Two more weeks

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Well, there probably won’t be too many more of these blog entries. After spending sixty-four days in Europe, I have sixteen left. It feels like I got on that early morning plane to Paris not long ago. That interminable eight hour layover in Detroit feels like it passed in the blink of an eye.
As some of you know, I feel ready to go home at this point. It is as if a thousand little voices are calling me back to where I belong. All those little things that, when you add them all up, comprise your life become magnified and aquire a new significance. Like breath of fresh Colorado air. A tasty morsel from “the Met”. Mt Ranier presiding over Puget Sound like a king in white robes. The early morning moon rising over an Idaho highway. The sun filtering through the towering evergreens on your way to a midmorning class. The precarious strech of a couple dusty and overtired fingers to an improbable hold in the climbing gym. Rearranging the past, present, and future of humanity at two in the morning. The thump of my subwoofer. A long talk with someone on the phone. The satisfying ping of a well placed lacrosse ball bouncing off the goalpost. The fire of a summer sunset. Seattle’s understated style. Mt. Evans. The curves of a beautiful instrument and the sound that happens somewhere between calloused fingers and the fretboard. The list goes on. I think leaving Colorado was easier because a new life awaited me in Washington. Here, life has been truncated, discontinuous, transient, and lonely. Sometimes I feel a little bit like Don Quijote, charging off into the unknown for something that doesn’t exist. No doubt I’ll be more positive about everything when I get back, because it has been quite the experience. It is perhaps just difficult to realize right now. Alas, things get complicated.

At any rate, I am halfway finished with my TESOL course. The hours have been long, some of them fascinating and many of them frightfully boring. I’m afraid I was bound to dislike the course because I would inevitably compare the experience to Summerbridge. At Summerbridge, I could relate to the other teachers, everyone cared about everyone else, and the whole place was abuzz with energy. Most importantly, everyone was passionate about what they did. My class here in Barcelona is a kind of collection of wayward souls enabling themselves to continue being wayward souls. What little passion there does seem to be for teaching among the staff and trainees is drowned out by the huge emphasis on mechanics. The point of the course seems to be not to train teachers, but to train English language dispensers. You put the money in and the English language comes out, packaged with a Trinity Certificate and wrapped in the “Engage”, “Study”, and “Activate” techniques. At least that is the impression I have had so far. My tutor was a main source of this soullessness. He is competent and the whole thing is clearly just his day job. If teaching is ever just a day job for anyone, then I think they are bound to fail, so he provides a poor example. I mentioned being passionate about the students and teaching as an important quality to look for in a teacher during a class session, and the tutor wrote up “rapport”, as if to say, “It doesn’t really matter if you actually care about what you’re doing: you just need to make it seem so to enable the class to run smoothly”. Don’t ask me why, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of my entire basis for doing things being reduced to grease for the wheel. That said, I still like the basic idea of teaching, so I guess I’ll just see where things go. I have a big project to do this weekend. It’s a comprehensive liguistic analysis of a student called the learner profile. All said and done, it will be about ten pages long, so I had better get cracking.
I miss you all a lot and I look forward to seeing everyone within the next month or so.

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