Privilege. A word that is thrown around a lot in mainstream media, especially when talking about inequalities and by those trying to explain difficult and illogical phenomena. It’s also something that people do not like to admit to having. A privilege is something that is an advantage given to a certain individual or group based on certain criteria. It can be something you can see, like all the students who are standing quietly behind their chairs are dismissed first from class. It can also be something more subtle and easily overlooked, like having a car to drive to a grocery store with fresher produce and a wider selection of goods without having to haul your purchases back on foot to your flat, praying the reusable bag you are using doesn’t split and break the soy sauce you bought to make stir fry and ruin your sweatshirt. Since living here, I have realized the many privileges I have as an American compared to others in the world. Some I didn’t think of as privileges, just conveniences, like Walmart. It would have been so much easier to have a Walmart in Nottingham to go and find everything we needed when we first moved here. We wouldn’t have had to wander the city to find a place that sold towels. Walmart has everything you could ever need in one location!
But now I see that it is a privilege to have a store that has everything I could ever hope to need within driving distance from my house in the States. I don’t have to walk or take public transportation from store to store, wasting time and fuel to get things on my list that I need on a daily basis. I can wash dishes without having to wait for the hot water heater to heat up more water halfway through. I can wash my hair in the shower without hitting my elbow on the door or shampoo rack (which still happens at least once a day, no matter how hard I try to prevent it). And there are sheets on my bed besides just the duvet! This has sort of just turned into a rant about all the things I don’t like about living in England, but it highlights my privilege because I have these complaints. At home everything is bigger and has so more options. Do I want to got to Stop and Shop, Costco, Big Y, Sam’s Club, Stew Leonard’s, Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods to get my groceries? Here, we only have little convenience like grocery stores with little selection. It is absolutely enough for my needs, but with my American privilege, I expect more. Frankly, I’m a bit disgusted at all that I have at home. I packed everything I needed, and extra, to live in a foreign country for 100 days in two suitcases weighing less than 70 lbs. I left so much stuff at home that I found I don’t actually need. I also have discovered that I really don’t miss much of it. Maybe my flannel sheets and a more comfortable mattress and pillow. Do I really need my 40 sweaters (this is not a joke, I may actually have more)? No. I brought 5 and am doing just fine. I also do not need television, despite my aforementioned love for Criminal Minds. All those couches and chairs at home I rarely sit in? Nope: my bed, desk, and seat at the kitchen table all I need here. I also don’t need a car here. It would be easier, yes, but I am surviving –nay, thriving – here without one. At home there is next to nowhere to go without a car, almost no sidewalks, and no public transportation that I know of in Orange, Connecticut. And here I am, so privileged that I am complaining about everything I have in England.
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Hello there!
Congratulations on getting into Neag’s IB/M program! You are now on your way to unlocking your potential to be a great teacher. It will be difficult at times, but in the end you will look back on your journey and be thankful for the challenges faced and obstacles overcome. Here, you will be equipped with the content and pedagogy to be a confident and competent teacher, as well as meet the people who will become your biggest support network and cheering squad. I’m writing this letter to you from my flat in Nottingham, England where my study abroad semester is drawing to a close. Unbelievable, right?! Before September, I had barely left the country, let alone lived across an entire ocean for 100 days. It was a shock for sure but I am confident I am already better for it. There’s loads of value in studying abroad. Not only do you pick up new phrases and words, but you develop an appreciation for different perspectives and a lens through which to analyze and reflect upon your own. You will have to look at yourself, really think about who you are, what you represent, your thoughts and feelings on certain subjects, and what you want the rest of your life to look like. Studying abroad is one of those pivotal moments where you feel yourself changing (evolving?) immediately on landing. You’re thrust into a world where everyone speaks the same language and yet you’re still not quite sure what exactly it is that they are saying. You will learn to operate under new norms in a school system vastly different than the one you know (and maybe love, maybe hate). This juxtaposition between what you know and expect and what you find throws your previous experiences into question: what do you like about US systems and ways of doing things? What would you change? How does being a teacher in England change how you feel about teaching and education? In the end, you’ll be left with more questions than answers: more questions about yourself and the world you see around you, wherever you end up. But these questions become a way to critically reflect on who you are as a person and as a teacher. In the admission process, Neag asked you why you wanted to be a teacher. You might have had a generic answer like “I want to help students reach their potential” or “My mother/father/aunt/grandfather/sibling/etc. was a teacher and I’ve always wanted to become one as well”. When teaching in a new environment with a completely new system and expectations of students and learning, you solidify the real foundation of what your motivations are to teacher. You discover your real philosophy of teaching, made up of bits and pieces of US and UK experiences and practices. You’ll experiment with different activities, planning techniques, and lesson delivery that you may have not known existed and decide what fits you as a teacher. And when you are asked during a job interview why you want to teach