First Class Down

I taught my first English class yesterday and I survived and the student didn’t call me out for being a total hack, so I’d say things were an overall success. I also have the kind people of Chile to thank for this, as no fewer than five strangers were involved in my ability to navigate both to and from the office building out by the the old airport where the lesson was held. While my school sent me armed with specific directions and a map, I still thought it made perfect sense to board a bus called “I09” rather than “109”. Notice the subtle difference? The “I” as in “I have no Idea where I am goIng” vs. “1” as in the number I should have been paying attention to? 
Okay, so I’m being a little hard on myself. Still, thank goodness I was trying to get a bus that was at the end of it’s line (and completely empty), which allowed the bus driver to take pity on me, look over my map, and help me find my way to another bus-lined corner (there were three in plain sight). There, I waited for the ONE-0-9, boarded, beeped my Bip card, and kept my eye out for the one and only high-rise building on the highway, the one I was told would clue me in that I’d need to request my stop.
Yet, even when I saw said high-rise, there was still that city-dwelling part of me that was convinced I hadn’t been on the bus long enough and surely that six-story glob of concrete couldn’t be what I would call a “high-rise.” So I sauntered up to the bus driver and tried to pronounce my target street name with the least amount of gringa-ness possible, an effort I’ve known for some time is impossible given my California accent and giant North Face backpack, which I’ve learned to wear around my front, which really completes the look. Miraculously, the bus driver understood me and I, in turn, comprehended that my stop was up ahead. 
I exited, rounded the corner of a street with one-story buildings as far as the eye could see, dodged new rain, and walked into the warm lobby of the office building a full hour early. But I was there. I wasn’t late. Eventually, a woman opened the glass doors, looked my way, and said “Teacher?” And she meant me! I was shown to the room where I found a white board and a desk to set up my materials for a private lesson. I met my student, a VP of sales/marketing for the Latin American division of the company. The lesson started and the next thing I knew 90 minutes had gone by. We had made our introductions, reviewed her previous test, and started our first of three lessons on giving presentations at work. By the end of it, I was assigning homework and bidding her well and knowing I’d be doing this all again on Thursday.
At least by then, I’ll know which bus to get on, where to wait for it, and that on the way back, the bus will NOT drop us off at the same corner where we waited for it, but rather a few blocks down. So, I’ll ask another nice bus-rider where the metro station is, dicipher that it’s up ahead, stop again to ask the newsstand lady where the metro is, dicipher that it’s up ahead, and soon round the corner where the grand station carousel is lit up (yes, it has a real carousel) between palm trees and commuters buzzing past my shoulders. I’ll be one of them, officially on my way home to my family after an honest day’s work. 
I have some shots of the bus station, the highway, that high-rise, as well as the sparkling station, but try as I may, I can’t get them off my new cellphone in a way that allows me to re-upload them here. But maybe that’s for the best. Because this day wasn’t about trying to frame segments of my experience to look at later. It was all about paying attention in each moment, looking at those around me, knowing I can find my way with limited Spanish and the help of non-judgemental strangers. It all makes the whole teaching English thing sound like the easy part.

But I don’t want to leave you completely empty-handed, so here at least is a pic of a real high-rise going up in Santiago (plus a bus and a palm tree):

Phonemes and Friends

After four weeks of TEFL classes, two textbooks, some 20 quizzes, three papers, six hour-long lesson plans and teaching demos, and nearly a dozen new friends, I am a certified English teacher! Of course, it took a few other things to get me here–a long-held love of English, its structure (grammar is my math), and the way we use language to communicate. It also took an exceptional grad school professor who made learning about teaching English so fascinating it felt like I was learning a new language, too. So that when it was time to move to Chile, getting a job teaching English wasn’t just something I could do because I didn’t know Spanish, it was the job I wanted here, that could contribute to our home, allow flexible time to write, and take me all around Santiago. Come Tuesday, I’ll be finding my way from the metro to a bus to an office building out by the old airport (yeah, I didn’t even know there was an old airport to be by). And I’ll be teaching.

