You should already know about what I learned from teaching in China, how I fell in love with teaching, but I also fell in love with travel. After China I spent two years traveling and teaching in over thirty countries including Pakistan and Kenya.
While in Pakistan I sought out Greg Mortenson’s schools talked about in his book “Three Cups of Tea” and spent several weeks with a translator living in a village and teaching English in girl’s schools in the Northwestern Frontier province near Afghanistan.
The only thing more drastically needed than English teachers was community organizers. An example of this is how one school had electricity and computers donated by a western non-profit but no chairs–and no one at the school knew how to use any of the technology! Just down the road was another school that had faculty that knew how to use the technology, with electricity, and this school had plenty of spare chairs to share! All that was needed was someone to see the needs of both schools and connect the leaders of these schools in order to share resources.
The need for communication was similar in Kenya. I traveled to Kenya to start a non-profit pilot program that would create English teaching opportunities abroad with cultural exchange and a change of pace and experience for newly graduated Americans: think Teach for America for the world. After three months there I realized that I had been naive in my original plan: western influence was largely the cause of many of the problems in the country–not the solution. Western non-profits were funding different schools with huge sums of money which took away the need for communication between lock groups and led to animosity between schools and a culture of corruption. I was distracted from my role as a teacher when I was stuck between two groups warring over money and tribal identities that I could not possibly understand.
I came back to America shaken over the experience, disillusioned at what I could do to make the world a better place. While in Cairo I met an American soldier turned Iraq war protestor who told me about the MAT@USC program. Still wondering how I could offer my talents to break the educational systems I had visited from the British rote system, I remembered the unbelievable advanced usb wireless modems that were all over countries like Nairobi. Could we bring quality teacher training to developing countries through on-line education programs? The MAT@USC program has answered my question.
After a month long observation at a Title-1 school in Los Angeles through the MAT@USC program, I came to realize that many of the community/communication problems that I had witnessed abroad were just as prevalent in my own backyard! My experiences taught me that, as a teacher, teaching is just the beginning. Teachers must also invest in their students, those student’s families, and partner with the organizations around them in order to create new models that will transform the definition of school and develop and regenerate the communities they work in. This connecting is one of the aspects of teaching I look most forward to in the future.