or what your philosophy is on teaching, you have a unique and honest answer forged during your time abroad and in the States. Besides adding to your teacher repertoire, you will be able to log in world and cultural experiences through studying abroad. While here, I went from barely leaving the US to traveling to so many of the places I’ve learned about in my studies and treasures I hadn’t even heard of. Edinburgh Castle, the Guinness Factory in Dublin, the Cliffs of Moher, Park Güell in Barcelona, the Colosseum, Florence, the Eiffel Tower, Omaha Beach, sections of the division between East and West Germany, just to name a few. Each place I visited allowed me to see history, really experience the things I had learned about while simultaneously understanding how history shapes people and places in ways you don’t think about when reading books and doing research at UConn. Hearing Germans talking about the division between the country, how different experiences were in villages only a few miles and heavily fortified fence away makes it all so real. Visiting new places makes history come alive in a way that books, documentaries, blockbuster films, professors, anything, cannot. These experiences can be drawn upon when teaching to engage students in a way that other sources cannot as well. A picture you took of Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery with an anecdote of the rain, fog, and desolation you felt standing on the beach where you know scores of soldiers died add a piece of empathy that can ensnare students and add a new dimension to learning history. There are so many other benefits I can talk about in an effort to convince you that studying abroad is something that any aspiring social studies teacher should do, but I think that many of them are unique to each individual and are things that you really just need to experience and reflect upon yourself while you sit in your flat in Nottingham writing a letter to a new member of Team Social Studies. If nothing I’ve said can convince you, you should consider studying abroad solely for the Instagram likes on travel pictures! Best of luck to you, future world traveler and social studies teacher extraordinaire! Katherine Holden They say that you learn more about yourself when you are abroad and I definitely think that is true. I’ve discovered strengths I didn’t know I had and accomplished so many new things. I have also changed the way I see myself in terms of identity. I definitely feel more like a teacher here, maybe because I have completed student teaching and now feel “veteran”. Now I know I can teach and have accepted teacher as part of my identity. I also have added American to my identity. It’s obvious that I am American, but I never really felt like it was part of my expressed identity. This was probably because I was in America and with my accent it was understood that I was American.
Here, I am always asked where I am from and referred to as American by anyone who can tell the accent as American and not Canadian. At home, I identify as Irish or Russian, not American. In the States, with our immigrant past, people identify with cultures and traditions from places ancestors were from generations ago. My closest ancestor came from current Belarus in 1912 yet I still consider myself to be Russian and Irish, from where I am even further removed. Here, if you say you are Irish or Russian it means you personally are from Ireland or Russian. I told a PGCE student from Belfast that I was Irish and he immediately just dismissed the notion saying that I was American, not Irish. To be honest, it felt like a smack in the face because I feel as though I am Irish, even though I really don’t follow many Irish traditions and am from America. It is just part of my American identity to be Irish and Russian. Here I am constantly reminded that I am American and only that to people. I constantly catch myself talking in a slight British accent and saying British phrases and remind myself that I’m American. I need to talk like an American because that is my identity here. I feel as though lapsing that is insulting to my nationality, but I tend to pick up words and accents quickly from people and places. And I feel that I am letting down this idea of my labeled identity as the American. I guess I am just struggling to reconcile the identity I have for myself with the identity I have been given here in England. At the same time, I am tired of being just an American because that isn’t how I see myself. I’m tired of being the representative for America on the election, Donald Trump, and a whole slew of different things. People ask me the opinion of America but I can only give them my opinion. I am not America’ spokesperson in Nottingham, yet people expect us all to be. I wonder if this labeling experience would be different on an off-election year. But I do feel more American here. I feel more American pride for our accomplishments and shame for our shortcomings. I just hate being expected to explain things about America to people when I don’t understand them myself. I’m not an expert! Confession: I used to be an awful traveler. Key words used to. I would pack too many clothes, but not the ones I needed when the time came, bring too many outfit choices and accessories and have to lug everything around because I just had to have options. I would rely on my mom to have the itinerary and know where to go and how to get there. I would just be along for the ride. Now, I am the one making the plans and getting everyone where we needed to go in time for the bus or tour or entrance time. I’ve even managed to condense everything I need for a weekend in another country, with rain gear, in a single backpack so I don’t have to check any luggage. This was a particularly large accomplishment for me because I used to over pack by almost double. It might be cold, might as well bring three sweaters to keep warm! I’m definitely better at planning what I will need and layering up for trips, especially since it’s gotten colder. It’s insane to think back at how I would have an entire car load of stuff to bring to UConn for a semester and yet I fit everything for a semester in another country in two under the weight limits for the flight over. Being able to plan ahead, anticipate what I’ll need, and consolidate necessary items is a skill that I will benefit from for the rest of my life, in and out of teaching.
