teaching & me

Somehow I have gone one month/eleven blog posts without really talking about the only semi-legit thing I'm doing this summer... that is, doing [stuff] in the ESL program at my local community college. Yeah, I said it was only semi-legit.

Basically what I do:

• Observing Reading & Writing 3 for the whole semester (8:30-10:10, for 10 weeks)
• Observing Grammar 2/Grammar 3, alternating about every two weeks (10:30-12:10, also 10 weeks)
• Email-tutoring one student
• Conversation-tutoring two students
• Intensive-GED-reading-tutoring one student

I don't get paid for any of it (except a nominal fee from my GED student), and out of the 20ish hours a week that all encompasses, I'm only guaranteed to be doing anything for 7. The rest is just sitting in a classroom, listening, taking notes, doodling, and occasionally walking around the room and helping students with independent exercises.

But recently, the Grammar 2 professor gave me one of the greatest gifts I've received yet, and offered to let me review the class' latest test with them AND teach a whole hour and forty minute class on comparative adjectives. 

The class will come next month. The test review was Thursday. And oh... friends, this is hard work.

I've known since about sixth grade that I probably shouldn't be a teacher. Back then I thought it was because I understood things too easily, and I would expect my students to be as brilliant as I am (and that expectation would 99% of the time be false). Yes, I was quite a wonderful sixth grader. And humble, too.

Anyway. In recent years, I've stuck to my conviction that I shouldn't be a teacher, but for slightly less annoying reasons--mostly just because I don't know if I'm gifted that way. I think education is one of the most important structures in society, and it bothers me a lot when people say things like, 'Oh, I don't know what I want to do with this degree in [    ]. I'll probably just end up teaching it to high schoolers.' 

Just because you know something doesn't mean you can or should teach it. 

And that is being reinforced quite thoroughly into my head this summer. Do I know English? You bet. Can I work with one student to make them understand it? Sure. Can I teach it to a class? Questionable.

It's funny... I think I'd take teaching small groups of Catholic high schoolers about the Sacraments (as I did last summer) over teaching classes of international adults about English (as I am doing this summer). In the first case, I (being Protestant) knew less than my students did, but I had a different perspective, a different angle... and some real humility to boot. Here, I know a lot more than they do. I ought to. I'm a native speaker. And there is only one possible perspective, one possible angle. I have it; they don't. But they need to, and I need to get them there. And somehow manage to stay humble.

It doesn't just have to do with right and wrong answers. Teaching is about getting the students to think in a way they don't naturally think. Once you get them started in the right place and moving in the right direction, the answers will come. And, again: this is hard work.

And it makes me wonder... is teaching just a gift you have? Or, like theology or the English language, is it the sort of thing that I could arrive at just by starting in the right place and moving in the right direction, with a little guidance from somebody who knows what they're doing?

regarding sherlock, and thresholds

[no spoilers! no worries.]

I've known for a while that I needed to find a TV show to like. Avoiding TV because it's TV is like saying that all books are boring, or all internet articles are useless... and then never reading anything. So first I thought about 'Community,' because I'm basically living at a community college and all... but instead, I went for 'Sherlock.'

What an idea that was.

So I have a problem with audio-visual media. I am extraordinarily sensitive to movies and television. Somewhere along the line when normal kids learn that What Is On The Screen and What Is Real Life are two different things, I skipped class to have a tea party with my teddy bears. As a result, I am one of those annoying people who leaves the room when a movie gets too sad, too scary, or just too awkward. And sometimes? I'm just overstimulated. There's so much going on, and I can't handle it all.

'Sherlock' about did me in.

Most crime shows I've seen do something to diffuse the tension... to give you a hint as to what's coming next... to pepper the action with random comic relief*... to give you a break. From the very first episode, this show refuses to do that. And then there were six of those.

During the first one, I thought my brain was going to explode. There is a lot of action, and the director uses a lot of jump shots, so you have to be constantly on your toes just to get a picture of what's happening. And once you get that picture, you have to work pretty hard to decide what to think about that picture. Is it reality? Is it some great farce? What's happening behind that door? Why is the screen going black? My adrenaline was pumping for all 90 minutes. I felt like I had just lost a few weeks off of my lifespan because my heart rate was permanently altered. This was not just an emotional reaction... this was physical.

