Part of the Application Essay, or How I Got Here

Travel has always been away for me to recharge my physical and intellectual batteries, and it always changes my perspective. Geography shapes character wrote Russell Shorto[1]. If I can even begin to impart to my students the benefits that have been afforded by travel and study, then the geography of my own expanded world might be able to shape more than just my own character. This kind of transference is actually one of our greatest charges – and challenges - as teachers, I think.

The word “education” itself comes from the Latin educare, meaning to extend, and it is this part of my job as an educator that I take very seriously – to extend my students’ ideas of what it possible, of what the world can be, to show them the box that is checked neither “Yes” or “No” or “Right” or “Wrong”, but rather, “Other”...As an educator, I have brought along the experience of my own travels: much of the continental United States, including 9 years on the West Coast; the Appalachian Mountains on backpacking trips; treks to countries in Eastern and Western Europe; and two summers ago, a two week trip to China as part of study tour with other New England teachers…

When I was preparing to go to China, more than one person said something to me like, “China?? It’s halfway around the world!!” Exactly. What I saw there was the beautiful China of art and philosophy, along with craggy panoramas of mountains and rivers carved into a part of the world turned ever away from us physically. Yet, I also glimpsed a complicated political climate and the shifting urban landscapes of a country we are now turning towards as a viable economic power, a player in a world that this nation is beginning to shape by its own changing and growing presence. I hoped I went on that trip with an open mind, even as I deliberately looked down the alleyways past the great temples and monuments or stammered through a bit of conversation with local people, all in my trying to catch a glimpse of the Real China. When I returned and sifted through my numerous photographs, memorabilia and the daily journal I kept, I realized, it was all the Real China -- that and so much more I could not see in a short two week visit. If I were to return today, it would be a country still in state of self-determination and change, different from the China I saw two summers ago in many respects, I would imagine…


What of Japan, then? My vision of it is a bit kaleidoscopic: the incredible impact and presence it has with regard to pop culture and technology, the confusing messages I received as a public high school student when we studied World War II, my study of the enigmatic elegance of Zen Buddhism in college, my sense of things like origami and haiku, fragments of many suburban grade school studies in art and literature, all hand in hand with images our own media provides. Japan is a country to which I have never traveled, is a country to which probably few of my students have traveled. Part of why I want to go is because of pure interest. How much of it is as I expected? How is it like the only other Asian country to which I have traveled? What are the degrees of separation between that nation and our own? To be honest, I have no answers to these questions yet. Yet, I do have a strong sense that Japan is part of that box checked “Other”, and by adding it to the geography of my world as an educator, it too can become part of what has the potential to shape character.



[1] From The Island at the Center of the World, an excellent book about early Dutch Manhattan. First Vintage Books, 2005