It’s fun being back in a place where people talk like me: —”Look at the ahrange leaves,” I might say. “Yeah, in a few weeks the weather’s gonna be hahrible,” might come the reply. But people still look at me funny when I say icebox.
Would you like to hear about the classes I’m taking? Or did I already tell you? Oh well. I’ll tell you again. I’m taking seven classes. Normal college is three or four, so this really is two years squeezed into one. The coursework is much more academic than I expected, which makes me feel scholarly but confused.
- Language Analysis for Lesson Planning: A pretty name for Phonology and Other Linguistics Complexities that Ginna Forgot Forty Years Ago but that Everyone Else Remembers. But I love the prof who reminds me of Larrygensky.
- Second Language Acquisition: Even though this is the second time I’ve taken an SLA class, I am in deep fog much of the time.
- Kiswahili: Now I really do want to go to Tanzania, because I can already say goodbye (kwaheri). Once I learn I’m sorry, I’ll be set.
- Introduction to Adult Education in the US: Starts next week.
- Approaches to Language Teaching: Theories of pedagogy. Like other classes, there’s lots of interactivity, which helps engage a fidgety gal like me.
- Teaching the Four Skills: Listening, speaking, reading and writing, you see.
- Group Dynamics: The teacher is unbelievably funny. The class confirms my experience that people in groups can be a pain in the ass. They can also be delightful.
- Coming soon… Internship Preparation: Need I say more? Actually, I do, but hang on. Let me step outside this bullet point.
There. That’s better.
Hey, wait. That’s eight classes.
Anyhow, the internship. I’ve vacillated about which country and teaching situation I most want. In the process I’ve earned myself the moniker Troublemaker from certain staff and faculty. [Just like my daddy before me. People called him TM for short.] The first trouble I made was inciting a riot among two others (a very small riot, really) about our displeasure that Mexico wasn’t on the list of potential sites. We roped the program director into our discussion and, to my amazement and gratitude, she immediately complied. All was well for a day or two until I heard about South Africa’s site and decided I wanted to go there more. Thus, the internship coordinator became the second person to call me Troublemaker. Today I talked to the person in charge of the South Africa program. She hasn’t yet called me Troublemaker, though I think I accidentally nudged her into more immediate decision-making mode. An hour later she sent e-mails to applicants requesting we schedule interviews with her. Five minutes later I was at her door, accompanied by friend and co-conspirator Kim. —”What time would work for you?” she asked us. —”Now?” I wondered. And so it was. The down-side was that I was ill-prepared. She: —”Why do you want to go to this site?” I: —”Uhhhhhh…” The work, by the way, involves teaching Zulu-speaking high-school children who live in a township in the Free State, a couple hours from Johannesburg. Wouldn’t that be incredible? I so want to do it. Sadly, so do six others, and there are only two slots. Here is a satellite photo of the village of Memel and the township next to it and nothing else for miles beyond.
Let’s see if I can write anything that has a grain of interest to it.
Nope. So here are pictures from the past two weeks, oldest to newest because I care about the order of things.
September 22 (SIT Founder’s Day, which was also the day after I poured lemonade into my computer)…
At a bench-making workshop on the same day…
Nature…
September 23
On some days when I get home, the neighborhood dogs follow me upstairs into my apartment. I love them. This is Dinah and Satchmo, respectively. I’ll have to introduce you to Rosie later…
More scenery between my barn and my school…
And now I’m just too tired to go on. My classmates are in town at the pub. I’m going to bed.
I got my roots dyed today. When you get your hair dyed in a place, it means you really live there. I live in Vermont. That concept is still surreal, time-space-continuum-wise.