attempted fun after reconsidering their view of a stereotypical American English teacher, one they could possibly respect and be friends with at the same time.

Unit III – Teaching Requires Learning
I had been back in the United States for almost a year when the yearning to teach again reemerged while perusing an online volunteer site that advertised a local non-profit ESL program needing teachers. A few weeks later, I found myself standing in front of a mix of twelve Brazilian, Mexican and Russian students, most at least 10-40 years my elder. I had them turn to the first set of exercises in their workbooks, only to discover that everyone had worked ahead and completed the exercises in advance. After two years teaching high school English, I couldn’t imagine what kind of students voluntarily gave themselves homework? I was left without a lesson, and twelve sets of eyes were gazing eagerly at my astonished face, waiting to be entertained. I noticed a small note next to the teacher’s desk, left there by the educator who inhabited the room during the school day. “Control, command, power,” the note boasted – a phrase surely learned at some teaching seminar on classroom discipline. ”Yes”, I thought, “Control the classroom. Get your power back and command their attention again!” Then I realized the phrase only referred to printer maintenance commands. Yes, these were adults, and I was going to have to adapt my teaching methods yet again.

I recently gave the class a mid-term examination – six pages on reflexive pronouns and phrasal verbs. The Central and South American half of the room worked quietly, their eyes on their own papers, but my teacher’s ears perked up knowingly with the first hissing whispers from the Russian couple in the far corner. They projected a constant whir of conversation as they compared test answers, drawing annoyed glances from the other students. My first instinct was to collect their tests and give failing grades, but I quickly recognized my dilemma. First of all, how do you fail someone who’s there voluntarily? And secondly, how could I discipline a 65-year-old Russian married couple, especially since I understood their culture well enough from living in the Czech Republic to know that any good Slav would help their neighbor by sharing answers?

I finally asked them kindly to keep conversation to a minimum so as to not disturb the other students, who had grown up (like myself) being taught that cheating was the equivalent of lying.

“We’ll go over all the answers together next class,” I explained. “It isn’t really important to get every answer correct.”

Not understanding what I had tried to convey, Mariana stared at me imploringly - “But it is important to us,” she said.

And she was right – it was important, just as it had been important to my first Chinese students and my Czech high-schoolers. Ultimately, they all shared the desire to understand and to be understood, yet their status as foreigners and teenagers rendered this desire unattainable. And, from that perspective, it didn’t matter if my students had learned much English - they had learned that someone wanted to help them communicate outside of LA’s Chinatown, that someone believed in them enough to leave her home for two years to teach them English, and that someone who recognized the struggles of being a foreigner wanted to help them succeed in America.

And I learned a few lessons as well - that teaching is not only about conveying knowledge and giving homework – it’s about loving and serving, empathizing with and striving to understand your students, and always believing in what they are capable of achieving. In essence, whether or not I continue to actually teach, I hope I will always be a teacher – one that never stops learning.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I’m sitting at a café table in the DFW international terminal, waiting for a flight to Frankfurt. I’m a standby passenger, and there’s little chance that a seat will be available – today, tomorrow, the rest of the week. Still, I decide to wait it out, my hopeful nature getting the best of me, and I pull out what I believe to be an unused blue journal to record my pre-trip thoughts, just as I always do. To my surprise, the journal contains one previous entry from an ironic moment – my flight back to the USA after my first full year in the Czech Republic.

The “me” from that moment in time would likely be fairly surprised by the present “me” and our opposing realities. In contrast to earlier expectations about my future, this current trip overseas does not involve lugging all my worldly possessions with me to move permanently to Europe. Rather, I’m sporting a small carryon with enough clothes for a week in the Czech Republic and a few small gifts for friends there that I left behind almost a year ago.

Interested to glimpse into the history of my own mind, I begin reading:

“I’m on a flight back home to Dalals after a year in the Czech Republic. By happenstance, I ended up next to a Czech man from Prague currently living in Dallas with his family. After exchanging the usual tidbits of personal information and sharing a bit about my year and travels, the man enquired about my return home and my feelings about it. He cautioned that now I am distinctively "cosmopolitan", and it will be extremely difficult to erase the memories, feelings, and transformations accumulated after a year in Europe.

