On Teachers

I started life as an elementary school teacher, then moved into higher education where I taught prospective elementary school teachers (and others). My sense of teaching between then, when I started, and now, when my career essentially is behind me, has been turned on its head. I now know that you can't teach anybody anything; all you can do is make it possible for them to learn.

Or as Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) would say: "You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."

Learning is a quality of being born. All living beings seek to learn; they are born with innate curiosity about the world around them. The main role of human parents is to protect their young children while this learning is taking place, because learning will take place. As all good teachers and parents do, you provide the type of environment ripe for exploration, filled with age-appropriate books and toys, art and building materials, and set them forth -- with healthy and regular doses of positive reinforcement.

You provide conversation and, sometimes, gentle direction. Language should fill the learning space. Children need us to talk to them, and they need to talk to us. This is how they test their assumptions and acquire a rich vocabulary. Nothing is more important in the learning environment than words and hands-on activity. Gaining experience, rehearsing that experience, then sharing that experience with others is at the heart of all learning, even basics like reading, writing, and math.

The teacher who stands in front of a room and talks, without allowing students to also talk, distributes the same worksheet to everyone, and then gives a clearly right-/clearly wrong-answer test has missed the point of teaching. This is something the teacher is doing for her or his own convenience, perhaps out of a need to keep each day routine and therefore more known and less stressful, but it has nothing to do with student-centeredness or student learning. Mentors are good; lecturers are not.

Probably the only things I've ever truly learned -- wholly absorbed -- in my life are those things I've heard my own self say. In this regard, whether their students do or not, teachers should learn a great deal by the act of teaching. Now it's time to hook our students with that same truth and provide them with opportunities to explore its fullness.

By the way, I have not finished with my own learning so I have no clue when wisdom happens, or if it ever does. The world is filled to the rafters with things I do not know and want to learn, and those rafters are as high as the sky. It's a bit hard for me to climb these days, but I can stretch. Heaven help me if and when I can no longer stretch.

On Traveling Abroad

I took my first trip out of country as a young mother, traveling with my mother, to England and Scotland to study one of my favorite ahead-of-her-time women heroes, Beatrix Potter. I thought the sky had opened to bless me especially; I was that thrilled making that initial journey. My joy and zest were uncontainable.

Travel has introduced me to a broad spectrum of cultural experience that I would otherwise never have had.

• A semester teaching in Pusan, South Korea, at a women's college. It seemed while I was there that unlike Seoul, the entire city of Pusan still followed the traditions of ancient times. I lived with Koreans, truly immersed, and stood out as a blond fair-skinned anomaly to Korean children who wanted to touch me as they passed me by.
• Teaching in Africa, namely Ghana and Kenya (and flying a rough version of Ethiopian Air between western and eastern Africa), my husband and I worked with graduate students who primarily came from tribal culture but who wanted to be educated and return to their home villages to help improve life for their people. One student in Nairobi had walked all the way from Uganda, his worldly possessions on his back, to attend our classes, his arm withered where it had been hacked years before by one of Idi Amin's boy soldiers. Children with submachine guns criss-crossed over their shoulders patroled outside the airports.
• Teaching in Santiago, Chile, this time primarily to expatriates (from all over the world), mostly women, whose husbands were assigned to various unknown posts in South America, doing work that I suspect even their wives knew nothing about. Too many lonely women!
• Taking a Brazilian fishing boat on a three-night excursion across the Amazon River basin, including a machete-chopping incursion into the jungle where even our guide got lost, disappearing for awhile with the seven of us sharing this adventure unsure whether he would ever reappear and lead us to safety. It was pouring rain and the now-defunct path filled with water to become yet another tributary of the Amazon, lapping at our ankles, then our knees. We were shivering and frightened, all of us huddled together. My husband and I were the only two Americans. Would anybody ever know what happened to us?
• Teaching in Switzerland and Austria, with side excursions by car to Hungary and the Czech Republic, and visiting little family-owned boutique wineries outside of Vienna.
• Spending a week in the Tuscany region of Italy, part of our stay in a tiny walled village, another part of our stay in Florence directly across from the Church of San Lorenzo, built in 393, making it the oldest church in Florence. And yes, the chianti flowed.
• And many of the world's great cities: London, Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Sydney, Auckland, Florence, Istanbul, Athens, Vancouver, Quebec, Budapest, Prague, Nairobi, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Tokyo.

How fortunate I have been! How grateful I am! If we had waited until we retired to begin traveling and learning more about our planet's amazing and distinct people -- yet they also have so much in common with us -- it would not have happened. My current health would have prevented most of the kinds of undertakings we've already done, often on somebody else's dime (all the adventures linked to teaching, for example).

But as a continent, I've stilled missed Antarctica. We had friends who went on a Russian ice trawler to Antarctica at Christmas. I wonder...