Please allow me to use an analogy of
two ugly, four door Toyota Coronas,
I owned at different times in my life,
to describe my academic journey.
These cars were the polar opposite of “date bait”. They weren’t pretty, and many of their non-essential features were jimmy-rigged or patched together. But they were amazingly dependable and ridiculously affordable. These two vehicles took me on several journeys, much like my academic journey.
My academic journey has also been via two vehicles. After driving my first Corona on my move to the Silicon Valley, I immediately began attending junior college classes while working a full time job. It was a slow, incremental process. Initially I focused on the ‘new’ field of computer-aided graphic design, because I wanted to have a career that would allow me to use my creativity and imagination more completely.
After settling into my print graphics career, I began taking core-requirement classes. I had previously earned an AA in Arts and an AA in Science, and I wanted to move on to a bachelor’s degree. Maybe more.
I had to put my degree pursuit on hold after losing my graphic design job and running into a wall of Silicon Valley age discrimination in all my attempts to find another similar job. Finally I answered an invitation from a persistent friend, to teach English in China. My hope was to obtain enough ESL education experience to allow me to keep teaching well into my retirement years. There I discovered a need my imagination and creativity could fulfill: writing funny, entertaining lessons with characters or issues kids could connect with. (you see English textbooks in China are often boring and numbingly redundant) Things were going well, then China changed their visa policy and my two AA degrees no longer met their minimum requirement.
Now I am at the end of my second ‘Corona’ academic journey: 30 credits of history and psychology courses earned on-line through Excelsior University, New York. I have enjoyed my courses in both of my degree depths, but to be frank, I chose them only because they met my ‘Corona’ needs: expediency and affordability.
As a second language teacher I have become interested in the psychological function of play and nonsense in lessons and classrooms. I have found that nonsense is a very effective means to keep students pondering over a lesson after class time is over. Nonsense also helps students understand the rules of English better by showing them what is outside the rule boundaries.
I have found support for this in an article written by Professor Urmishree Bedamatta of Ravenshaw University, India titled: “Playing with Nonsense: Toward Language Bridging in a Multilingual Classroom”1. She wrote “Like fiction, play is a kind of carnival reality… parallel to the real world but having its own meanings.” I couldn’t agree more and have found my students also appreciate the opportunity to be playful with their English.
Perhaps nobody is more famous for making a point about logic by stating what’s illogical than Lewis Carroll. So I will use two of his quotes as they apply to my academic journey. He said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” and he also said “ I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then” I have thought about both of these more than a few times this past year.
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More about Lewis Carroll:
“Go Ask Alice” June 2015, New Yorker: Who “reads” Alice in Wonderland now?
“Looking at the Birth of Alice at 150 Years Old” June 2015, New York Times
“Mathematics: Logic and Lewis Carroll” November 2015, Nature