"You will never forget it", he said decidedly, and the simplicity of his statement struck me as such a simple way to describe such overwhelming emotions.

Of course I won't forget it! The past year has altered me enough that I’ve decided to return to the Czech again in the fall. But the question is - to what extent can I forget what I'll leave behind in the USA, given the uncertainty of what my future abroad may bring?

Half-awake, I watched the in-flight movie "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", in which two ex-lovers experiment with a new scientific procedure to erase each other’s memories, only to discover in the process that they wished they hadn’t. Through the course of the movie, which doesn’t occur in chronological order, you witness the deterioration of their relationship, from the first romantic encounter to the fight that ends it all. Drowning in bittersweet memories, the pair focuses only on their partner’s faults; but, as the entirety of their relationship rewinds in the process of erasure, they recall fonder moments from their beginning that they unconsciously hold on to. These memories eventually enable them to “meet” again as “strangers” and begin their relationship anew. Even after discovering the truth about their past, they risk disappointment again for the positive romantic potential they’ve found in each other once more.

It’s not such a strange concept, I think, as I thumb through the pictures glued to the journal cover. I received this journal as a graduation gift from college friends, and photographs dot the front and back linings. They remind me of past times that seem so distant and strange, like something my mind tried to erase unsuccessfully, and remembering them again only makes me seemingly discontent in my present state. Staring at the past, I sometimes forget the potential in my future.

But how do you forget people, places and memories that were such an important part of you, even if it was a long time ago. Could I ever really forget friends from Vanderbilt, my home town, Nashville, Greg, for a future in Europe that no one from my past seems to truly understand?”


Almost two years have passed since I wrote those words on the blank pages of a new journal. Just as my thoughts then were ironic due to the sentimental medium in which I wrote, so this entry is ironic due to its juxtaposing nature with my situation at the time. Since that journey, my life has done a complete 180, and I’m living a life opposite of what I wanted then. But the strange thing is – I’m happy.

I moved to dreaded Atlanta after my second year abroad; Greg and I are back together; I commute daily to my job at a large corporation; I work out regularly at a trendy gym; I subscribe to “Martha Stewart Living”. My life is deliciously stable.



I cautiously observe the other passengers board the full flight to Frankfurt until the gate attendant shuts the doors. And that is that. To my surprise, I breathe a sigh of relief.

My long-scheduled plans to visit the Czech Republic have just been crushed with the swinging of a gate door, but I realized at this moment that, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t really want to get on that plane in the first place. I’m not ready yet to face the past I left behind. The memories are still too close, and I don’t want the memories of my past to compromise the contentment I feel in the present.

If I’m to truly embrace my choices and move on, I need to be emotionally prepared to face what I left behind with a strong will, because it’s not erased. The Czech is still very much inside me, and it will remain there for as long as I live. But moving on is about closing doors, and true happiness occurs when you can open them again to look back on what you learned from the experience and how it helped you become the person you are today.

For right now, the gate door is closed, and a plane full of strangers is heading to Europe. I’ll go home to Atlanta, go back to work, and count the blessings that surround me, knowing that the door is not closed forever, and that I’ll find myself standing in front of this door again one day. Perhaps then I’ll be ready to open it.

Monotony = The Enemy

I am the cereal-box champion for right-brained thinkers (though my anal retentive list obsession and methodical goal-achievement plans sometimes throw people off). I prefer doing 20 things at the same time, often for no conceivable reason. I learn German on the way to work, join nature clubs for only a few weeks, start random art projects, & take on so many arbitrary hobbies that it’s practically impossible to master them all.

I’ll try almost anything once, and once is generally how I prefer it. In the eyes of my peers, who struggle to understand my decision to be “mediocre at a thousand things” (in the words of my high-school drama teacher) rather than to perfect more marketable skills that companies appreciate on a resume, change and exploration are my most menacing vices. But my time-management choices are completely logical to me, as monotony in any aspect of my life does nothing but bore and dishearten.

For example, a friend who had known me since childhood, and was well aware of my intense hatred for any activity involving sweating, once asked how I managed to complete a marathon within a year of taking up running. The explanation was simple: First, I had a concrete goal that I wanted to check off my list of random things I’d accomplished in life and, second, I never ran the same track twice. Every day, I took every unexplored path, turned every new corner, and followed it until I was tired - then I turned around and ran back. Driven by my curiosity, I was my own personal distance trainer, and I learned more about the town’s geography than even some of the residents!