The key to being a better traveler is to cut down on baggage- physically and mentally. It’s way easier to travel with alight backpack than a bulky checked bag you have to wait for at the gate and lug around. It’s also way easier to travel without the mental baggage of anxiety and worry. I’ve accepted the fact that things may go wrong and I’ll have to improvise. We may have to use extra Mickey Mouse Band-Aids from camp to patch up Will’s knee when he wipes out running for the bus to the American Cemetery in Bayeau and ask the café to call us a cab when we get off at the wrong stop. We may have to take alternate tube routes to get to King’s Cross to make a train to Nottingham when the Circle line is closed for engineering. We may have to sprint full tilt through St. Pancras with all our bags to make said train, getting on less than 15 seconds before the doors close and we leave. Things happen. Plans fall through, and unexpected challenges pop up. You just have to trust that it will all work out and try to get through it! I thought for sure we would not make our train on Sunday coming back from Germany. No one else on the tube thought we would make it either. BUT WE DID IT! We must have looked a sight sprinting through the station, swearing at the ticket machine, urging it to hurry and print our tickets, and flagging the conductors to make sure we got on. I’ll look back on it one day and laugh, but not today. If I hadn’t learned to trust that everything would work out, my anxiety levels would have been through the roof. We had no contingency plan. We had just assumed that Heathrow was close to King’s Cross and we’d get to the 10:20 train no problem. (That’s what happens when you assume, I suppose) Same goes traveling to countries that speak different languages. I don’t know any German and only a few phrases in French. Ordering food, getting directions, and figuring out public transportation is really hard for me in English, let alone in a language I don’t know. There was a lot of pointing and miming involved, and guessing on both sides, but I got food in my belly and on the correct trains and buses! There are some things that you just can’t worry about when traveling because that is all you’d do. You need to have the time and energy to enjoy the holiday, which is hard if you’re trying too hard to stick to a plan to the letter or agonizing about things outside of your control. The art of traveling really boils down to having a solid plan and being prepared for said solid plan to fail spectacularly. It’ll all work out in the end! At Minster, I am working in a variety of history and RE classes, as well as working on curriculum writing and lesson planning. As I mentioned in earlier posts, Anthony and I have been tasked with writing the curriculum for the American West course they are implementing this spring. This task has taken up most of my time, especially with the year 11s doing coursework. With coursework, the students prepare for and write essay on the topics of the class. The year 11s I am placed with are completing the coursework for Britain during WWI and will be soon moving on to America in the 1920s, which I will be helping to teach. I’m very excited to adapt the lessons I used during student teaching to see how the different groups and cultures deal with the material. I suspect I will really be able to see the more subtle difference within the school systems when I teach the material I taught to my sophomores at E.O. Smith. This excites and worries me, as I fear I will not be able to foresee major differences that will hinder or derail my lesson and prevent the students from engaging with the content or from meeting the lesson objectives.
