Job Discussion Forums

[esl_prof]

Not necessarily about ESL teaching. Just something that inspires you. Mine is . . .

Title: Going Home to Teach

Author: Anthony C. Winkler

Publisher: MacMillian Caribbean (2006) -- available on Amazon.com

Summary: Following thirteen years of study and university teaching in the U.S., Winkler--a white Jamaican--returns home to teach English in a rural teacher training college. The year is 1975, right at the height of Jamaican socialism when most white and near-white Jamaicans are fleeing the country. The book is basically a chronological account of Winkler's year on the job--the highlights, the frustrations--with frequent flashbacks to his childhood years growing up in Jamaica and periodic detours into cultural observations and social commentary.

Why I liked it: While I never taught in Jamaica and only visited there once (for about three days), Winkler's story is essentially a composite of my own teaching experiences in the Caribbean: The dedication (and lack thereof) on the part of his teacher colleagues, the motivation of his students to succeed, the limited infrastructure for education, his visit to the Ministry of Education in hopes of getting a pay raise commensurate with his qualifications (a PhD) that resulted in a pay cut due to his lack of qualifications (no teacher certificate), his frustration with bureaucratic rules and decisions that undermined the education of his students, and his blowout with the college president, just weeks before the end of the school year, that resulted in the premature ending of his teaching stint in Jamaica. Many of Winkler's stories echo my own experiences in the Caribbean and helped me to put them in perspective. And, like Winkler, in spite of my frustrations and the fact that I no longer find it viable to live and work there, I still deeply love the Caribbean and it's people and have no regrets about the years that I spent there.

What's your favorite teacher story, and why does it inspire you?

[Mushkilla]

Title: Thank God It's Wednesday: An American Family in Saudi Arabia

Author: Doyle, Maralyn G

Publisher: Sand Rose Books (28/01/2013) -- available on ebay.

Summary:
In 1973 Maralyn Doyle and her family arrived at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her husband, Jack, would teach English at the College of Petroleum and Minerals for the next four years. Her letters home, sometimes hilarious and always interesting, describe a Kingdom in change, cultural misunderstandings, and unusual events, as well as encounters with zealous Saudi censors, crazed drivers, a corpse on a bus, underwear thieving gardeners, and a spike wielding Yemeni. Through her letters Maralyn provides a narrative of her family's daily life in Saudi Arabia as well as detailing the eccentricities of her fellow expatriates.

Why I liked it
Because it reflects the realities I have experienced when I was working in the Magic Kingdom as a teacher of mathematics and engineering.

[johnslat]

I prefer TAIW

Thank Allah It's Wednesday.

Seriously, Pnin: by Vladimir Nabokov.

Regards,
John

[Mushkilla]

Who is the publisher? Sasha?

[johnslat]

Everyman published it. Although it's a novel, it's really a thinly-disguised biography of Mart Szeftel.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30593.Pnin

[natsume]

I'll have to think about a favorite, but I just read River Town by Peter Hessler and enjoyed it quite a bit.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/94053.River_Town?from_search=true

[esl_prof]

So Johnslat and Natsume, why did you like the books that you recommended?

[esl_prof]

[johnslat]

Dear esl_prof,

Why - because although Nabokov is often acclaimed as a "stylist." what's often overlooked is that he's a great storyteller, as well. In Pnin, the narrator that we, as readers, initially accept as an omniscient "truth-teller,"
very gradually and unwittingly reveals himself to be untrustworthy.

It's a fascinating read, with a title character that touches the reader deeply, despite (but also because of) the narrator's portrayal of him as a figure of ridicule.

But see for yourself.

Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin
Chapter One
1

The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin. Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but
ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.

His sloppy socks were of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges; his conservative black Oxfords had cost him about as much as all the rest of his clothing (flamboyant goon tie included). Prior to the 1940s, during the staid European era of his life, he had always worn long underwear, its terminals tucked into the tops of neat silk socks, which were clocked, soberly coloured, and held up on his cotton-clad calves by garters. In those days, to reveal a glimpse of that white underwear by pulling up a trouser leg too high would have seemed to Pnin as indecent as showing himself to ladies minus collar and tie; for even when decayed Mme Roux, the concierge of the squalid apartment house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris where Pnin, after escaping from Leninized Russia and completing his college education in Prague, had spent fifteen years--happened to come up for the rent while he was without his faux col, prim Pain would cover his front stud with a chaste hand. All this underwent a change in the heady atmosphere of the New World. Nowadays, at fifty-two, he was crazy about sunbathing, wore sport shirts and slacks, and when crossing his legs would carefully,
deliberately, brazenly display a tremendous stretch of bare shin. Thus he might have appeared to a fellow passenger; but except for a soldier asleep at one end and two women absorbed in a baby at the other, Pnin had the coach to himself.

Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train.

http://lavachequilit.typepad.com/files/pnin-.pdf

[Mushkilla]

[johnslat]

Dear Mushkilla,

"Best" is, of course, subjective. It's certainly his most popular, as measured in sales.

But I'd list it behind "Pale Fire," "Pnin," and "Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle."

Regards,
John

[esl_prof]

[johnslat]

Hey, I only wish I were teaching English Lit. But as an ESL teacher, my forays into that subject are limited to (very) short stories, some poetry/drama.

But the novel would be so much fun to teach as it is so darn DECEPTIVE. The unwary reader can initially be seduced by the narrator, and only very gradually does the deception (hopefully) become apparent.

The novel. very subtly and indirectly, presents a strong, moral example, one whose protagonist, despite being a kind, erudite and intelligent man, is usually thought of and treated as a bumbling dolt by those around him.

What's presented as a third-person omniscient narrator in Chapter One transforms into third-person limited as he starts to slip on details. Finally he reveals his true identity in the final chapter and formally takes over the story by shifting into first-person mode.

It's a cautionary tale of how we all so often take our subjective opinions to be objective facts, and of the dangers of judging others superficially and without much, if any, regard for their back-stories, intentions and often hidden (from us) motivations.

Regards,
John

[esl_prof]

Thanks, Johnslat! Very informative.