In my opinion, routine patterns prohibit me from discovering things & people I may fall in love with. But change sparks knowledge – knowledge about myself and the world around me. Change allows me to determine what I want for my life, who I want to be in it, what I enjoy, and just as important, what I DON’T enjoy. Doing things you don’t enjoy is a waste of time, and I abhor wasting time. In my case, we will use math as an example.

Math and I parted ways long ago following several years of intense fighting. In the end, I determined that math had no relevance to my Anthropology & Spanish degree, and we broke up for good. To be quite honest, I haven’t missed it very much. I’ve started new relationships with TurboTax, Microsoft Money, and calculators, all of which are willing to do the difficult part for me.

But the college board has reminded me yet again (in the form of the GRE) how seriously I should take important mathematical matters such as how much faster Janice can fill a 12-gallon fish tank with a thimble than Chuck can using a teaspoon. Frankly, I think both Janice and Chuck should find better things to do with their time than using inadequate measuring tools to fill large spaces, and I have yet to understand how such calculations will help me achieve a Masters in Journalism.

I realize that math is a vital skill in the business world, and business is where I would make the most money. I’m not dumb – in fact, I was in advanced-level mathematics throughout high school. But business & the money it brings don’t interest me as much as the thousands of things I want to experience in my lifetime, no matter how poor and socially unsuccessful I may appear to most of the population. If I don’t enjoy math & business – why put myself through it when I could be exploring something I’m passionate about?

In a twist of irony, I learned a valuable lesson watching a TV show, even though I usually consider watching TV a waste of precious clock ticks. On an episode of “Scrubs”, a young doctor tried to convince a dying patient to accept medical treatment for the cancer eating away at her physical body. The doctor had prepared a list of things he thought everyone should do before they died. As he blurted out each adventure, the calm, controlled woman patiently checked them off one by one and, much to the young doctor’s astonishment, instead posed the same question to him: which of those things had he done in his lifetime? The look on his face betrayed that, although still young, most of his time had been spent drilling medical books and working long hours at the hospital. The dying woman had stoically accepted that her time had arrived, and she had no regrets about how she had spent the hours of her life. The doctor, on the other hand, could only reply, “I’m scared”, as he sat down beside her on the hospital bed, allowing her to hold him.

Why was the doctor so scared, even though he wasn’t the one dying? I think most people are scared of pursuing things they want to do because they are afraid of deviating from the long-tread path of “should’s” and “supposed to’s”. We spend so much time pleasing others (our boss, our company, our friends) that we deserve to spend the rest of our time experiencing life and all it has to offer.

I will inevitably have to work most of my life in some form or another – it’s just one of those necessary evils that can’t be avoided (unlike math!). So I choose to spend my free time exactly how I want to. When my time comes, I want check off everything on that list of things I wanted to experience in life with no regrets. I’m a girl who likes variety, and doing a million things, trying a million things, and seeing a million things are what make me happy.

At least I’ll never wonder what I missed.

Running Toward Something

The first things my dad taught me about running were to keep my pace steady, to look straight ahead, and to focus on a visible goal. As a child, I avoided anything that required physical activity or sweating, so I didn’t quite appreciate the advice. In the Czech Republic, however, it saved my sanity.

I took up running as my athletic activity of choice to avoid the boredom of lazy afternoons in Sokolov. I would strap on my running shoes and explore the wooded trails behind my apartment building, always keeping an attainable goal within sight. I began by simply dragging myself to the end of the street, and I finished off the year by completing the Prague Marathon 8 months after my first run. From this experience, I learned I could do anything I set my mind to… as long as I set my goals within reach and aimed for them at a slow and steady pace.

Oddly enough, at the ripe old age of 25, I have already accomplished many of the goals I had set out for my life. I feel especially blessed by the many travel opportunities I’ve had and, most importantly, I’m thankful for everything I’ve learned about myself along the way. The cultures I’ve immersed myself in have forced me to adapt a slower, simpler lifestyle, and to appreciate my few possessions and my many friends. During my time overseas, life became slower and somehow more beautiful, as if the world had reinvented itself specifically for me; my goals became clearer and less self-absorbed; I had more free time to accomplish those things that were important to me and fewer distractions to usurp my attention.