So what does a person have to learn in order to teach her native language? I’ve gotten this question a few times recently. So in an attempt to answer I will say this: It is not sitting down and just having a conversation. Teaching English is not merely speaking English. As I’ve learned, we try as English teachers not to speak unless it’s necessary, especially with our beginning students. That means simplicity and clarity–always. That means one-word directions when possible, though a gesture is even better. That means no repeating what the student has said if it’s correct, but instead praising and moving on. That means drawing a picture on the board in the hopes they can produce the word or at least know the meaning without a weighty verbal explanation. A picture of a pig is a picture of a pig in any language, after all. That means asking a question the same exact way every time if your student needs clarification. If you say it differently, you just introduce more words they may not understand. And all those extra words have the potential to confuse your student even more. And forget about idioms, expressions, or phrasal verbs. A.k.a., don’t tell your students about prepositions being “the final frontier” of language acquisition even if that comparison made perfect sense to you when your professor put it that way last year.

It takes quite a bit of planning to keep it simple. A 10-page lesson plan in some cases, where we come up with straightforward yet engaging ways to pre-teach the target vocabulary or phrases, practice them again and again, and–if we are successful at our work–the student produces them with close to perfect accuracy by the close of 60 or 90 minutes. Whether that means they can ask the time, tell you about the weather, or understand the contents of a newspaper clipping or an NPR audio clip, you have enabled comprehension. You have pulled back the curtain an inch farther, revealing a corner of English previously inaccessible. Maybe that means they can now conduct business abroad or receive a promotion at work. Maybe that means they have another way to communicate with their significant other. Maybe that means they have accomplished something they’ve always wanted to. Maybe it means they can move abroad with their husband and teach Spanish in California. In any event, you’ve helped them get closer to that goal.

This job means knowing English grammar inside and out without letting on that grammar is what you’re teaching. You are teaching communication and allowing a fluency with everyday, real-life situations: a job interview, making a doctor’s appointment, and eventually carrying on a debate about education reform in Chile.

This means your students will surprise you. They will get frustrated with what they aren’t understanding and you will do nearly anything to help them understand. And when they do, you will feel so proud–of them. So, if that means you have to dance like N’Sync, jump back and forth for two sides of a dialog, or scratch your head with a fork in order to display impolite table manners, you won’t hesitate. No meaning is too small not to be understood. After all, this course reminded me what a phoneme is: the smallest element of sound which is recognized as making a difference in meaning. On a literal level, that might mean the “sh” sound in “fish.” On a practical level, that can mean the difference between being fully understood or not understood at all, and that is always the goal. After all, “nation” has a “sh” sound too with no “s” or “h” in sight. No wonder English is so confusing!

Couldn’t have gotten through this without Kylie and Ashley!
Well, I could have, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.

But there’s something else I found over the last four weeks that doesn’t really have anything to do with lesson plans or phonemes: friends. When you sign up to spend eight hours a day with the same people in the same room, you hope for the best. You realize, at 31, you may be the oldest student of teaching in that small room, but you find everyone is interesting and has a different reason for being here in Chile, whether it’s for love or work or a way to spend the North American summer. So when you all go out to celebrate your certification, you may end up karaoke-ing without a microphone at an Irish Pub in Santiago and realize you’re doing so not only with your new coworkers, but with your new friends, too.

Now, about this bus ride. Since I’ve got English more or less down, I better get back to those Spanish lessons so I don’t board the bus that ends up in the Andes. I’ll check it out and report back.

Trying to Frame the Andes

Big Ocean.

As we know, I used to live by the beach. Close enough to walk on it nearly everyday with a cup of coffee. Close enough to hear it through an open window at night. Close enough to smell the salt and watch fine grains of sand scatter up Fulton and through the Avenues. Genuine Ocean Beach sand actually drifted out of my running shoes the other day and lightly dusted the floor of my closet, and so much do I miss their origin, that I left them all there for awhile. Little sandy reminders of home.

