Job Discussion Forums

[denise]

Zaneth--

What a great post! My first TEFL position was in Prague, and I found that my students were all very aware and very critical--not just of America, but of world politics in general. It was a very refreshing change--seeing people (who just a few years before were living under Communism) actively discussing and being critical of (which is different form merely criticizing) world events. I think the "stereotypical" American doesn't know enough about world events to even begin to be able to think about them critically.

Your mention of a "buffer zone" really got me thinking... My adult life in the States was spent in bastions of liberalness in California. First Berkeley, where I got my BA, and then an internationally-oriented grad school in Monterey (which was just a kilometer or so away from a military school whose students had very different world opinions...) For the past several years of my life, I feel that I have lived in a "buffer zone," even when I was living in the States. I never quite knew what mainstream America's opinions were, because often they were not my opinions and I did not see them reflected around me.

Another poster commented on how where you live/grow up affects you. Very true.

d

[JosephP]

Here or there, what a dualistic problem. I'm reminded of the opening part of that great film Apocalypse Now. Captain Willard, stuck in a sweatbox fleapit Saigon hotel, bathed in sweat, drunk, jittery, alienated, and isolated in a flat voice-over says "Sh*t! I'm still only in Saigon...When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle..."
Or as Mick Jagger put so eloquently "I can't get no satisfation, oh no no no...that's what I say, uh hey, hey, hey, hey."