But returning to the States has reversed much of the transformation, and the intensity of American culture has swept me back into its grip. Far away from my quiet life in the Czech Republic, I now find myself wandering semi-aimlessly with no concrete goals, constantly distracted by the monotonous stresses of corporate life. I often feel like I’m accomplishing nothing - and nothing can be extremely overwhelming following two years of volunteer service in a post-Communist country. Measuring my current success by comparing it to what I achieved in the past, I find it difficult to enjoy much of anything because of the looming misconception that nothing is “good enough” anymore. As a result, I feel emotionally and motivationally “stuck”, with nothing to move toward.

Running used to provide a mental escape during the day – a chance to relax my mind and simply enjoy my surroundings. In contrast, nowadays when I run along the back trails of the Chattahoochee River Nature Reserve, I practically ignore the beautiful Georgia scenery and plow through the woods, trying to beat the quickly retreating sun. Unable to simply let my mind relax, I mentally plan my evening, my eyes concentrated on the ground immediately in front of me, scanning for avoidable rocks and tree stumps. Essentially, I’ve become the same person I left behind over two years ago.

One day last week, as I was running alongside the river, the ground still wet from the morning showers, a question entered my mind. Why wouldn’t I look up? What was so interesting about the ground that I would prefer it over the green landscape?

It dawned on me I was somehow afraid – afraid that, if I looked up, I would trip on the rocky places in my new life as an “adult”, proving that I couldn’t survive. In that moment, I determined that “not falling” was not a successful goal. The rocks and stumps blocking my way were distractions placed in my path intentionally to keep me from reaching a destination I had lost sight of because of my refusal to stare it in the face.

For some reason, the newness and ambiguity surrounding my return to the USA has made me intensely nervous about he future, to the point that I swim in memories from a distant time that is complete; a life where I was happy and successful, whereas now I have to begin again.

But I’m a survivor, and I have conquered much more than menial tasks and imaginary agendas, and this empowering thought rocketed me forward down the trails. I proved that day – at least to myself and to the trees - that I was capable of more than it seemed. I was tired, lost, and unsure of where I was headed, but I kept going, motivated by my new goal– to overcome whatever fear kept pulling me back to a time that had come and gone.

It was time to move on. My legs lurched forward, and my eyes focused on a horizon that I couldn’t quite make out, but I could see its vague outline.

For the first time in a long time, I looked up.

Komunikace

I just made my first friend in here Atlanta – and it only took me 6 months.

Life in the big city as a young single has hit me hard upside the head following the easy college lifestyle and two years of overseas exploration, and I have few outlets to express the culture shock I’ve managed to hide beneath a naïve obsession with blending into American culture again.

So the table has turned, and now even words in my native tongue are inefficient to express the feelings lurking behind two years of inner change being attacked by values and habits just recently purged. Somehow I feel homesick, though I’m supposedly at home.

In a conversation with a relative, we discussed his various travels to far off destinations, some of which I had never even heard of – he had been to every corner of the globe and learned to appreciate the smaller places and its people the same way I had.

“But, you wanna know something funny,” he cooed as he slid distinguishably back into his chair, with an air that demanded a cigar or a glass of brandy twirling in his left hand, “I was always so relieved to come back to the USA. I don’t think I’ll ever leave it again now that I’m this old – we live in the best country in the world.”

Everyone nodded accordingly, but I just stared down at my thin coffee disagreeingly, too timid to voice my opinion.

I love my country and every memory, friend and family member that I have here, but the continent that I called home for a few short years haunts my life back in the USA in a subtle way that won’t let me simply return to life as normal. It could be that I’m simply holding on to the past, to memories of a carefree and whimsical European existence that I hesitated to leave for a steady job in the States, close to loved ones. But mostly it’s the inability to voice my longing for what I left behind and to verbalize exactly how my time in the Czech Republic changed me as a person that drives my loneliness.

The transition back to the States has itself been overwhelming – moving from a former Communist country just teetering on the twenty-first century and still fascinated by everything natural - where they enjoyed life and appreciated the small pleasures it brought, not its endless consumables. I taught children that appreciated having a native English speaker help them learn the language and mentored others who simply needed someone to talk to – in any language. I felt that what I did mattered, and everything in my life was fascinating and new. I woke up every day invigorated about what I would learn in the next 24 hours and what challenges I would face, or what undisturbed village I would visit next. I was growing.

