Tongue Twisted Traveler

I've said before that I hate to follow. I would like to qualify that statement. I'm not opposed to seeking guidance. But when you follow a leader, you allow that leader to make decisions of where you can and cannot go. Leaders, in my opinion, should be more like guides, rather than gatekeepers. In fact, we should all look to ourselves to lead, and seek guides along the way who will help us reach our desired destination and not try to take us to theirs. As a teacher, I try to adhere to this philosophy. My students are not here as pawns to be placed into a course of study that I know will ultimately take them to an understanding of English as I perceive it. I am here to guide them on the path to understanding the English they encounter in their world. This will ultimately be more fulfilling for them, and the experience will be more rewarding for us all. I've had language teachers along the way, especially in French, who set forth a plan of study that started with one po...

I've been reading a few books this summer that some of you might enjoy. Here's a short list: 1. World On Fire , Amy Chua I wrote about this book in my first blog entry, titled "No More Hurt Humans". It's an incredible, eye-opening book on current affairs that reveals a lot about how the United States is perceived by non-American world citizens. Yale professor Chua, an American whose family is ethnic Chinese from the Philippines, draws you in from the start with a story of her aunt's murder at the hands of her servants that serves as a base example of the main theme of the book--backlash against market-dominant minorities. 2. How the Scots Invented the Modern World , Arthur Herman For years I've been focusing my studies on the origins of other people in the communities where I live, to gain greater understanding of their language and culture. Now I'm ready for a little me time. Half of my maternal ancestors are from Scotland. My grandmother ...

I can't understand why so many people spend half their lives bitching and moaning about having a terrible commute. We all have choices in life. We can choose where to work, where to live, and if our commute just doesn't work out the way we like it we can always alter one or both of the choices we have made. And if changing a job or moving is simply not an option, we can choose sometimes to change our route, change the times we travel, or maybe just change our attitudes. There is no reason to just bore everyone else around you by complaining how bad your commute is every morning when you arrive at work and every afternoon you're heading home. My current commute is an easy one, relatively hassle free. But then again, I planned it perfectly this time around after having a few real attitude killers. When I got a new job recently at a local college, I moved to an area I knew would have a pleasant commute. From my apartment I can just hop onto Alton Road where it catches India...

For the past year, since my return to Miami after a two-year stint in Newark, I've been looking for signs of a mature city, something that would draw memories of the Northeast. I came south to escape the snow, but I'm really missing the grit of a city with some miles on her. In Miami, so much of history lies in the last 50 years, and the focus is more directed to one glaring aspect--its chance relationship with the cold war and growth as a transnational suburb in exile of Havana--while tourism has flourished to disguise this fact to the rest of the country. There is also a visible history here, from 20th Century architecture to a unique blending of Latin American nationalities. But Newark, which has lived a sort of transnational existence itself, hosting wave after wave of newly arrived immigrants throughout each of the American centuries, is somehow more deeply layered, more complex. Newark, arguably the downtown of metro New Jersey, has a tight, defined city center, with b...

North Beach has a certain flow. It's the kind of place where traffic and people congest the neighborhood streets and sidewalks, and there's a real arterial feel. So even as we sit and congregate at restaurants, bars and coffee shops, planning our next walk upon the sand, it somehow seems as if we're all just passing through. Northbound Collins, the main vein, is an oceanfront semi-expressway lined with high rise condos and hotels, many lying in a state of decay only slightly masked by the intent of redevelopment and signs meant to entice passersby to cash in on pre-construction savings. The Beatles stayed here in the 60s, and now developers call the style of architecture MiMo, or Miami Modern. Some new buildings are actually under construction, and a new luxury set moving into four new high rise developments could change the otherwise workforce aspect of this area within the next year. By now I've lived in nearly all the extremities of NoBe, South Beach's oft ...

This morning I met with the chairperson of the linguistics department at a local university. I wanted to find out if their program was right for me, and perhaps more importantly, if I was right for their program. I honestly didn't know what to expect. So I set out from Miami Beach, with optimism in the passenger seat of my tiny egg-shaped hatchback, past downtown Miami and west along the Tamiami Trail to the main campus of FIU and my meeting with Dr. Feryal Yavas. The dense air moistened my skin as I hoofed it from the parking garage to the Deuxieme Maison, where the linguistics program is housed. How fitting, I thought, that the buildings were given foreign words as names (and not just Spanish ones, as I've come to expect as the rule in Miami). I asked directions from a guy taking cover under the awning of the student union during a quick but torrential downpour. "Oh, you mean DM," he said, motioning for me to follow him as the shower turned to sprinkles and the s...

I'm a job hopper. At 32, I've already held somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs. It's a fact that I used to try to cover up, scared my next employer would find out and not hire me. But as I get older I realize it's something that makes me uniquely me. Really, it's the thing about me that makes me most employable. I've worked with such a broad variety of people, and at all levels of the labor hierarchy, from mop boy to manager. So my experience helps me to be a sort of workplace expert. And the training I've gotten along the way has been priceless. Despite what some may think, I'm not the guy who can't keep a job. It's just that I love to start new jobs. I thrive on it. I'm addicted to new adventures, new experiences. The thrill of first contact. Meeting new people gives me a rush. I don't know where this addiction started, but I think I've traced it back to the fifth grade. That was the year I moved from a rural village to a big to...

Two of my best friends from college recently finished graduate school. I had always planned going back to school, and really thought I'd just take a year or two to decide what direction I wanted to take before committing to a program. I still can't commit. I'm having trouble picking a program. It's not that I have a huge variety of interests. In fact, everything I want to study relates to my other interests in some way. But I have yet to find a school with a master's degree flexible enough to take all my interests into account. I'll wake up on Monday with my love languages rising to the top of my list of likes, and I start leaning toward the study of linguistics. Maybe pure research. Maybe bilingualism and language acquisition. Maybe I could solve the problems of illiteracy. Then on Tuesday, I'll wake up considering the plight of people in the underdeveloped world and I start to think about how I can help, beyond helping them all read. I think I...