But 5 episodes later after that first one (of increasing intensity, no less), I stand before you, alive. My heart rate has gone back to normal. In fact, other than some slightly embarrassing pillow-squeezing during the last episode, I made it through relatively unscathed.

I didn't react as much to the (ridiculous) sixth episode as I did to the first.

Why?

Something in me changed. It's different now, and I find it very odd... my I Am Certain This Will Kill Me threshold is a good bit higher. My tolerance for Trauma-Induced Adrenaline is higher.

Does this mean I need lots of action and suspense to keep me satisfied, to keep me interested? I don't think so, yet. I think it could. But I read The Screwtape Letters yesterday, and now I'm reading Story of a Soul (the spiritual autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux), and neither of those are particularly intense. But I wonder... after a while, will raising the Amount Needed To Kill Me necessitate raising The Amount Needed To Impact Me?


*Edited to add: given, this show is hilarious. I think when I wrote this I was more reeling from Reichenbach Fall than I wanted to admit, and hence was casting that terror back more than I ought to have. But I hold that any of the comedy is not 'relief' in the usual sense. Good grief. It's all intense.

every good endeavor

Where do I even begin with this book? I will admit, I took forever on it... My friend Sam once told me that he had spent so much time reading philosophy books that he forgot how to read novels. I have the opposite problem, wherein I can't remember how to read books that don't have a plot (and therefore take two weeks to read 250 pages).

But regardless of my slowness getting through, I highly recommend Tim Keller's latest... Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work. It covers a lot of material and is useful even to the lowly non-working workers (i.e. students) among us.

As usual, the most convicting parts of the book had to do with work and its relationship to rest. Keller says,

'If we can experience gospel-rest in our hearts, if we can be free from the need to earn our salvation through our work, we will have a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, restores our perspective, and renews our passion.'

I'm sure I know what you all are thinking. 'Katie, you don't have a job. Why in the world do you need rest? Your whole life is rest!'

False.

I find myself even more immediately confronted with my lack-of-rest now than I did when I was a full-time student with a schedule that looked, on a nice week, like this:

Because now that I am objectively not working, I ought not to feel tired. I ought not to feel anxious. I ought not to feel overworked.

In reality, I spent the first month of this summer rather stressed out and totally exhausted. I wasn't working then any more than I am now, but I was a wreck. I had this 'need to earn my salvation through my work,' a sense that my value comes from my work, and I wasn't working.

bad work = little value

no work = no value

That's a problem. I think they call that 'legalism.' Now I'm not saying I subscribe to some weird works-based soteriology... I've spent enough time with The Five Solas to know intellectually that I cannot work my way into Heaven, etc etc.

...But apparently I haven't spent enough time with God to know personally that I have value not based on how much product I turn out, how many people I impact, how much money I make, how efficiently I use my time, how pristinely clean I keep the kitchen, or any other quantifiable measurement of usefulness.

That is the 'rest under the rest' that Keller talks about in the book, and also in actually my favorite sermon ever.

Without it? I will spend this whole summer doing nothing, and being run down by it. I will be sitting on the edge of my chair, springloaded, tapping my feet, waiting and waiting and waiting for something earth-shattering to present itself to me (or at least a job at the Village Cleaners, really)... and that's not rest.

Real rest is better for me, and better for the world, than my constant wheel-spinning could ever be, even if I did have a job. Since I don't, it's that much clearer. I need to learn how to rest, and quit freaking out about working so much that I read 250-page theology books on work when I'm unemployed.

(But seriously, even if you're unemployed like me, I highly recommend this book! And if you're not, I recommend it even more.)

one-month check-up

I’ve been summer-ing for a little over a month. I’ve been blogging for almost exactly one month. That’s a third of my summer. Yeesh. To keep perspective… time for a check-in with the goals, yay!

Shadow ESL classes at the community college

Check. I've been pretty consistent, and only skipped two days (one for being out of town, the other because I almost-fainted twice before breakfast and thought driving would be stupid).

Gain the professor's respect enough that she lets me do something useful in class by the end of the semester

Yep! Well, two of the profs anyway. And I'm tutoring four students now, which is awesome.