I am placed in two different year 8 sections taught by different teachers. This allows me to compare teaching styles and activities directly for the same content on consecutive days. This is sort of hard for me because one of the teachers is significantly less engaging, prepared, and enthusiastic than the other. Comparing the lesson “success” and student engagement of the same lessons delivered in different classes really shows how important the teacher is when guiding and teaching lessons. The students are learning about slavery, which is something I know a lot about considering my schooling in America and teaching the slave trade when I taught about Africa in the spring. I’ve mainly been helping with group work in these classes and will be teaching a lesson on the abolition of slavery in Britain next week. I wish it was the abolition of American slavery, but it’ll be good to get back to doing the research, lesson planning and teaching of an unknown topic again! The year 12 class I am placed with has been working on Henry VII. The teacher is an NQT so I will not be teaching any lessons on the Tudors, which is a small miracle! I know nothing about Henry VII so these are the classes I’ve been learning the most content in. It’s interesting to see what the teacher does to engage the kids with the sometimes dull material. There are lots of charts to organize information, competitions where students have to read dilemmas Henry faced and determine what he should do to stop threats to the throne, and lectures. I sympathize with the teacher because the students are supposed to be developing note taking and critical analysis skills while learning an immense amount of information for their exams and the teacher has admitted to having difficulty coming up with engaging lessons that get the information to the kids and give them the skills they are supposed to be developing for university and the exam. My favorite classes that I am placed in, oddly enough, are religious education classes. Once I got over my initial shock of the curriculum and content of the classes I have found myself looking forward to each class I have. With the year 10s I am placed as student support to help a student stay on task, take notes, and complete activities. This was a new role for me and I struggled initially, unsure of how much I should push the student to be independent. I talked to the teacher and worked out what the expectations were for the student and myself. As the student’s support, I have been actively working with the material and activities of the course and enjoy it immensely. I really like how the teacher presents the material in a logic way more than just having a faith based approach. The teacher was an atheist for many years before finding faith and thus approaches questions of faith and religion in a critical, logical, and understanding way. The first day I was there the teacher asked the students their religions and I was surprised with how forthcoming and open students were about their faith, or lack of. It wouldn’t be a subject broached in US schools and I am still surprised by the content every time I go in the classroom. My favorite part about this teacher’s style is the logic in the lessons. The teacher took a class to teach how to make and dismantle arguments based on statements. While it was in a religious context, it’s an important skill for students to learn. The teacher gave an example of an argument that had statements that built off of each other and showed students how to attack the fundamental statement in order to collapse and disprove the entire argument. Fascinating way to teach Christian values and beliefs of Christ and important skills for life and exams. We have also visited a few tutor groups to do questions with the Americans, which exposes us to more of the student body, as well as to the younger kids in the school. It’s still weird to me to see all of these students in the halls who are shorter than me for a change! Being in classes with younger students has also solidified my choice to work in high schools and not middle schools. I don’t see myself performing quite as well with the younger students as I did student teaching. I shall see if this is true when I teach year 8s about the abolition of slavery next week. They’re just so young! The dynamic of the school is unlike anything I have experienced. I do not like how few history classes they have. Some students only have 1 or 2 lessons a week. As a student, I wouldn’t be able to remember content after a week, let alone be able to effectively build skills with a week in-between lessons. It is also interesting how the students all take classes together as a group. The same students will stay with their same peers for their entire tenure at Minster (besides sixth form). I had classes with some of the same kids growing up, but being with the same ~25 students all day, every day would be so difficult for me! Trust has been essential while abroad. Trust in others, trust in myself, trust in technology and transportation. Without phone plans, we have to just make plans and trust that everyone will be there on time and that everything will work out. We also trust complete strangers to give us directions and advice for doing things because we usually have no clue what we’re doing! I have become much better at asking people for help since I’ve been here instead of attempting to muddle my way through because I have literally no clue where to go/what to do, etc. I didn’t like it at first, but it is nice to have help instead of wandering around the humanities department looking for room 230 when it is upstairs in the English wing. I have also found that I have a ton more trust in myself and my abilities. I’ve always maintained that I am directionally challenged and useless with directions, yet I have somehow been appointed the map person in charge of getting us places when we’re traveling. (Well, it’s because I bought the offline map app that we use to actually know where we are without data...) And since I’ve only messed up once, I now have much more faith in my abilities of getting places, reading maps and following directions to new places in foreign places with language barriers.
