Upon starting this, my intention was to process this rather major challenge I am currently taking on by trying segment the primary challenge into what on consider to be the smaller types of challenges. I have not gotten very far on any of this reflection/analysis stuff, and thus far it seems that I am hung up on my view of language and my relationship with language and, more specifically, the process of acquiring a second language.

I've been teaching for quite a while.  For some reason, I never really am able to pinpoint the exact year when I began teaching.  I think this might be because, while I certainly remember my first teaching job in Poland, I still have difficulty accepting that I was actually a teacher at that time.  I think I was still pretending to be or trying to figure how how I was a teacher.

So, as I have mentioned, this challenge really is a convergence of different smaller challenges/interests/obsessions, which sometimes are difficult to tease apart.  It seems that right now I am morphing one--my attempt to understand how language is learned--to another--my experience, understanding of, and beliefs about teaching.

I started teaching the fall of 1992.  I think it was August, but it was probably September.  It was in Poland--Jaslo, Poland.  I'm not sure how much I want to go into that experience as a teaching experience for two reasons.  The first one is the fact that I really had no idea what I was doing as a teacher, and as a member of a school faculty.  The second on is the fact that this teaching experience was happening at the same time as my first experience spending an extended period of time in a foreign country.  There was a lot going on.  In the end, this experience really became probably the most important part of my education to allow me to do what I do now.  The teaching was just part of it.

So, in Poland, I worked primarily at one particular high school.  During my time there, I also worked for about a month at another high school and then I worked for a semester at a small college created to train English teachers.  I never really felt like I knew what I was doing, but I got by, and I was able to make some good connections with learners.

Also, in Poland, I was faced with living in an environment where I needed to come to terms with a foreign language.  It's funny, the most important thing that I have always said I have taken away from my experience in Poland was how I was treated by the people.  How kind, generous, patient, understanding and helpful they were.  There was one thing, though, that I never really understood about how people helped me with my transition.  I had never even heard a word of Polish before I moved to Poland, and I expressed to my school my need to get help learning Polish, but the people at the school never really offered any help in any formal way.  There were certainly people around me who were helpful and spent time with me so that I could learn or practice or even just listen to Polish, but I don't think anyone ever offered to sit down with me to teach me in any systematic way. In the end, though, my attempts at learning the language were an important part of my education there, and that experience has informed my teaching and some of what I believe about second language acquisition.

The more I really think about these different pieces of my challenge, the more important it seems that I read and I study more.  I have so much to learn.  I really need to find a way to deepen my academic understanding of teaching, language, and second language acquisition.  Perhaps my insecurity with some of this knowledge is an important contributor to my feelings of phoniness.

So, spending some time in Poland and trying to teach and trying to learn some Polish taught me a lot of things--things that I have used my entire professional career as well as things that I turn to when I am trying to face challenges and make sense of life.

As far as second language acquisition is concerned, in Poland I learned that being in the environment of the target language was extremely beneficial, but it was not a guarantee that the learner would always be able to take advantage of all of the communication opportunities around him or her.  There are people who are fearless and who can just immerse themselves in an environment and seek out opportunities to interact and practice the language.  I was not one of those people at that time, and I am not sure I will ever be one of those people.  So, a learner's comfort level with initiating interaction and dealing with the world of the target language is very important.  At the same time, I also realize that it is important to put yourself out there as a learner so that you are exposed to as much language as possible.  I learned a lot listening to and watching my school colleagues interact in the teacher's lounge.  Most of the time people were not interacting directly with me, but they were talking to one another. The conversations seemed to be all over the map--they talked about work, about students, about their own lives.  I say now that it was a great learning opportunity, but it was not without anxiety.  Clearly, I was the only one there who did not understand most of what was going on.  Being in that situation can be stressful.  There were always people around, though, who were kind enough to help or express some kindness toward me to help me feel more comfortable.  The other way that I think I was able to put myself out there was spending time with friends, often at a bar that my friends owned.  Spending Friday or Saturday night with people, drinking, eating, and dancing was a great way to be exposed to more of the language.  There were other opportunities to receive linguistic input, but these were two of the big ones.  This relatively unfiltered authentic language input experience was combined with a fair amount of self-study, and then some relatively low-stress one on one interaction with native speakers.  The two people I normally think about for that interaction were my friends Iwona Przeradowska and Krystyna Kalisz.