Learn more about community college life by picking up "Community" as my summer bad habit of choice

Just kidding. This hasn't happened, and I don't think it will. I discovered 'Sherlock' instead, which is AWESOME and RIDICULOUS and POST COMING SOON.

Find a job that pays money

Negative. Every time I apply somewhere, they're like, 'Oh, you're leaving in 2.5 months? Sucks to suck.' (I'm sorry. I'm beginning to sound bitter. I'm not, really, just sad. But now that we are down to 2 months left, I have resigned myself to unemployment and will no longer spend hours scouring Craigslist for job openings. I will instead spend that time tutoring wonderful international students in the most frustrating language on the planet, i.e. English.)

Take that job

I WILL IF YOU LET ME PLEASE!!

Do not spend the money on frivolous things

To my sister's dismay, this one's a success.

Read books edifying to my intellect

Well...

• Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh 
• Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger 
• 1984, George Orwell 
• Story of a Soul, Therese of Lisieux
• Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens 
• The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell
• Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller
• Lolita, Nabokov
• Various poems by Державин, Ломоносов, & Пушкин

Read books not quite so edifying to my intellect

A few. None on my list except a few Twain short stories.

Write some sort of reflection on my experiential and/or book learning at least once a week

Not just once, but twice a week! aha! ...Can I get double points on this one?

Take three consecutive internet-free hours every day, exclusive of the hours when I'm working

Unfortunately, I have not been consistent with this one. I have limited the number of times I check Facebook per day, and I've stopped using the internet while I'm working. heh.

Write a libretto for Braeden's oratorio of The Great Divorce

Good progress. I'm pleased. Tomorrow we start Chapter 9, and I get to subject him to all of my George MacDonald fangirling. :D :D :D :D :D

Sew myself an elf cloak

Have pattern. Have main fabric. Have plans to embroider (another hobby I've picked up recently). Need lining fabric. Need to locate sewing machine.

Thanks to y'all for sticking with me. On the list of things-to-do-this-month, I am book-clubbing Brideshead Revisited and Lolita with Molly, as well as Biblical Womanhood: How a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head, and calling her husband 'Master' with KMax. I'm excited.
I have also resolved to keep my room clean, eat more vegetables, drive no more than 5 miles over the speed limit, and play nice with my sister. Standard.

If I can tack on one extra thing... I would appreciate prayers. I have found that I have a terrible time motivating myself to, you know, do things, when I'm home, not knowing anyone around, and not working full time. These 'things' include everything from reading (haven't really read anything for about 2 weeks) to praying (which has gone better than reading, but not by a lot).
I guess part of me is so afraid of doing something and finding out I've been wasting my time all along, that instead I do nothing at all. That way I know I'm wasting time from the start, which somehow makes it easier. I think Andrew calls this ennui. I call it inertia. It's annoying. I'm not used to it and I don't like it.


BONUS just because:

(They're like a cross between A Fine Frenzy and Lisbeth Scott... really good.)

bel air, maryland

Well, I don't have anything intelligent to say this fine Monday evening.

I spent 80 hours this weekend with people... straight (aside from a 25 minute break, and sleeping Saturday night). But I love all of those people.

Yes! I got to go back to Bel Air this weekend! It was awesome! I did nothing useful but so many things valuable!

I loved getting to hang out with some of my very close friends from my high school days... Marina, Rachel, David, Kristina, Douglas, Megan, and Caleb (in order of appearance).
It's so great that I can go months without seeing or communicating with them, and the first time we see each other we go right back into real conversation about real things. (Although it is NOT so great that we go months without communication.) And I know that whatever questions they ask me, from 'How are you' to 'How can I pray for you,' they really care about my answer.

That is the best feeling in the world.

Also, I got to see Rachel's dad, who was my Calc1/Calc2/Physics/WorldHistory/Latin1/Latin2 teacher in high school. He's the coolest. We made calculus jokes. Fun fact: he breeds spiders for kicks. (That part's a little weird.)

So Bel Air is no longer exactly home for me, even though it is home to many of the people whose company is home for me. Regardless, I would like to make a list of Reasons Why Bel Air, Maryland is Actually Pretty Cool Regardless of the Fact that it is in Maryland.

