Becoming an International Teacher

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By MOLLY BEER
This article was printed in Abroad View fall 2004

A fellow international teacher once told me of a particularly illuminating experience he had while teaching Vietnamese refugee children. Their father was a man who had endured re-education and refugee camps, had snuck over borders to spirit his family out of the country, and, at the time, had worked around the clock to give his family a new life. One day, the man took the teacher’s whiteboard and markers to illustrate the respect his culture held for teachers, which he could not explain in English. He wrote:
1. King
2. Teacher
3. Father

In Vietnam, the teacher is regarded above the father, and this father wanted the teacher to know this. With all that the father had done for his children, the teacher was deeply humbled.

“Education” as a process and a concept is defined by culture. International teachers are forced to come to an understanding of culture: the culture they have come to teach as well as the one in which they were taught. French philosopher Joseph Joubert once wrote, “To teach is to learn twice.” To teach internationally, then, is to learn three times over, at least.

My initial run-up against culture as an international teacher was negative, which is pretty normal—most people experiencing a new culture for the first time are likely to be critical before they are able to see the positive aspects. I was teaching tenth grade language arts at an elite private school in El Salvador and found myself leading a war against endemic cheating and plagiarism. I imagined myself to be taking on the corruption of Latin America, but my students, who hoped to one day attend universities in the U.S., were mystified by my no-tolerance policies, and their parents were indignant.

Eventually, I came to understand why my students acted the way they did and why they were not overly impressed by my perspective on the issue, which is not to say I softened my policies. I realized that I was used to the highly individualized and competitive classrooms in the “Lone Ranger” culture of the U.S.; Latin America, although corrupt to the bone, boasts a culture of family. My students borrowed answers and other people’s work without shame, but they were excellent at working together on projects and at being supportive of one another.

I face these same issues of culture translation in my current job, volunteer teaching at a state university in Ecuador. I recently assigned a group of my American literature students to read Flannery O’Connor’s darkly hilarious story A Good Man is Hard to Find. The story is about a family (an exhausted mother and father, two whiny brats, a baby, a stowaway cat and a foolish grandmother) that takes a detour while driving to Florida for vacation and winds up getting murdered by an infamous criminal.

When the students came to meet with me to discuss the story, I asked them if they had found it funny, and they only shrugged. When I pressed them, suspecting they had not read the assignment, they told me they liked the part about the cat jumping out of the basket and onto the father, causing him to wreck the car. It was then that it dawned on me that they had missed the humor. I proceeded to give them a crash course in U.S. family structures:

In the U.S., grandparents live with a family because they need to be taken care of, not to help with the children, while in Ecuador, married couples generally keep living with their parents, sometimes forever, and childrearing is a multi-generational endeavor.

In the U.S., children are supposed to be quiet and polite, and if they are not, it is seen as a failure on the part of the parents. In Ecuador, however, children are indulged by the public at large.

In the U.S., whining is not a polite form of speaking, while in Ecuador, it is polite to whine when asking for something, be the speaker child or adult, male or female.

My students did not need help translating the language of A Good Man is Hard to Find. They needed a translation of the culture beneath the story.

One of the many other advantages to teaching internationally is having an established place in the community. The role of teacher is not one step below king in most cultures, but I find that having a familiar profession helps the community know what to do with an unfamiliar foreigner. In El Salvador, the families of my students invited the imported teachers to go to the beach or to ride horses on their fincas in the country. In Ecuador, my students are much more middle class and much less extravagant, but for Teacher’s Day, in April, I was feted with a classroom luncheon of roasted chickens, flowery toasts with Ecuador’s favorite peach-flavored boxed wine, bundles of roses, uproarious dancing and plenty of trinkets. Walking around the city I am often chased down by my students if they see me and introduced to mothers, grandparents and siblings.

Basically, when I became an international teacher, I became a student in a whole new way, and I have learned more about my language, my world and myself from the front of a classroom than I ever did as a student. I have had my mind pried open and my eyes re-focused. I have had to stretch my tongue not only to speak another language but also to speak my own language to those for whom it is a foreign tongue. The cultures that have welcomed me—not just as a bystander or tourist, but as a teacher—have taught me more than I could ever teach them. AV