Students @ Schreyer Honors College, Penn State

Studying abroad is a time of crisis. Contradictory demands, shifting personalities and the raw conflict between being a tourist and a student is enough to make one quite dizzy with confusion. However, beyond these challenges of this semester exists one fundamental question: how much do you write about the experience? On one hand, you’ve been placed in a privileged position and owe a debt to share this blessing with as many as possible. On the other, however, each time you close your bedroom door and start to write, you’re closing the door to Chile, Spanish, and all the outside world. Each second writing is a second not living.

I guess what this amounts to is an elaborate apology for not writing anything for the last month. To be sure, things have not stopped happening in South America: travels to the desolation of the Atacama, an odd Easter weekend, and lightning-quick peeks into Argentina and the Lake District are among the most salient experiences. I guess, in some ways, the unwritten sections have also deterred me from writing; I keep wanting to go back to where the story last left off – at San Pedro de Atacama – but feel that I haven’t quite settled that yet myself. Somewhere, out in the desert, something fundamental changed for me, but I can’t understand it yet. Maybe, in time, I’ll figure it out. But for now, the story must go on, even if it may lack background.

Despite this absence, I’d like to draw attention to one of the greatest joys I’ve discovered abroad. It’s a labor that inspires its workers rather than wearing them down, a job whose rewards are truly unique. It’s also one of the most frustrating roles I’ve ever played, an agonizing part that requires the strange mix of stalwart discipline and unyielding compassion. Nevertheless, despite the contradictions and confusions of the task, teaching English to Chilean students has been rewarding beyond comparison.

At the beginning of this volunteer work, I never would have imagined that being my worst enemy could be anything but horrible. While I never dreaded language classes, as a high school student, I wasn’t exactly displeased when “sound crew responsibilities” happened to require the same time block as my Spanish course. And, stumbling over the peculiarities of grammar myself, I could never imagine having the patience to make these mundane details exciting – it would have been like trying to promote vacations to Guantanamo.

Nevertheless, I’ve been rather surprised to find how much I’ve enjoyed teaching. Granted, my enthusiasm may have something to do with the “rock-star” effect – my students are all girls from between 6^th grade and junior year – or with the fact that I don’t have to make lesson plans – these are done by people with actual teaching experience. Nevertheless, it’s an incredible privilege to contribute to this community, especially with a previously unknown skill – the simple, unstudied ability to speak English.

Surprisingly, however, this so-called ‘skill’ is in fact one of my greatest handicaps as a teacher. As a native English speaker, I’ve become so accustomed to dealing with intricacies, not simple concepts, and find it hard to identify the problems with badly mangled phrases if they don’t fit into my neat patterns of understanding. Before I can actually be help these students, I’m gonna need to learn how to speak English again. (Side note: The workbooks are all in British English, meaning that I have got two adjustments to make: the first to learn English grammar and the second to start practising ignoring apparent spelling errors )

Fortunately, however, the student’s fierce appetite for learning has carried through my bumbling attempts at education. In the younger grades especially, the students are enthused about learning about the outside world and are anxious to meet (and talk with) a real-life American. Although a few kids are obviously lost in dreams about the next emo pop star, there’s a mystifying and invigorating sense of life in the classroom. When questions are asked, hands go up and faces light up, a striking occurrence in comparison to the blank stares of the more “serious” students at the Catholic university. If it were possible, I’d love to bottle up this enthusiasm for later – it’d definitely be useful for the never-ending nights in the library back home.

While the students’ zeal is by far the greatest attraction of teaching, the interaction with other teachers has also been interesting. Desperate for native English speakers (even among English teachers, vocabulary and pronunciation and sorely lacking), they’ve openly invited the volunteers into their fraternity (or maternity, given that only the gym and philosophy teachers are male). As a result, we’ve been awestruck witnesses to the reality of the staff room: fears of evaluation by the headmaster, tearful confessions of a longing to return to work in poorer schools, (if only the salary could sustain a family), and heated political debates. In some ways, I feel like a spy, camouflaged in dress pants and tie, embedded into the heart of the Chilean education system, with a mission to understand anything and everything.

In the end, therefore, I feel like studying abroad has been a ticket to far more than cultural exchange. In Chile, I’ve been able to get under the skin of the society in a far more profound way than ever would be possible in America (prior to this, I had never imagined being a teacher). It’s my hope that others can do the same thing in the future, even as I continue exploring this wacky and wondrous Chilean society.

Wacky footnote: In Chilean schools, the police dress up as the Ninja Turtles to teach kids about drug education. How cool is that?!?!