1. It is the biggest town in Harford County. If you live in Harford County, you probably have to drive to/through Bel Air to get anywhere/do anything.
2. Even though it is big, it is green and it is clean. Including downtown.
3. There are all sorts of pretty places hidden around its neighborhoods... there are creeks everywhere.
4. They actually teach kids our State Song, even though other Marylanders (cough Baltimore) are trying to pass legislature to change the lyrics and destroy our history!!!!! (sorry, rant)
5. Speaking of the Confederacy, John Wilkes Booth grew up there.
6. Wegman's.
7. Humidity makes my hair do fun things!
8. A lot of neighborhoods have themes... like the one Megan and I found yesterday where all of the streets had Shakespeare-themed names :D #nerds
9. The town is putting up a darned good fight to prevent the new Walmart. Props to you.
10. All the coolest people live there, really. (Obligatory cheesy last reason, sorry.)

Yep. Pretty cool weekend. And now I'm exhausted because, you know, introvert.

community college, community church

Today, I’m going to take a break from writing about books. Because really, I promise, I have done other things besides read this summer! I have also been observing classes and tutoring in the ESL program at my local community college.

And I’ve realized… ‘community college’ is a terrible misnomer.

Maybe it’s because the college is servicing students from a 15-mile radius. Maybe it’s because it’s the summer and not the semester. Maybe it’s because I’m not actually taking real classes. But there is not much ‘community*’ about this college. 

Frankly, I miss it. I miss Notre Dame and the community I have there. I miss New Covenant and the community I had there. I have always associated school with really intense relationships and a committed Emmaus-walk mentality. I’m not exactly finding that at community college.

I guess it’s not necessary to get at school, though. I do interact with other people besides the ESL folks. I go to church with my family every Sunday! …whatever church we’re visiting that week, anyway. And when Sunday mornings look like that… ‘community church’ is just as misleading a name.

We’ve visited a couple of those. A couple of Baptist churches. An LCMS church. A Methodist church. And none of them, the community churches included, have been very forthcoming with the fellowship. Maybe that’s because we’ve never been anywhere more than twice… but still.

And I miss it. I miss Fulkerson and the community I have there. I miss Mt. Zion and the community I had there. I have always associated church with discipling and being discipled, with life together with people who share my priorities and my loves. I haven’t gotten that in church the last few weeks.

I miss community.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than two weeks of my post-middle-school life without community, without good friends and strong spiritual support physically present to me. When my friends at ND used to talk about their trepidation going home on breaks… that it was harder to remain disciplined, harder to see God, harder to feel loved, harder to feel happy… I never got it. Yes, the community available at school (especially through ISI & various other campus ministry groups) is amazing. But I went home to community that was only slightly less awesome, if at all.

I get it now.

I’m wondering about the next few months. Do I choose a place, dive in, and try to ‘create’ community… and all of the accountability, vulnerability, and self-denying love that goes with it… or do I hold out another 11 weeks on my own? The whole make community happen now thing seemed to work last summer, at Vision. We only had 5 weeks together, and we went from strangers to best friends. I’ve got more than twice that amount of time. But somehow it’s scarier now.

So I wonder, what do you do when you’re in a place where

• you have no existing community?
• there are no structures in place to facilitate community?
• you know you’re only going to be around for a few months?

That’s not a hypothetical question. It is very relevant to my life now, and it becomes even more relevant looking ahead at the month I’ll be spending here this winter, the months I’ll be spending in Russia next spring, and whatever I’ll be doing somewhere in the world next summer. Since my family moved in January, I officially live a life-in-transit. I don’t have a stable ‘home’ anymore, and I don’t have any guarantees that the places I’ll be over the next years will be good at faking it. How do I handle myself?

Do I…

• find people and surreptitiously adopt them into what I will secretly call my community?
• find people and ask them to be brothers and sisters to me?
• sit still and wait with anticipation for God to provide people for me?
• render myself (somehow) independent of the need for community?
• do something else entirely?

I don’t exactly know. 



* Click the link. Definitions of overused terms/jargon are good.

literary crushes

Friends. I have read the so-far winning book of the summer. That is A Tale of Two Cities—Jess’ favorite book, and now at the very least my favorite Dickens novel.

I feel insufficient to the task of writing something spontaneous and spontaneously intelligent on a book of this magnitude about which I have no complaints. (That’s really all blogging is, isn’t it? A selection and magnification of complaints? Not always, but it’s easier that way.)

