Girls on the town

Jackie sports an official Cycle Paths T-shirt on a recent excursion with the group.

The danger in caring

“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” he [Tomaso] asked. His voice was very soft and he raised his eyes to me. “Why are you always looking in me?” I saw his hand close around the scissors and lower them. “I wanted to hate you. Why wouldn’t you let me? Why wouldn’t you just let me be alone?”

[…] I was overwhelmed. The question of questions he had asked me. What right did I have to make him care about a world that did not care about him? For every child I saw, for every child I touched, that question was there. And he had not been the first to doubt my wisdom in it. For me the sorrow came in having no answer, in never being quite sure that the pain I gave was better than the pain I relieved.

-Torey Hayden, Somebody Else’s Kids

This scene follows an attempted attack on Torey by an emotionally disturbed boy in her special-needs class. Her four elementary students are as diverse as could be. Boo is autistic, abuse left Lori brain-damaged, Tomaso is violent and in denial about his father’s murder (which he witnessed), and Claudia is pregnant. Somehow, they form a community.

Reading this book has made me cry, probably more than any other book. It’s also caused me to think about why I’m drawn to teaching, and what I want from it. Hayden describes the utter beauty she sees in these kids, their expertise at pushing her buttons, and her fluctuation between trying to pretend she’s omniscient and doubting she knows anything useful. She’s an idealist and a dreamer, and I needed a dose of that before starting student teaching. It’s easy to let details swallow up vision instead of fleshing it out. That scares me.

Torey Hayden reminds me that school is about the learners, not about the lessons. Lori’s brain damage has left her unable to process symbols: though her IQ is normal, she can’t even distinguish the letters in her own name. When Lori is humiliated in front of the “regular” first-grade class for her inability to read, Torey apologizes for the school. “We should never have made you feel that reading was more important to us than you are.”

I know foreign languages are scary to a lot of people. While I believe everyone who’s learned their native language can learn another one, I don’t want to blindly demand a skill or a rate of learning from everyone. May I have sympathy for the learners who honestly don’t get it, even when it seems ludicrously easy to me. May I avoid mixing up the struggler with the stubborn, or the confused with the lazy. Too often, lack of sympathy is the plague of the teacher who learned her subject matter easily.

Hitting the (soon-to-be) floor running

Yesterday, In-Service finally began at my school, meaning everyone at the high school is preparing for students. Actually, we began yesterday at Harrison Middle School listening to pep talks and instructions. (The folding chairs said “HARRISON” on the back, but the one in front of mine had been scratched off to read “PRISON.”) The highlight was definitely the silent speech given by the superintendant, who simply let us read each Powerpoint. A memorable quote: “Talk is cheap. The Romans didn’t build an empire by talking…okay, so they did it by slaughtering their opponents, but still…”

The teachers had to learn their way around the school just like me. (We went on a scavenger hunt, where staff filled our “goody bags” with planners, dry erase markers, first aid kits, etc.) It’s been closed all summer as massive renovations near completion. They’re thrilled about their sparkling new rooms and upgraded technology. With about half the building open, they’ve been teaching out of boxes the last few years. There’s still a long way to go – exposed drywall, unlaid tile, stepladders, and floor-waxing machines are the norm. Several sections won’t be finished until January, so some teachers have temporary room assignments. But it’s already a huge improvement, they say.

Unpacking boxes and hanging posters has helped me connect with my mentor teachers, especially Mr. Hindman in German. Originally, I expected to work with both teachers for half the day all semester. Now, it looks like I’ll be with him for 8 weeks, then switch to Mrs. Frye in French. But she’s already given me her #1 Advice for New Teachers: “Do what you want until someone yells at you.” Words to live by. Until then, I think I’m going to love teaching with Mr. Hindman. He’s infectiously enthusiastic and full of cool ideas. I just need to adjust to his schedule: he arrives between 5:45 and 6 daily, so I’ll need to leave my house by 5:30. Students arrive Monday, but I’m not nervous yet…there’s much to be done in the meantime.

Well, isn’t she something!