Atlanta, on the other hand, is a large, metropolitan American city where corporate yuppies my age the flock to materialistic urban condominiums in trendy areas to spend too much money on the same things they could get at Wal-Mart and wait for hours to have drinks at the hippest pick-up spots. Something tells me that this is what I should want for myself – but I feel surrounded by wastefulness and discomfort when I succumb to the pressure. While I recognize that my perception of life back in the States is likely skewed and biased, I still feel separated.

I’m different, but I’m the same. I’m the same, but I’m somehow different. Not even I can accurately earmark the changes, though I know they’re there. There are feelings inside of me that I can’t communicate because of the boundaries that different times and different experiences have created. We are all very caught up in our own lives, and taking time to truly decipher the meaning of spoken words is a luxury we have long forgotten.

So, because spoken words have failed me again, I’m turning to writing once more as an attempt to surface whatever I’ve been keeping quiet. I’m going to recount what I’ve learned about myself over the past 4 years of my life - and I’m going to do it in a most peculiar way.

Writing to Someone

I only recently learned to cherish the art of words, though, as a child, I read constantly. My body huddled into a warm corner of my bed and my nose practically skating over the paper fibers, I fell face-first into the pages, yearning to enter the fascinating fictional worlds of Oliver Twist, Anne of Green Gables, and Jo May. When I read, I heard what they heard, I saw what they saw, and I felt what they felt, so that, in a way, their story became my story because of the emotion they inspired in me. These emotions carried over into my real life even when the rough edges of the paperback began collecting dust on my bookshelf.

But then I went to high school. The drudgery of boring weekend reading assignments squelched my passion for leisure reading, and my one-time hobby became a time-consuming and stressful necessity – it was one more thing on a “to do” list that I simply memorized and regurgitated. Instead of searching the contents for thoughts and feelings I related to, I scanned the lines quickly for literary devices and improbable themes to use in English essays. Hence, even writing inherited the same dullness as its progeny - it became uncreative and passionless because I was writing only about fiction, not the adventurous reality that reading had once been. Written words no longer affected me the same way, and I had little interest in expressing myself through them.

This was my mindset for quite a few years, until my life took a very ironic turn… I became a teacher. All of a sudden, I was being paid to instill an appreciation for reading and writing into the fresh young minds of tomorrow. But there was one catch - English was my students’ second language. For them, reading was not only an academic necessity, it was a tedious struggle to comprehend even the basic meaning of the words on the page. And writing and communicating simple sentences required dictionaries, spell checks, and after-school study help.

As an English teacher in the Czech Republic, I began to appreciate the beauty of communication and the incredible comfort that expressing yourself to others can be. We forget that humans have an essential need to be understood in order to develop true camaraderie. Words give you the power to express who you are and to communicate complicated feelings that can’t otherwise be perceived. Yet, I was surrounded by a country of people that, despite a genuine effort to know me on a deeper level, couldn’t break through the language barrier to comprehend the true meaning of the words I wanted to express. The words were inconceivable, and sometimes even unpronounceable, leaving me feeling completely alone.

So, I began to write. It began with the occasional email home, but then I began to experiment with the words, changing them around slightly to more accurately reflect my mood. I stopped worrying about whether it was appropriate to belie my true feelings to those supporting me on the other side of the ocean, and I simply let my fingers fly across the keyboard in an effort to keep up with months of unsaid words that spilled from my heart.

Eventually, I was writing a short essay or online journal entry almost every day as communicational therapy. When I first began, I didn’t expect any responses – I assumed it would serve primarily as an emotional outlet for me alone. But people did read it, and I got comments from people I’d never even met thanking me for my honesty. Reading the entries gave insight into a life being led halfway across the world, pulling the readers into my life just like a fictional character in a novel. But these words were real, and people could relate to them.

So, that was the beginning of my relationship with words, and, frankly, the beginning of this blog. I still have many words floating around in my head that need expressing and questions that need answering, and I hope that the entries that follow will bring the readers along on a journey through where I came from and where I’m going.