Instead, I shall diverge my new literary crush. Previously, Prince Myshkin held the spot. In fact, he’s remained my primary lit-crush for 4 years now, since the end of my sophomore year of high school (other contenders have included Tom Bombadil, Gilbert Blythe, and Winston Smit—oh just kidding on that one). But Myshkin has been met, and perhaps usurped, by Mr. Sydney Carton.

Swoon.

The man is intelligent, idealistic, and good at getting his way in the business world.

He is also smart enough to not press his attentions where he knows they are not returned.

He is also trusting enough to be vulnerable where he knows he will be cared for.

He is also PERFECT.

Maybe it’s a cliché. Maybe it’s why I like Myshkin too. But the sort of love Sydney Carton embodies in the novel… the selfless love that does not seek the reciprocated love of the beloved but only the good of the beloved… is so deeply rooted in my heart as The Ideal Of All Things. It’s a lot of why I like fairy tales; it’s why I like the Gospel (…or maybe I’ve got that backwards).

And Sydney Carton is just perfect. I don’t care that he’s an alcoholic for 5/6 of the book. When he holds the seamstress’ hand on their way to the guillotine, my heart immediately becomes his. And the most amazing thing of all? I’m not annoyed with Lucie for loving Darnay as she does. Even if I think Carton is all-around better, because he thought her love for him (or maybe just ‘her’) worth sacrificing his life, I have to give it some credit too.

I’m going to stop talking and just tell you to read the book. Read the book.

PS- for fun, a quote I liked:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

PPS- in case you were wondering, I liked the ending of this one.

let's talk about endings

Considering that summer has only been 3 weeks long so far, I’ve finished quite a few books: Pygmalion, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Wives & Daughters, The Great Divorce, and 1984*. And I would just like to ask—Seriously guys, what do you have against nice endings? I’m not counting The Great Divorce because that was written by the Infallible C. S. Lewis (kidding, he’s not actually perfect, just close), but other than that, these books have terrible endings, and I would like to complain.

Pygmalion

Dear Liza learns how to speak and wins over everybody at the Embassy Ball. Aw, yay! …but that happens offstage, halfway through the play. The rest of the time is spent detailing Eliza’s angst and Higgins’ social and emotional incompetence. The very last scene reveals that Eliza is the golden pin holding Higgins’ life together, that Higgins believes with his whole heart that she is coming back, but that Eliza is, as Higgins says, ‘going to marry Freddy! Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!’ as Eliza and Mrs. Higgins sweep out the door on their way to church.

This being an utterly unsatisfying ending, George Bernard Shaw gives us a Sequel… which is even worse. He warns us,

The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.

Don’t insult my imagination! I like it just fine, and I don’t think that the fact I want closure is indicative of a decrepit, sickly imagination. But anyway, Eliza marries Freddy, Higgins never learns to appreciate her apart from her usefulness in small household tasks, and basically everything would have exploded except for the fact that Pickering lends the unhappy couple basically-unlimited money. I just don’t like it. I want the girl whose character I’ve been watching develop the whole book to actually have a developed character and make wise choices, darn it! Higgins also falls off of my Role Model list for his inability to ever love his creation beyond her utility.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Spoiler… Mrs. BEF’s lawyer is the kids’ uncle, and so they all get sent home early without a chance to live in any more museums. Lame. Okay, it’s not an awful ending, but I sort of didn’t want there to be an ending.

Wives & Daughters

The author died before she wrote the ending. I am certain it would have been just as saccharine, vicariously pleasing, cathartic, etc. as I secretly wanted if she had lived to write it. But whereas in The Mixed-up Files I didn’t want there to be an ending, in this one I definitely did. As it does end, the protagonist’s love interest has expressed interest to her father (but not ever explicitly to her) and is somewhere in southern Africa doing scientific research (likely to be killed by some wild animal). That’s not annoying at all.

1984

As my dear roommate once said of the ending, ‘One of the greatest acts of self-restraint in my life (and no, this is not an exaggeration) was not screaming and throwing the book across the room.’ I want the triumph of humanity! I want the conquest of the life-full spirit! I want the victory of will! And not the victory recorded here.

