photo by bachmont
CulturallyTeaching is on vacation until January 4, 2010! Until then, we hope you enjoy a selection of favorite articles from 2009. This one was originally posted in March 2009.
by :: Anamaria
When I was in 9th grade in Romania, an international teacher from the U.S. walked into my classroom and changed my life. His name was John, and my classmates and I absolutely loved him.
Before I met John, my knowledge about the U.S. was limited to what I learned from the show Beverly Hills 90210, which I was a big fan of (my excuse? I was 16).
But then John came to our school and corrected all these distorted perceptions about the U.S. that I had learned from the show. He told us that not everybody drove expensive cars in the U.S. Or lived in big houses. Or dined at fine restaurants.
He also talked about his own life in the U.S., his family, his friends, the school where he taught and his students. And my classmates and I were just mesmerized.
We met John in 1994, roughly 4 years after the fall of communism. Back then, we, just like our parents for that matter, were still learning about the outside world. We were learning not to fear it, after many years of almost complete isolation, when any contact with foreigners could have had devastating consequences.
So John was somebody we slowly became very curious about. John talked to us about his country, he told us about Thanksgiving, he taught us how to play baseball, and he sang “Row row row your boat” with us.
John started conversations about how he was different from us, and how we were different from him. He started conversations about the rest of the world. And one day, I woke up with a feeling that I had never experienced before: I was curious. Curious about John, about his life in the U.S., about his culture.
For the first time in my life I had a genuine interaction with another culture. John brought his culture to us, he brought the world to us, and I became curious about it. I became curious about the same world that had been forbidden to us for so many years. Suddenly this world was no longer a mystery: it was fun, and interesting.
It is because of John that I had the courage, and curiosity a year later, in 10th grade, to get on a plane and live for 5 months with an American family that I had never met. It is also because of John that I decided to study in France for one year in college. And it is because of him that I decided to return to the U.S. as a graduate student. The world had opened up to me in 9th grade, and I just couldn’t get enough of it.
I now realize that my life forever changed the minute John walked into my classroom when I was only 14. I am not even sure that John even knows the impact that he had on my life (I didn’t either back then), which is a shame.
Did you ever have an international teacher at school?
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