Guru-ma: Back to school

Guru-ma: Back to school: The "Wedding Cake"  building at Cal Tech, where I visited last week. This week--last week--next week--lots of us will head back to schoo...

Back to school

The "Wedding Cake"  building at Cal Tech, where I visited last week.

This week--last week--next week--lots of us will head back to school.  

When I was a kid, I loved going back to school.   I was usually bored in the summers, and missed my friends.  I also tend to like an imposed structure, or purpose, in my life and school provided that.   (And, luckily, I was interested in most of what school had to offer).

I'm still going back to school.  I've only had a couple of jobs in my life in which I didn't have to go back to school.  Something about school obviously clicks with me. I've worked in three colleges and three high schools, constituting most of my career.  I have yet to figure out exactly what it is about school that resonates with me.

And as I creak my way back to school this year, rev up the school gears again, I'm still wondering what it is about school that has always drawn me in.  I read about school and college even on my vacations, even when I swear I won't.  I can't help it.

So what's up with school, as a profession?

(Hmm . . . I've just noticed that this building, above, looks faintly religious, as many college buildings do.  Lots of college architecture is modeled after Gothic cathedrals or 60s-era churches.   Maybe there's something to that?  Check out this Arts & Sciences classroom building at USC--Univ of Southern California--which I visited last Wednesday).

The slab of vulnerability . . .

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I started this blog to explore the notion of leaving one's country and coming home.   A Canadian friend and colleague at my school in Zurich was eager to hear about the adjustment of coming back to your home country.  I didn't know what kind of adjustment issues to expect when I moved back to the States after five years overseas in two countries, but I expected to feel that I was "adjusting"  all the time.  I expected to be bombarded with culture shock.

In fact, I didn't feel that way at all.  Many elements of life were a relief:  I knew how to find an apartment in the States.  I discovered that, after five years of letting myself live in the housing that was provided or found for me, on or very near campus, it was exciting to look for an apartment in Washington, DC.   (And when is finding an apartment anything other than a chore)?   Knowing from afar how the system worked was reassuring.

I couldn't name it during those five years, but living in a new country made me vulnerable in way I'd never been before.  I don't know if others of you have experienced this, but I now realize that the foundation of me the expat was resting, 24-7, on a concrete slab of helplessness.   I don't mean to be overdramatic--and maybe this is just me-- but I can see now that part of my day-to-day Amy-ness that I lived pre-2003 (pre-India, pre-Switzerland) was replaced with a layer of vulnerability, helplessness, openness, fear, blank slate, whatever you want to call it.  It has taken me four years back in my own country to know this about myself.

To illustrate this, I can attach the vulnerability to a particular element of life, in both places.   In India, the snakes on campus and the big gecko in my kitchen took the rug out from under me, 24-7.   There was nary a single second of any day in three years on campus that I didn't look for that cobra on my office window (this had happened to my predecessor) or take a step back when I flipped on the fluorescent light in my kitchen, for the disappearing tail of the huge gecko that lurked or lived in the masonry walls.

In Switzerland, the label on that slab of vulnerability read GERMAN, two kinds of German that are different enough to be different languages.  You are not the same person anymore when you can't read your own mail you take out of the mailbox when you get home:  the stuff from your insurance company, the political candidates'  flyers, the newsletters from the gemeinde (the county).  I can begin to imagine how immigrants to the US feel when they arrive here and don't speak English.   Part of me felt ashamed, part of me felt helpless, literally like a baby in an adult parallel universe.

On the other hand, I did get used to hearing another language around me in daily life.   In fact, when I would come back to the US in the summers, it would almost feel too easy that I could understand all the announcements over the PA system in the airports and recognize the newspaper headlines.

So when I moved back to the US, I was excited because I could speak the language and talk to the landlord and live in whatever part of the city, or suburbs, I wished.   I could make small talk with the people next to me in the elevator, in the grocery cashier's line.  I could talk to the tourists on the DC Metro or bus, if I wanted to, or if they asked me directions.  I could introduce myself to my neighbors.

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And the opposite was also true:  because I came back to the States to work in a French school, where the classes are taught in French and a majority of the emails and the meetings are in French, I felt as though I was still living in another country.   French is the only other language I understand fairly well.  I still work at the Lycee, and I still feel as though I go to another country every day.

Because of this last fact--that I came back to go to a little island of France every day, and live in one of the most diverse cities in the US--I never felt the downpour of culture shock that I anticipated.  At the same time, speaking the language and knowing my home culture began to chip away at the slab of vulnerability.

The real adjustment, however, has been . . . .   well, I will save that for another post.  And welcome anyone's reactions.