Iwona was actually a student who lived in the dormitory across the hall from me.  Even though my dormitory was connected to the school where I worked, not all of the girls and women who lived in the dorm were students at the high school.  Some of them were students at some small post-secondary schools in the town.  Iwona and a few other students were studying to be midwives at a school across town.  Anyway, Iwona just came to my door one day and introduced herself.  From that point on, she came to my room on a pretty regular basis.  She was teaching herself English, and I helped her with that, and then she also helped me a lot with learning Polish.  I was able to have conversation with her in Polish.  This was a very big deal for me.

I think Iwona was eighteen or nineteen at the time.  If it was 1992, then I must have been 24.  I'm not sure how to describe her, but she was a rather well put together young woman.  By that, I mean, she dressed relatively conservatively, but tastefully, most often wearing a skirt.  Her hair was shorter, and always styled.  She wore make up.  She was cute.  In some ways, she gave the impression of being a bit uptight, but in fact she was pretty fun-loving and had a great sense of humor.  I have totally lost touch with her, and that bothers me because she was a very important person in my life at that time, and I still consider her to be an important person in my life.  She helped me a lot. I always looked forward to and enjoyed spending time with her.  It became an important part of my routine, which is really important when trying to make sense of a new country and a new culture and and a new language.  There was a sort of intimacy there, but nothing romantic ever came of it.  I know that she became romantically interested in me, but I was not really interested.  I think I learned a lot about that aspect of the relationship, too.  

So I feel that I am taking on probably the biggest challenge of my professional life, and that experience has brought with it the opportunity to replace sleep with a racing mind.  I have to say that it is about time that I have a challenge like this.  It certainly seems that I am old enough to finally take on something.  With all this, though, comes quite a few thoughts spanning quite a variety of aspects of my life.

I think I remember reading a headline from somewhere about how many people often come to a point when they really feel like a phony.  I know if we had all just listened to Holden, than we probably could have realized this a lot sooner, but I think this idea relates specifically to the work we spend our time doing and the work that seems to provide us with the money to eat and live someplace and raise our children and buy stuff.  This phoniness is just a matter of realizing what we do that has somehow been determined to have values has a certain arbitrariness to it as well as probably some political elements to it.  If we enjoy any degree of success in anybody's eyes it probably has to do with how well we are playing along.

So in this particular instance for me, many different facets of my life seem to be converging and this convergence is really where the challenge lies.

I'm really appreciating the word "facet" at this point.  I'm really not sure of the etymology of this word, but I think its inclusion of the word "face" is entirely appropriate as it applies to my current situation.  I am not even sure I have the precise words to describe what each of these particular facets are, but I think there is a list somewhere in my head or in the world that is probably worth contemplating.  Ok, so now I try to identify these facets.  

One of the first one that comes to mind is my relationship with language and the nature of language. Obviously, this is a big one, and I'm not sure if I think about this idea more than other people or not. The only reason I mention this is because one of the things that has for a long time fascinated me about language is the fact that almost every human being has and uses language, and it is pretty essential to successfully function in the world. It is pretty important in order to take care of so many of our basic needs as social beings in a social world.  But, even though we all seem to have enough language in order to live and survive, there seems to be a hierarchy of sorts which organizes people into one end of the spectrum of those who seem to use language enough to get by and live and basically be happy at the other end of the spectrum those who seem to have achieved some of the highest social status due to his or her ability to use language in some way that is seen as superior to others.  So, language is this thing that we all have some access to--it is a completely egalitarian, democratic tool, I suppose.  Yet, there are certainly people who have been able to use this tool better than others in order wield power and get what they want. I am not even sure how to characterize this quality or these qualities of language I am talking about, but whatever it/they are, I find them fascinating.  So fascinating, in fact, I consider my thoughts about them to occupy a good part of my time.