This semester I’m living with Jackie, my uncle’s marvelous mother-in-law. I’ve always been close to her daughter, my Aunt Nana, and it’s fun to spot similarities between such distinct people. Jackie and I met briefly in May when I visited overnight, but this week we’ve certainly gotten to know each other better. She is a force to be reckoned with: opinionated, outgoing, and lively. Her favorite phrase is "I'm so lucky." She finds most people around her "delightful" and pours herself out for neighbors and friends in tough times. One of the first to earn a master’s degree in linguistics, she taught reading and high school English for decades, mostly to non-native English speakers. The house is filled with her watercolors, most based on photos she’s taken in her world travels.

She’s passionate about athletics and the outdoors: she bikes three times a week, sometimes with a club called the Cycle-Paths. Twice, she’s biked from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. and back. After college, she danced professionally for a year. When her daughter got serious about gymnastics years ago, Jackie became a national-level judge, judging Mary Lou Retton from age 6. Years of skiing and hiking hut-to-hut in the Alps inspired her to take up German in the last ten-odd years. When I wake up, she’s usually returning from the gym.

During the lull before student teaching, I’m enjoying the chance to be included in some of her interests. We solve the New York Times crossword puzzle together - I contribute 3 answers; she gets the other 27. She takes me biking around Pittsburgh and walking through the woods behind her. (We got home from biking 20 miles yesterday; while I took a rare nap, she swam laps.) She shares her “Economist” magazines, her Wall Street Journal, and her library card. I chat with the mostly-retired neighbors in her condo complex about their upcoming events in the Bulgarian Cultural Society. I eat sweet corn on the porch with her and her “special friend” Ben, pleading to help clean up for once.

It’s also neat to see her nearly Internet-free lifestyle. For years, she’s had four hours per month of dial-up. Since I’ve gotten here, she’s used a biographical dictionary, a 1974 World Book Encyclopedia, a catalogue of bird species, an atlas, and other paper-based resources. She says she does Google her crossword clues on occasion, but generally the Internet is superfluous for her.

I hope Jackie rubs off on me this semester.

Remember Uncle Louie’s polka party?

I came out to Pittsburgh last Monday in my family’s new standard transmission car. I don’t especially enjoy driving: it's an area where my "Space Cadet" reputation can kill people. I also do not learn quickly with most things mechanical. So even after three stick shift lessons over a year, I still lacked the ability, one week prior, to consistently start on the smallest of hills. I'd never driven in traffic. But I am pleased to report that following an intensive week of training, I successfully drove alone to Pittsburgh. (My area’s not called South Hills for nothing!) Let me define success: No mechanics were involved. I have since upgraded the definition to “no tears,” and “no honking” is coming soon. By December, I might get to “no stalling.”

Tuesday, I drove (again successfully) to Penn State McKeesport for the orientation with other student teachers and our supervisor. It confirmed my initial impressions in two ways: this will be a tough semester, and my supervisor seems excellent. Supportive and competent – what a combination! I also learned that my school starts a week later than anyone else’s. I’m not even meeting my mentor teachers for In-Service days until after Labor Day; everyone else starts this Monday or sooner with In-Service.

During our lunch break, I walked down to the PSU library and was surprised to hear a band playing nearby. My first thought was marching band practice, but I realized it was all polka music. I was further confused because the sound seemed to be simultaneously coming from an empty field, two different classroom buildings, and a nearby church. They even played the “Pennsylvania Polka,” which you might remember from “Groundhog Day.” As I drove away hours later, strains of the “Pennsylvania Polka” further baffled me until I finally spotted a hill above campus, covered with colorful tents. If anyone knows more about McKeesport’s Annual Polka Festival or whatever it was, please share, because it seemed to be an impressive production. Maybe even the top polka scene in Western Pennsylvania.

P.S. I figured Penn State McKeesport was diverse, but I was taken aback when a campus map showed “White Student Lot,” “Brown Student Lot,” and “Yellow Student Lot.” A green one proved that race wasn’t meant here, but you’d think they could choose better colors with this phrasing.

