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One of my duties in Slovakia will be teaching English. To help prepare for that, I have begun with an online starter course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). One of the first “warm-up” assignments was to find a quotation about good teaching, and write 200-250 words of reflection on it. I took a passage from Edward T. Hall‘s book, The Dance of Life:

After many years of teaching, I noticed that if I couldn’t love my students, the class didn’t do well…. What does it mean to love one’s students? Somehow the idea must be accepted that the greatest pleasure and real expression of love on the part of a teacher is to be able to watch and occasionally encourage the talent of each member of the group to grow. Also needed is the trust to permit each to do his or her own thinking. This means that we strive to bring out the best in each other and to somehow allow the rhythm of the group to establish itself and avoid at all costs the imposition of the artificial rhythm of a fixed agenda.

And here is the concluding paragraph to my brief reflections:

Loving one’s students isn’t easy. It demands more of the teacher to approach each student and each class with an openness to their needs–needs that may require the teacher to backtrack, change direction, or even create new material more suited to them. This in turn demands that the teacher be continually growing and learning himself, so that he is able to adjust his teaching to suit his students.

I have my work cut out for me.

With all the preparations for preaching and presenting the Slovakia mission, and all the cross-cultural studies, I think I’ve been coming down with a case of PDS – Poetry Deficiency Syndrome. This is a rare disease – there are maybe two or three cases of it in the world each year, and those usually go unreported. It’s brought on by prolonged periods during which the one who is afflicted is distracted from his poetry books and unable to find half an hour alone to read something with richness and rhythm.

The symptoms often go undetected: impared speech (talking in mono-syllables, inserting filler phrases such as “you know” and “it was like”), blurred vision (inability to see beyond the next task on the to-do list), and restless but dreamless sleep. I finally had to resort to some Auden and Keats the past few days. But since I’ve been studying how different cultures perceive time, I’ll stick with that theme and treat you here to a haunting dialogue between a lover and Time.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  “Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.” (more…)

I’m continuing to read Edward T. Hall’s The Dance of Life, and I’m astounded at some of his insights. He’s helping me to see, for example, how in some ways Paula and I have veriy different concepts of time—not unlike some of the differences that often frustrate people from different cultures when they try to work together. In Hall’s terminology, Paula lives primarily on polychronic time, while I live primarily on monochronic time. Monochronic time is that of the northern Europeans—linear, one activity at a time, with a clear beginning and a clear end. Polychronic time is experience in many simultaneous activities, never really beginning or ending, simply weaving their way through life. And along those lines I’m mulling over the following quotation that describes our American and European conception of time. I’m trying to figure out how it relates to a biblical view of time. Perhaps you could offer some insights in comments. (more…)