Language is a Pool

What does it feel like to be an international student learning English? I often ask myself that in some sort of impossible attempt at empathizing with their situation. What must it be like to walk into my class on day one? Let me give you an ordinary scenario of what it looks like on the first day of class:

Two students enter with smiles on their faces, but most come, one by one, rather straight-faced, as if they are skittish or unsure. They check their room information sheets before they sit down. Those that sit up front come with textbooks in hand, but generally the seats fill from back to front. A small cluster seem to know each other already, and for a few Arabic students, who sit in the far back, there is a sense that each seat represents a personal island. When they sit down there is a heaviness. One gets lost in "texting" immediately, which I have learned is a strategy to not make eye contact with me. Others are content enough to simply look forward and wait, but not necessarily at me. I wonder what they are looking for. Then it strikes me as symbolic: they are all looking for something. Their glances seem poignant to me somehow, and then a student near the front asks me a question and my thought vanishes.

I worry about my students. I worry about them a great deal. They come with more obstacles than the typical American university student, and the typical American student already has plenty to worry about. For one, there is the language barrier, of course, fraught with pitfalls and the inability to say nothing without sounding 5 years old. There is the cultural barrier, too (one of my students had NO idea what french fries were, and kept trying to order in English as he would in Japan. In Japan, when you go to a fast food restaurant, you can actually show off your mad English skills by ordering "fried potatoes"). And then there is the social barrier, which includes the sheer loneliness of going home to an apartment, doing your homework, and then turning on the TV. EVERY day. Not to mention they have none of the familiar social network or family structures that one might be used to (meals, calling up a friend, a way to do your laundry that makes sense, a hang out). As one of my students phrased it this week, "I miss being me."

And then, last but not least, how about the classroom culture shock? What must it be like to be speak in a language that you haven't mastered? What is it like psychologically to open your mouth in front of 30 others and just speak incoherent half-thoughts? What is it like to suddenly open yourself to a whole world of academia, opinions, and feelings with a group of strangers? Well, I think you end up feeling like Mr. Bean.

Mr. Bean, you say? Why yes, I do. I think he is the perfect metaphor for an international student, in fact. He has boyish hopes and ambitions, but an absolute inability to translate those hopes into the world around him. He is endearingly relatable, and yet he is aloof from the rest of the world precisely because he is so different. And, most important of all, he always surprises us for, despite all his deficiencies, being willing to attempt the foolish in order to accomplish his goals. In essence, he is willing to jump into the pool.

I think we could all learn a thing or two by being a little more Mr. Bean.

And to my international students, I salute you for your bravery. Even if it is going to take me to step on your fingers to let go of the plank.