I'm eating a baguette for breakfast. Not a whole one. Just a big chunk of one. It's a day old, and it's HARD. I keep smearing a drop of real butter on each bite. I eat this for breakfast most mornings. But for some reason this one is so hard that it's hurting my lips when I try to bite it & cutting the inside of my mouth when I chew. Just the outside is hard; the inside is still wonderfully spongy. I am eating through the pain, & it is worth it. I will miss the eating injuries when we come back to the States.
Now I return to the regularly scheduled post.
There are classes at the university that don't follow the 12-week semester & instead run only for ten weeks. One of these is my most difficult class, one that requires students to spend two hours watching a five-minute video clip & answering questions. This class started two weeks late, thus ending its semester with the rest of the university.
The other class, a continuation of a one I taught last semester, ended two weeks early. Tuesday. When a friend said he needed someone to cover his last session with the same group of students, I jumped at the chance. Because while I've been helping them correct their English, they've been teaching me a lot of things. Like what it's like to have a serious disease; what your countries civil war was like; how to make traditional Algerian & Vietnamese dishes. Like if you let 12 people talk for long enough, they will become friends. They will open up in ways you'd never imagined–become bold enough to have class discussions going in directions you'd never have been comfortable pushing them.
When class ended, I was asked for my address. I was asked if I had Facebook. I was invited to visit them in their home countries. I was asked if I was positive I wouldn't stay in France another year. "Will you ever get back?"
We hope so. I hope they'll still be here; I hope that this is what they were looking for.
My students were what Americans would call "non-traditional". They had other jobs–working on PhDs or as engineers or veterinarians. They come from Rwanda, Syria, Vietnam, Cameroon, Algeria. The list goes on.
The first few weeks were spent giving presentation–how we were supposed to spend the whole class. They each gave their required presentation, & then we just couldn't take it anymore. We moved onto debating topics. "We get much more out of this," they told me as we sat in a circle getting increasingly impassioned.
It didn't seem appropriate at the time to say, " I do to." To explain that, in the States, we don't often get a chance to have these conversations with so many diverse stories & backgrounds. The country is so large that at times it seems easy & obvious that so much of our news coverage should focus only on our news & how the world–the disaster in Japan, the revolutions in the Arab world–affect OUR country & OUR lives instead of the lives of these nations.
For the last week, I wrote several topics on the board. Home schooling, intellectual property, evolution, human rights. We jumped into human rights & didn't leave it–didn't even have a pause in the conversation–for two hours, struggling with a big question.
How do we make the world fair & just when we have so many definitions for "fair" and "just" and "justice"? When does the U.S. entry into Libya stop being a UN mission & start being another attempt to make other cultures work like we do? And what IS the role of the U.S. in the world? What IS our obligation as a world power, as a pool of many resources, as a symbol of democracy for the world (even though, as I tried to explain to them, I don't SEE us as the most democratic or the best way to do democracy)?
"You need to start with yourselves. Your poor. Your health care," one student told me. I wanted to put him on the big news channels that we cling to, to tell his story & remind us that we must fix ourselves before we fix others. We must loves ourselves before we're good at loving others.
I want to fix the States, & sitting in that hot classroom with those 12 eager faces will change the voice that is in my head when I begin my graduate studies. I won't forget them, & I hope they won't forget the American that admitted we don't have it all together either.
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