With the most recent events in my career, which is my life, I have begun to lament not being able to turn back time. You see, I was never trained to be an English teacher. I was never trained to be a teacher at all. However, when I applied to grad school they said, "You must have teaching experience, and it would be better if you went to the country you wanted to do research in. You don't even know if you like the culture yet." Well, I'm here. I'm in China. I love the people for the most part. I LOVE the food. I love the history even more, which is the part that I'm interested in studying and teaching.
However, I'm here teaching English, not history or archaeology. I'm stumbling through blindly, since they don't really help us at all. No one told us anything. They didn't even tell us their expectations for the students. Now as the semester is almost over, I wish I could start it over with the knowledge that I have. I know now what they need as students to learn the material. I know how to motivate them. With only a few short weeks left, I'm afraid it isn't enough time to really make a difference to their learning and education.
I'm not only looking back at this period of my life though. I found myself thinking on the bus to school today, "I wish I could change this, and this, and this..." "This" in the former sentence all has some meaning, but as I'm not familiar with this community yet, I'm not sure I wish to share all the mistakes. I'm human. I made a lot. I'll continue to make them. I just wish I could do more than tell the people that were harmed by those mistakes that I'm sorry. It doesn't seem to be enough in some cases.
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What's your grad school program?
Archaeology. My idea is to study trade routes throughout Asia using archaeology, geology, geochemistry, and history. I need a lot more training to get there.
However, no archaeology programme seems interested in me or my ideas. All the geology departments are though. They just tell me that I have to go through the archaeology in order to get that training.
I'm thinking I'll have to just do a lot of random things like I did in my undergraduate studies to make my dream come true.
The sanity within is overwhelming.