In my particular case, I consider my relationship with language to have several different strains. I'm not sure how precisely I am able to articulate what these different strains are or if the word "strain" is the best word to use.  Like many people, I struggle to use language in as useful a way as possible.  Perhaps I think more about my use of my own language and how I could use it better in order to achieve what I want.  I assume everyone struggles a bit with their own use of language.  I am sure though, the degree people agonize over their own use of language varies greatly from person to person.  So, I suppose this first strain of my relationship to language has to do with just being able to say or write what I want in order to accomplish what I want to accomplish.  I suppose many people might just go about their lives not giving this much thought and these people are at relative peace knowing they can basically say or write things and get most of their needs met without worrying about it too much.  Not that I necessarily worry about it, but I do spend a certain amount of energy trying to figure out how I could do it better.

I think another strain of this relationship with language has to do with my pretty consistent fascination with how speakers of my native language, English, use it in order to get what they need.  I really love watching language happen.  I think I have a particular interest in how people use spoken language in their everyday interactions.  This everyday use of language, which really is un-self-conscious and fluid and just out there is really at the heart of my interest in language.  As I said earlier, language is the thing that all normally functioning humans have access to, but we also seem to accept the fact that some people are deemed more skilled language users than others.  I certainly appreciate many of these "higher level" users of language, but my real interest is just in how people talk every day.

Another aspect of my relationship with language is my fascination with how really difficult it can be to put thought into language in such a way that this thought can be shared in a deep and meaningful way.  Language seems to be necessarily simultaneously literal and figurative.  There is a lot to be said about this thought/language/communcation/understanding/social construction cycle, but for now I can only say that it is pretty amazing that we are able to accomplish anything at all using language.

This discussion of language has be straying a bit from how I began this particular bit of writing.  I sat down to write about my current professional challenge, which is obviously a personal challenge, and I wanted to describe how the convergence of these various aspects of my life may actually be the main challenge, but I am getting hung up a bit on language.  I think I will stay there for a while, but I think I should turn to something more directly related to this professional challenge.

I teach English to people who use English as a second language.  On pretty much a daily basis for the past twenty-plus years, I have been either dealing directly with people learning English or thinking quite a bit about how people learn English or any other second language.  Trying to figure out how people, especially adults, actually develop some degree of proficiency in a second language has proven to be an endless pursuit.  In fact, I think the task of trying to understand or refine any use of language can easily take a lifetime, but for me, understanding the second language acquisition process has been and probably will continue to be the thing that keeps me busy.

Perhaps my longish relationship with trying to understand how people learn English is at the heart of my feelings of phoniness.  Seems likely.  I mean I suppose I am an expert of sorts, but one of the ironies that comes with being an expert is the constant reminders about how much you actually don't know.  In my case, I just think I need to read more about the acquisition process and learn more about it.  Of course, that will just lead to more knowledge about what I actually don't know about it.

This professional challenge I am facing has to do with setting up an English as a second language program for potential undergraduate and graduate university students.  These folks need to learn the language in order to succeed in school.  That success will hopefully afford them some opportunities to have an interesting life doing meaningful work that allows them to pay the bills and hopefully be happyish.

I think I should know how to do this, but it is turning out to be more difficult than I imagined. And, the fact is that I have been imagining doing something like this for a long time.  But, I think when we are imagining something, we are actually in a very luxurious position.  Besides the fact that we can, well, just imagine whatever we really want to, we are also not faced with real questions from real people who expect real answers.  We can easily choose not to imagine those complications.

It is rather amusing to be referred to as the expert, especially when you are not really sure what you are doing.  It seems that my expertise manifests most often in my little brain when I realize how different other people's perspectives are from my own, and I consider my own perspective to be correct.