How to Turn Culture Shock into a Learning Experience

          They always say that no amount of reading, discussion, and listening to other’s experiences can truly prepare you for an intercultural experience. Actually, I’m starting to think the opposite. Yes, it’s impossible to equate a story you hear to a story you can tell, but there is something to be said about preparing and educating yourself about intercultural dialogue before it actually happens. Preparing yourself for miscommunications and misunderstandings are essential to an experience abroad: otherwise, you would continually walk away from uncomfortable situations without any idea about what was going on, why people felt that way, and why you felt uncomfortable. You would have no idea how to turn that culture-shock moment into a real learning experience.

My personal guide to processing culture exchange, with an example of what happened in class one day:

1. Identify what factually happened. At the end of a discussion about civil rights and racism in the US, and student asked about the n-word.
2. Turn the fact into a story to identify what about it made you feel weird. My most recent learning experience (of many more subtle and significant ones this time around in Santiago) happened on Wednesday in the 1a media class when they had a reading about Rosa Parks. It was a great class! The students seemed interested and for the first time they were directly asking me questions and I could see their curiosity. Near the end of class, one student raised their hand and asked nonchalantly “So, is n***** considered an insult or something?”. Half the class didn’t hear what was said, and when I wouldn’t repeat the word for them, they started chanting and shouting “say it, say it, say it!”. I was completely caught off guard, but fortunately I had the situation under control: I firmly established I wouldn’t say the word, and subsequently explained how it carries the weight of hundreds of years of horrifying repression and history.
3. Third, consider that story from every possible perspective and ask questions. On the walk home from school and for hours after, I was turning this event over and over in my head, asking questions, replaying it from various perspectives, considering details, big picture, etc. What can I take away from this? Does this reveal anything about myself? About Chile? About the way foreigners view the US? Did I learn any new skills? Did the students learn anything? Did I represent myself the way I would want? How can I use this experience to help me in the future?
4. Answer those questions. This step takes much longer and I still haven't gotten around to thinking, discussing, and writing down my tentative answers.
5. Return to the story a few months later and see how your interpretation of it has changed.

          Unsurprisingly, coming from someone who considers education to be one of the most fundamental learning tools, these real-life strategies are taken directly from the theory taught in school. Critically looking at an event or object in a text for its symbolic significance, logically working through a math problem, analyzing the results of an experiment and coming up with every possible explanation, explaining people's motivations for acting in historic events, and breaking apart people's arguments in writing. All those strategies from different classes are applied in the real world at some point or another.
          So, reading and discussing and listening DO help you prepare for an intercultural experience. It's classroom practice where you can make mistakes and learn in a safe environment. Taking different subjects in school isn't just about learning the facts that exist in that subject area. It's learning the strategies involved in creating math, history, literature, philosophy, etc. that you learn to apply in real life.
          In my mind, preparing yourself for an intercultural experience means understanding how to ask questions based on strategies you learned in the classroom. Cultural miscommunications and misunderstandings are real and tangible, but you can soften the blow with some preparation and self-forgiveness.

Learning about learning... the beginning!

          Now that I have a clearer idea of what’s expected of me and what kind of students and teachers I’ll be working with, I’ve started to form a routine and the logistical learning curve is starting to come to an end, and the real learning can start!

Here's a typical day:
6am: wake up
645: leave my house
745/8: Enter the school! It's several buildings in one general area: the enseñanza básica (elementary school, grades 1-8) are split in two different buildings, 1-4 básica and 5-8 básica. The 1-4 media (9th-12th grade) are in another building across the street. Sometimes when I come in later around 9:30 I ring the doorbell so someone can let me in the gates.

The enseñanza básica building, 1-8th grade.

The front of the building that houses the "enseñanza media", or high school.

8-9:30: 10th grade english! each grade is split into two classes, each with about 35 students. That's a big number for any class, especially in a class where the students should be doing lots of discussion to learn a new language.
9:30-9:45: Break. The students will plug in their ipods or phones to the speakers some of the classrooms have, and reggaeton or US pop music will fill the classrooms and spill outside. Some students bring in cakes, panqueques (basically crepes, rolled around manjar), or other food to sell so they can raise money to travel as a class at the end of the school year. The teachers (myself included, haha!) go to the teacher's break room and talk over a cup of tea.
9:45-11:15: 9th grade English! It usually takes about a half hour to get the students settled: the teacher will check homework for "décimas" (decimals, points they can add to their test grades), take attendance and fill in the summary of material to be covered that day in big brown books that the government will review, and try to get the students to pay attention. So, the students really only get about an hour of teaching for what's supposed to be an hour and a half.
11:15-11:30: Another break! The students hang out and teachers converse. It's fascinating to listen to their conversations, they know who's dating who, who does their homework everyday, etc. It's weird thinking about what my teachers may have been saying about my classmates when we're not around. Teachers notice way more than I ever thought they did. :)
11:30-1: The other 10th grade English class. I really need to work on memorizing names!
1-2: Lunch! They get a whole hour for lunch here. I remember getting 20 minutes in high school!

