TESOL time
Hello to my colleagues in Pittsburgh, who are gathering for the annual tESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) Conference there Wednesday through Saturday.
I am actually nostalgic about TESOL though I have now retired pretty completely from the field. There are things that go with it - March Madness, freak spring snowstorms, a war in some corner of the world - that are more than familiar. Now that I'm retired, I have time to notice such things.
One feature of TESOL was that invariably somebody was from a country where war had broken out, and, once situated in a western city, would be concerned about their ability to get back home, find their family, use airports in and out, etc. In one case it was our Yemeni teachers; this year it's our Ukrainian ones. I imagine many of them have given up any attempt at teaching in normal conditions there; over three million have left to let the war take over the bombed-out cities and institutions where teaching could take place. To me, that was always the first concern - how is your family? What will you do? Where will you go from here? And what good is it to learn English in such circumstances?
As an avid NCAA March Madness fan, I would always keep my bracket with me, lose it in some shirt in some hotel room, and try to watch for my favorite teams on the televisions in the bars or restaurants while we were having some active conversation about, say, teaching EFL in some place like Tonga or Namibia. My colleagues always had interesting things to say. Ane now that I'm done, I can genuinely say that that is probably as close as I'll get to Tonga or Namibia. Just being on a plane somewhere near the place allowed me at times to at least dream about going there, but actually talking to people who lived there was a step closer to it, and I'll always appreciate that.
I do think I became a better teacher by attending. It was indirect, in many cases; I found that I had to develop and experiment with new activities in my own organic method anyway, so if someone put something good that worked in front of me, the best I could hope for was to integrate it slowly into my own system, and go home and change gradually and slowly from there. But I did that, and picked up quite a bit over the years.
I Another thing I liked was a bird's eye view of major cities around North America. I saw Baltimore three times; the last, possibly, was unnecessary. The biggest freak snowstorm was in Denver. I saw midtown Manhattan. I came back to Boston one year and saw it from an angle I wasn't used to. I thought Dallas was impressive, and so was Long Beach, Seattle, Toronto, and Chicago. Some of the others are fading from my memory. The cities for their part would wait for us hoping we were good tippers. The TESOL teachers, for their part (described by somebody as "a lot of former Peace Corps volunteers all wearing sensible shoes") would do a lot of walking, in my case through the rain in Baltimore several times. I wasn't big on taxis, and always wanted to see the city and its people.
I hung out in a crowd of tech-lovers called the webheads - we would find a good restaurant and go and tell stories all evening. One night I met the guy who did the entire Kyrgystan Wikipedia - or rather, he was the editor, in charge of it - and knew as much about translating from his language to English and back as anyone. Often the conversations about using some new tech gadget would be over my head, as I wasn't exactly proficient, and people came and joined these things to find out, all being the most proficient in their area, but still desperately in need of good guidance. I was like that. Whatever you can teach me, I'm here to learn.
Those were the days. I'm still eager to learn. Just thoroughly burnt out on the rest of it - arriving home, teaching twenty hours a week, grading, putting up with university politics - a lot of it I don't miss. TESOL, I miss. I've lost my NCAA bracket this year and am too busy to find it. That's as close as I'll get to being there with you in Pittsburgh.
posted by tom @ 7:13 AM
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