I often wonder about all these vintage viewfinders have seen…

It took me five years of living in San Francisco before it dawned on me that I could actually live out there by the very edge of the city, the state, the west. And it’s taking me a month and a half of living in Santiago to truly believe I don’t actually live by that ocean anymore. The Pacific isn’t too far off, an hour and a half due West by car. So, if we’re keeping score, this much-beloved nearly half-the-earth covering body of water is much closer to me than my family and friends. But it’s no longer a daily part of life.

Big Mountains.

Instead, I have the Andes. I’ve traded the world’s largest ocean for it’s longest mountain range. And because you “love the one you’re with” and all that, I’m trying to strike up a long-term relationship with these majesties. In other words, I’m a water person trying to play nice with the mountain people. And if you have to get on with mountain people, these are the mountains to have around. On a clear day (the operative phrase), they are nothing short of astounding. I’ve been known to take out my camera on the very same stretch of road each day on my walk home from school in order to try to frame them with a tiny lens. As if I can capture something like the Andes with one view.

The trees, the power lines, and I battle for the best vantage point.
The park benches sometimes help out.

Last month, Ryan and I flew over the width of the Andes on our way to and from Mendoza, Argentina. We ascended out of one country, flew just 8,000 feet over them for a solid hour, and descended into another country altogether. That means these mountains are an entire airplane hour wide. Fathom it! This time of year, they are dressed in white and quite handsome when the smog has been cleared by rain down here and snow up there. And they are downright stopping me in the street.

The power and tree lines continue to spar.
I’m starting to take pictures of them the way I took pictures of the ocean back home–often enough to know that I can never get over my awe at the vastness, the beauty, the constant shifting of sea and shore. The mountains shift, too, I’m realizing. Every day they look a little different, a new dusting or the next day’s melt giving me reason to try to catch them once again with my inadequate lens. But as I was coming around the corner the other day from school, I realized that my efforts are somewhat in vain–to try to catch them at all. Because they have to catch you. 
Finally, a clear-ish shot of some fresh snow.
I have a feeling I’ll be comparing my two homes for some time. And I think I knew that would be case this whole past year, long before I actually left California, but when I knew home was waiting with Ryan in this here southern hemisphere. 
Intersection of home and home.

I Found the Hummus!!

Is that a Cal bear I see?

When I went abroad to London in 2001, I may have missed the food back home, but I didn’t give it much more thought than wishing I could get my hands on a decent burrito. Well, when two guys from California studied abroad in Santiago in 2001, they missed the food so much they came back in 2006 to bring Californian cuisine to Chile. The result is California Cantina, the gringo hangout in Providencia that I haven’t wanted to admit has my name all over it. But this weekend Ryan and I found ourselves a little more homesick than usual (I’m five weeks into a no-Mexican food diet and Ryan’s nearly a year in), so we decided to go find a cure–in the form of a hamburger and beer on tap for him and fish tacos and fresh margarita for me. And, as my loyal followers well know, imagine my pure delight when I opened the menu and saw this:

I’m talking about the Humboldt Hummus if anyone missed that.

And here is my pure delight:

Happiness is… four kinds of hummus.
The menu had plenty of other witty spins on Cali (“Chile-fornia” was my fav) to make us feel right at home, as did plenty of sporty flat-screens and eavesdrops of English just about everywhere we turned. I’m not saying I need to to find California in Chile, but when you do get a little taste on a winter night in Santiago, there’s certainly no harm in feeling like you’re right back at the Park Chalet with the sounds of the Pacific nearby. It helped that we recently watched the Oscar-snubbed, “Hot Tub Time Machine,” and could chalk this all up to being our very own portal to hummus and burritos and all that the best Cali brew-pubs have to offer from 6,000 miles away.
Yowzas, that was one strong margarita.
It also didn’t hurt that we could look across the table at one another and say in all seriousness: “You’re my California.” (Okay, I’ll admit I’d had the strong margarita by that point). But what it truly means is that no matter how far this grand adventure takes us from our home state, we always have home in one another. Plus, we’ve mastered shrimp burritos from scratch, so we can go the distance without La Playa beach burritos right around the corner. The hummus on the other hand… not so much. As for the hummus you see above, rest assured that NONE of it went to waste. We’re already planning to go back for those Highway 101 Wings. Now, if I can just find some decent queso around here, we’ll be all good. But that would necessitate the arrival of a dear Texan friend of mine. Hmm, I feel some entrepreneurial spirit a-brewin…
Guess how many pics it took to get this just right?!

