Somewhere in-between

So I've now taken it upon myself the daily task of retaining and expanding my use of the English language. The tendency is, of course, to pare down my use of language to the irreducible chunks that can be easily transcribed into the minds of my students. In many ways, for clarity, I follow this tendency. First though, I intend to confuse them. I am here as a native speaker, and to reduce my use of language to what a native English speaker would only recognize as caveman talk would be a disservice to my students and to myself. They must learn to hear the language as it's spoken.

That said, I am attempting to restrict myself to a finite number of phrases rather than the infinity of constructions toward which a native speaker tends. The point of all of this, minus the digression into ESL teaching philosophy, is that I have noticed in the speech of fellow westerners a significant shift toward an almost Korean grammar. Perhaps I notice it more now that I am learning bits and pieces of Korean language, but it is particularly bad among those who have learned more of the language or taught here for longer periods of time. Feeling little slips myself, I've undertaken a reading of Umberto Eco, who, I've been told at various times, is an excellent and challenging read. It's true. I'm a little over 40 dense pages into the novel, and I'm loving it. It's occupied most of my free time today, and I forsee it taking a good deal of what I have remaining until I've finished the novel. I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum, and I can feel lamps burning in my mind that have long been dark. As the flames burn brighter - as they are exposed to more of the oxygen of thought - I can feel more of the lampblack burning away. Or, to to twist the metaphor a differet way, the lampblack is dripping away into the ink upon the page, and thus more is illuminated while the page before me is filled.

Another product of this shift is that I've begun to define more of those shadows that I mentioned recently. Life here gets better and worse with each passing day, but in naming those things which bother me, I am able to quantify them, classify them, and put them in their proper places. My mind reels more as I realize its motion, but each day, without slowing, the reeling becomes more like standing still. I suppose some would say it's all relative. Foucault would likely say that it's all relative to context, tradition, and the all-pervading cultural symbols(if I remember correctly).

All in all, I should say that, while little is new lately, new light is shed each day on those things with which I come in contact. The world continues to spin, and each error is part triumph and each triumph is accidental. Vigilance is good practice, but never an exact science. Teaching has become a sort of metaphor for my quest. Those things I tried so hard to do at first come so easily now in bursts, and those things which seemed so easy then get more difficult by the day. Perhaps it is that I see with new eyes, and perhaps it is that the field is everchanging. Perhaps the two are really part of one larger same.

Anyway. I'm digressing more and more lately, but somehow getting closer to telling you the truth of what I'm feeling here, cryptic as it may be. It has been so good to be in contact with home: to know that life is not standing still for any of you. It gives me great comfort to know that my world there is no more constant than my world here. Perhaps, that is its constancy. For the moment, I am musing on the fact that "perhaps" means something like "chance may be" at its core, and my mind is again in awe at the seeming randomness and simultaneous congruency of life. Creation is so easily difficult and so troublingly easy.

For now, I'm off to teach one of my favorite students. They're all teaching me what a terror I once was, while simultaneously showing me why my teachers held out hope.
Hope to write soon, and sorry if the syntax gets cumbersome - I'm trying to keep my English up to snuff.

I continue to keep all of you in my thoughts and prayers.

Love,
Joe