          Sometimes a big chunk of students don't come to class. If it's raining really hard often students will stay home because their parents are worried they'll get sick. A few days ago, there was a student march against the "ley tributaria", (from what I gathered: a reform that will increase taxes on the rich to help finance education reform, which won't work because the rich avoid paying full taxes. The students want the government to be in charge of education to eliminate profit) and 2/3 of all the students were gone! I found it hilarious, because something like that would NEVER happen in the US. I've personally never heard of students skipping school to go to a protest about the education system (or any protest for that matter). In 2011, the school was shut down for about 5 months because of the "toma": students took over the school and demanded better education and classrooms.

The mural that commemorates the Toma.
"It will be the people who create a very different Chile. Toma 2011: restoration in April 2013." 

          I recognized that I was coming into this experience with virtually ZERO teaching or classroom experience, and I knew that my inexperience was going to be magnified by the fact that it’s a different education system, country, and language. Fortunately, I’m not actually teaching! I’m just learning from an experienced teacher and stepping in when she asks. I’ve learned a lot during these first two weeks, mainly about all the ways it's impossible to teach a group of 35 students English for an hour and a half. I've had many really cool conversations with the teacher I'm assisting about how integrated teaching is: you have to account for the student's family life, health, habits, and mentalities. Educating young people is SO complex and difficult, but I think it will be one of the most satisfying challenges I undertake in the future!

There and back again... a "teacher's" tale by "Atina" Carlson

Sorry-not-sorry for The Hobbit reference in the title.
Also, "Th" doesn't exist in Spanish. So my people kind of call me "atina." Which apparently sounds like the verb "atinar", which I couldn't really gather the meaning for... cue the communication mishaps. :)
          I'm writing from my room in CHILE!! Ever since coming back in mid-December from study abroad last year, I was considering coming back to Santiago sometime within the next year to visit my host family and immerse myself in the Spanish language and Latin American culture again. Typical post-study-abroad-high-longing-to-go-back type of thing. I didn't really actively think about going back until the beginning of March, when I started tentatively sending emails to Grinnell alumni in Chile and the rest of Latin America, seeing if there were any schools open to having a gringa (person from the US) with very little education experience be an intern at their school. My hopes were pretty low, and I didn't expect much to actually happen. But IT HAPPENED!! When I got the email that my internship got funding, I was in shock and couldn't believe my plan was actually going to pull through. I jumped up an down, skipped around my building, and smiled like a crazy person the rest of the day. :D teehee
          So, I'm back in Santiago, Chile for my next great adventure: being an assistant English teacher at the Colegio Raimapu in La Florida, Santiago, Chile. I'll be helping out in a classroom for high schoolers (9-12 grade US, 1-4 media in Chilean terms). I visited the school for the first time today, got a tour, met a few teachers (and of course I don't remember any of their names... I need to work on that...), and observed and helped out a tiny bit in an English class. I had some cool conversations about the school's founding (a few parents banded together during the dictatorship), some of the struggles of educating young people in Chile, and maintaining a school. I still have no idea what to expect: I have a little experience working with high schoolers through camps, and I have a tiny bit of tutoring experience with the Spanish Lab... but I have NO idea how this is actually going to play out. And I am perfectly okay with that!
          So I'm sure you're all thinking... what happened to brain-obsessed-pre-med Athena? I realized that I was extremely tentative of that plan from the beginning, and after the clinical observations, I realized that being a doctor or surgeon or researcher for the nervous system really wouldn't make me happy. Originally I wanted to pursue that as a way of remembering my mother because of her quadriplegia, but that's not the aspect of my mother I would want to highlight every single day in my work. She was passionate about exposing her kids to all different kinds of things and ensuring that we learned as much as we could about anything at all. Education has done amazing things in my life, and I owe of lot of my own "success" to the teachers and people I met through school. So, education might be what I do with the rest of my life. We'll see how this summer goes. :)
          I have mandatory blogging to do for the funding requirements, so there might some of those posts up here as well as my pensieve-like musings.
Thanks for reading, and thank a teacher today!
Athena