TEFL Is Now a Verb

This book series may be why I am a writer… 
and a teacher. 
[Starfire; Reprint edition (October 6, 1998)]

So, I’m TEFL-ing. Grammatically speaking, TEFL is a noun, and an acronym at that, standing for the class I’m taking: Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I suppose it’s really a gerund if we zero in on the “teaching” aspect, which is exactly what I’m doing here in Santiago specifically and in my career in general.

Today, I had another first day of school. I just love these. Getting new school supplies, packing up a backpack, figuring out which way to walk if you’re lucky enough to walk to school (and not S-curve across the Bay Bridge for two years, for instance). All in all, it’s a chance to “start afresh” as they say. Anne of Green Gables is one of my all-time fav characters of fiction and I believe one of her favorite mottos was “Tomorrow is already fresh, with no mistakes in it… yet.” Meaning, the mistakes are likely just around the corner, but here at the beginning, all is new and untarnished.

Now that I think about it, Anne was a teacher herself, so maybe everything really is falling into place career-wise despite my not knowing the language of my new country, never mind the 90 percent slang you’ll often here as well as all the dropped “s”-es and everything else that makes the Chilean accent challenging even for folks who majored in Spanish, from what I hear. Hey, maybe my naivete puts me ahead of the game! May as well start from scratch, right? Cachai? (That’s slang for “Get it?”)

Okay, back to Anne and this career path of mine that is coming into clearer focus:

• Young Girl falls in love with books. Reads them. Tries to write them. Would eat them if she could, but they look much prettier on her bookshelves. Hence, girl’s desire to move said books around with her from country to country.

• Teenage Girl falls in love with magazines, everything about them. Their paper stock, the full-bleed advertisements involving a boy and a girl or a girl and a city street or a girl and a typewriter, etc.

• Semi-Adult Girl moves to NYC over said love of magazine publishing. Girl lands dream job, meets cool fishies, but misses home and returns to Cali, where she gets to be the bigger fish in a much smaller pond deal, but she likes the pond (and meets even more cool fishies whom she now misses just as dearly as she missed the first fishies!!).

• Adult Girl takes a hard look at where print publishing is going and thinks, A-hah! I will teach! I will return to my first love of books and try to write one for real and teach the ones that other folks have already written for real. Yes! (This is mid-2008 we’re talking about.)

Then… economy implodes. Everyone rushes back to grad school. By graduation, 3,500 teachers have been laid off in SF alone! A-hah! Teaching jobs in the Bay Area might be the only ones harder to find than publishing jobs! Fantastic! Oh, wait, hubby is moving to Chile… strong economy, lots of executives who need to learn English, tons of language schools… It sounds like this girl may be way more employable in Chile than in Cali after all.

And that catches you up to the present, where Adult Married Writer-Wanna-Be-Teacher Girl has commenced a four-week TEFL certification course so I can do just that. Teach in Chile. Nerd out on English grammar (anyone want to battle with phrasal verbs?). Get to meet a bunch of different folks, which was always my favorite part of working at a regional magazine and being able to profile so many everyday folks from everyday (and not-so-everyday) walks of life. And manage to keep a schedule that will make it possible to finish this novel so I can maybe one day get a job back in the States reading and writing and talking about books.

My mom always told me that if you ask seven-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll almost always blurt out their pure passion, before it’s corrupted by financial ambition, “practicality,” etc. This is why you might come across a lot of seven-year-old artists, astronauts, and Olympic athletes. This is also why I wanted to be a fashion illustrator until I was ten and realized I couldn’t draw for squat. I should have just taken a cue from Lucy Maud Montgomery and gone with being just like Anne Shirley when she grows up, with her zesting for adventure, stomping through the mud around an island, falling for the nice boy (eventually), and realizing you’re not so crazy to love books to the degree that you do.

Thank you, L.M. You writers really are my favorite teachers.