It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

That’s the worst thing I’ve ever read (except maybe Native Son, but we won’t talk about that). I don’t want to hear about how happy you are that you finally succumbed to brainwashing. I have struggled with you all of these 250 pages to beat the brainwashing. When you cut out and go about your own business being indoctrinated without involving me at all, I’m probably not going to be indoctrinated, and I’m going to be quite separate form your end state. Last time I was aware/part of a struggle, it was the struggle for freedom and truth. Unless that’s the struggle you win at the end of the book, while you may win, I feel like I’ve lost. And frankly, I’m not happy about that. I hate losing. It makes me want to scream and throw the book across the room.

What I want in an ending

I want closure… a story line that has concluded to a resolution of the main conflict of the story.

I do not want resolutions to everything… a requirement that the author kill off all of the characters.

I want hope… the expectant chance for life and growth even after the last page.

I do not want ambiguity… the uncertainty or even doubt of whether or not there will be anything good at all after the last page.

I want to use my imagination, but I want it to be more like the stretches my mother does than the stretches contortionists do. It’s got to be reasonable, and reasonably happy.

Or y’all could just keep doing what you do and writing annoying, half-baked, unhappy endings that make me feel like I lost. That’s okay too.

*And, since I wrote this, I have also finished A Tale of Two Cities. But that deserves, like, 3 posts of its own.

distinctions

I finally decided to pick myself up by the bootstraps and claim my place as a student of English Literature, which is a lot harder than it sounds. As soon as you take on the name of English Major, people begin to assume you have read certain canonical works of literature… and it’s really embarrassing to say No, I haven’t read that actually. It’s the same shame incurred by a self-declared Child of the 90s who has to admit No, I didn’t really know what Pokémon was until this semester.

Anyway, I hadn’t read any of the classic dystopian literature (1984, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451), and that needed to change… so I went for the first.

Let me tell you, 1984 is all kinds of weird and scary. I hate being watched; in fact, if my mother (whom I love and trust) were to be standing behind my back any closer than 3 feet away, I would probably be unable to type any words at all, which is silly because this is not exactly life-shattering stuff… I just like privacy.

I also hate TVs; in fact, after a week in a hotel with my family this winter with two TVs constantly on in the background making noise, I swore that I would never own a TV at all if I could help it… I just like silence. Both privacy and silence being denied me through the perspective of Winston Smith, it was difficult for me to enjoy living through his perspective for the hours I spent in the book.

Maybe the only element to 1984 I did find really intriguing/potentially relevant is Newspeak—the language of Oceania. One of the engineers of this language confronts Winston,

In your heart you’d rather stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? …The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

My mind went immediately to a book I read in high school, called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, by Madeleine L’Engle. so. good. She says,

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
…If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than ‘the way things are.’

She never mentions 1984, but it’s exactly the same issue. They say you only have memory as far back as you knew words to describe whatever it is you’re remembering… without words, you cannot grasp a thought or feeling even enough to recall it a few years later. Without words, experiences are nebulous nothings.

Even more dangerous, though, is very few words. When you get past infancy and discover language, you can start to really feel things, and grasp those feelings. But if your vocabulary never expanded past first grade, and neither did anyone else’s? I doubt you’d be able to know and grasp feelings of despondency or elation… at least, you couldn’t differentiate between them and disappointment or any mild pleasure. It’s all sadness and happiness. And it limits not only your communication, but your experience—because soon, you will forget that there is a difference between amusement and joy, diversion and enthrallment. These distinctions are necessary to full humanity. And if we aren't fully human... well yeah, what's to keep a dictator at bay? What thoughts might we have to keep private? What would we do with silence if we couldn't think?

In one of the ESL classes I’m observing, Reading & Writing III, the professor has been challenging the students to use words. Lots of them. ‘Good,’ ‘nice,’ and ‘thing’ have all gone on the I Had Better Not See This Word list. When we moved beyond ‘good,’ we could discuss the ‘shades of meaning’ between pleasant, profitable, and positive.

Some students are learning English words for concepts they don’t even have in their language. It’s amazing to see these adults’ minds open up to thoughts and feelings that weren’t even options for them to think and feel before. I wonder what my inner life is missing out on because I can’t name it.


BONUS ANSWER: thanks to the fabulous KMax, I give you 38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English