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.