Weather. War. Teaching. Learning. Decisions.

On Tuesday mornings I teach small group conversation in the low level ESL class at the Kyle Learning Center.  Today I had planned a lesson about the weather.  Because I don’t speak Spanish I usually base the lessons around a page or two in the Spanish/English picture dictionary that I photocopy for the students.  We work on pronunciation of English words together and then I have the students get into groups and work on practicing their conversation skills using the words they learned that day.  The students and I talked about the differences in weather in Texas and other parts of the U.S.  We talked about kinds of weather the students had experienced like heat waves, hurricanes, and rain while I described sleet, tornados and snowstorms.   After I explained the difference between a blizzard and a lizard, one student asked me where I was from.  I told them I had moved from Minnesota, but my parents were in the U.S. military and I had lived a lot of places including Germany and Alaska.   Another student asked why people join the military if they know they could go to war and die. This is such a complex topic I was caught off guard and had to think a moment about how to talk about the question with a group of ESL students.  Often in class I get pulled off topic by random questions, but they are usually about concepts like wishing someone good luck, the difference between tree and three, or how to tell someone to have a good day.  I am learning that as a teacher it is difficult to simplify concepts down to the bare bones of a topic and to not teach from a biased point of view.  At the same time I like to explain my opinion, clearly stating that it is just that, about topics so that the students are engaged in a discussion using critical thinking.  So…..in a few seconds I had to formulate my thoughts about how to talk about the military/war/world powers into a well-rounded chunk of information that answered the question. So I launched into an explanation about why people join the military even though they could be sent to fight in a war.  (I excluded my father’s story about getting drunk with a bunch of his friends and daring each other to get tattoos and to fill out an application to enlist in the army.  My father was surprised that he was the only one of his friends accepted even though he had flat feet, a pin in his ankle, and didn’t remember filling the application out in the first place).  I talked about the Vietnam War, draft cards, the Berlin Wall, communism, etc.  After a short amount of time one of the students said – okay, that was enough of that topic! We hopped back on the topic of the weather, and the students looked at pictures of news reporters experiencing different types of weather and described them to their partners.  At the end of class we said we would see each other next week.    The question that the student asked has made me think about so many things today.  My thoughts have been swirling around how and why we make the decisions that we do as individuals.  The last few weeks I have been stressing myself out trying to decide what to do after my AmeriCorps experience ends.  I have never been able to make decisions quickly - usually it is agonizing and I beat myself up a lot. Today's experience in class has reminded me that instead of being so burdened by the thoughts of having to make decisions, that I should be thinking that I am privileged to be able to make those decisions.