This brings me to the trust I have in technology. I have absolutely no idea if the map app is bringing us to the right place. I just follow the arrow to the destination and hope it’s right! There is way less reliance on my phone and communication with those at home due to the fact that I don’t have a data plan and WhatsApp doesn’t work at my school or in the archives. I have to trust that my family knows that I am safe and isn’t having cow on the other side of the world (we don’t need any more cows)! And because we are in a foreign country that drives on the wrong side of the road, we rely heavily on public transportation. This was a new concept for me because there is almost no public transportation near my house. I think the closest bus stop is a mile away and it’s in another town. Here, we use buses and taxis for everything. Every morning and afternoon we have to trust that our taxis will be there to pick us up because we have no other way to get to placements! Even though I have been getting a lot of help from others, I feel as though I have grown more independent and capable of traveling and getting places, especially since before this trip I had never planned a single vacation or outing. I usually just had my sister do it, but no more! The only time I felt uneasy (read terrified) was when I was convinced I was going to be murdered by a taxi driver. Anthony was sick one day for our Minster placement so I was alone in the cab coming home from Southwell. The taxi driver was lovely and we were chatting about England, America, and history. We stopped at a light and the car turned off, like most cars do here. They’re all eco-friendly and many turn off when stopped to save fuel. Anyway, the car sounded weird when it turned back on so the driver said he had to pull over to check to make sure everything was okay. It would have been fine if he didn’t turn off into this huge industrial park with mountains of topsoil and machinery everywhere to do it! The driver turned off the engine and locked the door and I convinced myself that I was going to be murdered and buried in some random industrial park in England. I admit that I watch too much Criminal Minds and other crime drama shows, but I seriously thought something terrible was going to happen. Nothing did and I felt horrible that I thought it would because the driver really was a nice person. Its just that on Criminal Minds the murderers and sociopaths are sometimes the nicest people who you wouldn’t think would be the perp! So I got home safely but was certain I would not. That is the only experience I have had that has truly made me uneasy, besides some guy in Rome who was a bit too persistent. Yikes. Race, class and gender. Prevalent issues that people, including myself, are hesitant to talk about in public – and in schools. That being said, these topics, while universally taboo, are seen in different ways in different places. Discourse about race, class, and gender are vastly different in the UK than in the US, as I’m starting to discover. I admit that I am at an extreme disadvantage to learning about these terms in the UK as I am an American citizen who does not watch British news or talk to UK citizens about these topics. So this journal was hard for me, least of all due to my school placement. Minster school has almost no “diversity” in terms of race and class. In fact, this was the one area the Ofstead report said the school needed to work on. The vast majority of the students are white and come from middle to upper middle to upper class. One has to look for students who do not fit these categories, although they are there.
I also haven’t seen that much (read any) mention of race, class, or gender in school curriculum. I saw a lesson on changes to the home front in the UK for WWI and saw no mention of the Women’s Land Army or any mention of all the troops from the colonies laying down their lives for the Queen. This was weird for me because I did entire lessons on each women and minorities in both WWI and WWII. There are brief mentions about how people of lower classes had different experiences in during whatever is being taught but that’s about all that I have seen. But multiple people (teachers) brought up how all the kids were wealthy when asking about how I was finding the school my first week or so. Come to think of it, I think everyone I talked to did. Everyone seems to make blanket statements about the students and miss out on all the differences. This can be really detrimental to the students. If they are always surrounded by other secure white students, how will they understand multiple perspectives and differences in race and class? Learning about other cultures and experiences of people shouldn’t only be done in school but it’s a good place to start! Especially with race, class, and gender conflicts (tensions?) all over the world. One of the few mentions of a topic like this was when one of my students asked about my opinion about Donald Trump because the student was a Muslim. He specifically told me that he was Muslim to gauge my reaction as an American and potential Trump supporter and it broke my heart. Maybe this habit of not talking about differences of race, class, and gender in the classroom can also tie in with the Prevent Duty and the idea that schools have to monitor students to make sure they are not becoming radicalized. The only focus on race, class, or gender seems to be concerning radicalization and potential conflicts. But I guess this can be seen in the US as well. We have a lot of discourse about race due to the racial tensions and racism against African Americans today, and the conversation seems to mostly cover the violence and conflict, not the underlying causes. I don’t remember it being talked about nearly as much when this racism wasn’t challenged. I guess I’m thinking about issues of race, class, and gender differently here simply because I’m not thinking about it. Other than my reflection above and things I’ve noticed to be missing from school curriculum, it’s not mentioned. I thought about race a lot in the States, if only because it was such a large part of public discourse. Same with gender. With Hillary potentially being the first female president and Trump’s treatment of many women, issues of gender were also in the news and talked about by people around me. And now that I am “removed” from these issues and everyone only wants to talk about the issues America is having about race, class, gender, and the Presidential race, I have not heard any UK people talk about these issues, even though I know they must be present in the UK. But I will now be on the lookout for these issues and how they are talked about in classrooms, public, and media. |