What happens to a memory deferred?

(Warning: This entry contains serious quantities of navel-gazing. If you want to cut to the chase, skip down to the bottom.)

This summer, especially in Munich, I was more alone than ever in my life. In the twenty years since learning to talk, I’ve grown accustomed to telling at least one person about events in my life each day. Sometimes the main purpose in talking is to stay close to those people. Other times, it’s an important way for me to process what has occurred. In France, for example, I came to value my friendships with Americans because we drew conclusions together about differences between US and French culture. They could tell me, for example, whether something about my host family was typical in theirs as well, or whether something I’d never seen in the US actually existed there.

I missed that in Munich. There were no Americans sharing my experiences, and other foreigners were surprised by different aspects of German culture. My infrequent e-mails and phone calls home weren’t nearly enough to describe half of the events that had puzzled, delighted, or irritated me. And while I sometimes asked Germans about phenomena I had noticed, much more went unsaid. Journaling helped me keep track a bit, but much remained merely an internal monologue.

Now I’m wondering how that affects my memories from this summer. Explaining something to other people demands that I reconstruct the details in a way that emphasizes the aspects that I see as important. This moves me toward a conclusion about the event, whether or not it’s an accurate one, and makes me remember the story in a certain way. With many puzzling events that I never discussed, I wasn’t sure what conclusion to draw, so I never decided anything about them. Now I’ve either forgotten they ever happened or lost too many details to make them worth discussing.

In June and July, I felt as though I was bursting with stories to tell, and it was frustrating to remain silent. Now that I’m in the US, I wonder where these stories went. Some of them seem too insignificant to mention six weeks later. Others seem a bit hazy and hard to describe. Still others come to mind at unexpected times, startling me after lying dormant for months. I think I need to keep processing them in order to learn from them.

The moral of my woeful tale? If you want to do me a favor, ask me about this summer, and wait for me to unfold some good stories! I’ll do my best to make it interesting and/or educational. But you’ll actually help me to grow from my overseas experience. If you want ideas, here are some topics that I haven’t gotten to share much about:

Austrian culture
-differences between my time in Innsbruck and Munich
-importance of Austria and Germany to each other
-why World War II affected Austria and Germany very differently

German culture
-adventures in grocery shopping
-an impromptu sleepover with neighbors I'd never met
-influence of the English language

International culture (with my classmates at the Goethe-Institut)
-life in former Communist countries
-norms for guy-girl interactions
-income disparities

With a laughing and a crying eye

I came home recently. In some ways, I'm delighted to be back. Honestly, it was hard sometimes to have so little consistency - there were only one or two people that I was around longer than three weeks. It's given me a new appreciation for the relationships I've built here, which have had time to mature. But my 10 weeks overseas were filled with so many interesting events, opportunities for growth, and intriguing people that I think back wistfully on my experiences. I would be thrilled to return. My co-worker used the perfect idiom (seen here in the title) to describe how I'm leaving.

Like I learned after my semester in France last year, the language follows you long after your immersion in it ends. A few times, I've been irritated that I had to stick to English, because the perfect German phrase was on the tip of my tongue. I love that my family knows German, so I can get away with a lot of it. In case I slip up and use them by mistake, see if you can figure out these German compound words and expressions:

German expressions with literal English translations
1. der Ohrwurm (ear worm, earwig)
2. langsam auf die Socken gehen (go slowly onto the socks)
3. nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben (to not have all the cups in the cupboard)
4. da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer (the rabbit lies in pepper there)
5. der Hammer (hammer)
6. durcheinander (through each other)
7. Urlaub in Balkonien machen (to make a vacation in Balconia)
8. Sauerstoff (sour stuff)

Figurative English meanings
a. that's the root of the problem
b. to get going, to head out
c. the limit, a doozie
d. oxygen
e. to be crazy
f. catchy song, song stuck in one's head
g. to stay at home
h. jumbled, mixed-up, chaotic

Answers
1.f 2.b 3.e 4.a 5.c 6.h 7.g 8.d