Only the traveler is foreign

By Neil Armstrong

What responsibility does a teacher have to his or her students? The notion of pastoral care in universities and colleges in recent decades has been devolved or upgraded, depending on your point of view, into a service provider-customer relationship, no different than you might get from a car showroom or a decent after-service electrical goods warranty. In dealing with a student’s educational issues, a teacher/knowledge administrator might be tempted go home and forget all about them once they have ticked the correct assessment boxes in the performance guidelines.

But there will always be gray areas, hinterlands into which both student and teacher can stray without wishing to in the first place or even realizing they have. As a teacher, you know when you have landed in these zones of uncertain response when you start to worry about your student’s future safety. This, I find, is never truer than when a student is learning English with the express purpose of spending time in an English-speaking country.

The first issue is often the degree of imminence. Students will sign up to take a brief foray into the language that they will be exclusively using for a month, a year (or four) of their life, unable even to express a simple fact in English, just a fortnight before they are scheduled to leave.

And yet plans for the trip had been made months or even years before. Unaware that a drowning man cannot learn to swim, they heedlessly figure that full immersion in a nation where English is the principle language will be the equivalent of existing day-to-day in a kind of gigantic open-air hagwon bound only by the sky, and under which, by a process of shopping and osmosis, they might end up, within weeks, functionally bilingual. Better at least to get stuck into the basics a few months beforehand.

The second issue is planning. A student who had dropped out of college to study in Canada cheerfully informed the class that she had no accommodation booked, had not yet looked into schools, and had bought only a one-way ticket. Not being very Canadian myself I could not be sure of that country’s visa or entrance stipulations, but I tactfully warned her that single travelers with one-way tickets to such countries are not always regarded favorably by jaded immigration officials.

This particular student distrusted local foreign education placement agencies which, she believed, encourage young people like her to rush into any overseas language learning program for the sake of their profit at the expense of her long-term self-betterment. But, we agreed, there must be a midway point between exploitation and being sent home from the airport.

The third and often most disquieting issue is what I think of as the problem of incongruous destination. It started when a diligent, well-mannered, slightly timid and short-sighted student once told me that he was going to do ``voluntary work” in part of an English inner city into which, I happened to know, Alsatian dogs will only enter in pairs. What kind of voluntary work? We never could establish what kind because he did not know. What is the teacher’s role at that moment? Tell the student not to go? Inform him that in that area elderly people often do not go outside doors after 5pm? Call his mother?

My stock response is a pat reminder that the world is not as safe as the immediate vicinity of his apartment block complex. I recall printing out for him city bus timetables, supermarket locations, and a list of pubs that locals avoided. From afar I became the opposite of homesick for a place where I had never lived. He accepted them all gratefully and then was gone. But on a hyper-connected planet, pastoral care, if that is what this is, is not constrained by time or location. The brief continues long into the student’s excursion.

And this can be even more troubling. A young woman on an intern program in New York emailed to ask whether she should accept an invitation from a stranger she met on the street in her suburb to go skateboarding in downtown Manhattan. What to say? Sounds exciting, but could end up in the newspaper. I asked one of the older female students to deal with it.

Neil Armstrong can be contacted at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.