GIVING THANKS

I’m sitting in the Princeton, New Jersey home of some old friends from Champaign-Urbana, Doug and Riki. I came out to the East Coast for a conference in Baltimore over a week ago and have used that event to piggy-back visits to an old housemate in DC, some old friends of my mom’s from her Johns Hopkins days who still live in Baltimore, other old friends of my mom’s from her Central College days, and Doug and Riki, where I’ll be eating the turkey today.

ACTFL

The conference was for the American Conference of Teachers of Foreign Languages, a national organization I joined for the first time this summer. My past career was in ESL, so I was more involved with TESOL, the national organization for that interest, but since my future career is broader, I thought ACTFL would be a good place to start. It just happened that the conference was in Baltimore this November. If it had been San Antonio, I probably wouldn’t have paid the expense, but Baltimore is close to a lot of people I’ve been wanting to see, so it was the old “kill two birds” scenario.

I had had a suspicion that ACTFL might turn out to be mainly an annual fun get-away for High School teachers of Spanish, French and German but was pleasantly surprised to find out that it is much more broadly based today. They now have representation from Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and the LCTL’s (“less commonly taught languages” lumped under one abbreviation). And it is much broader than just K-12 language teachers. Government, defense, and industry have come to play large roles, as well, and those are the sectors I’m mainly interested in in my job search.

In addition to attending sessions on the state of Arabic instruction in the US in K-12 and national initiatives for increasing the study of LCTL’s, I was particularly interested in casing the huge hall of exhibitors, mainly from the big textbook publishing houses like McGraw-Hill and language software companies. It was a way of checking out what companies might potentially hire someone like me and what the state of their computer-based products is.

A lot of the old textbook companies are now making “e-book” versions of their existing textbooks: putting their book entirely on the Web (.PDF files mainly). That’s not very impressive from my perspective, merely making an old form of media available - almost unaltered - in a new means of communication. But I did see some good examples of how the digital age has helped language learning opportunities progress. I spoke with the Palestinian developer of a DVD series of over 100 interviews with Arabic speakers on a wide variety of topics. It’s a huge quantity of authentic REAL Arabic that would be hard for some Arabic student in, say, Kalamazoo to have exposure to otherwise. And it comes with complete transcripts of all the conversations, exercises, etc. I also chatted with two women reps from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, who seemed interested when I said I was an instructional designer. I got the insider tip that three such positions would shortly become available in January (open only for a month), so that gives me a bit of time to get a portfolio together to apply early.

I also got together with Joy Peyton, an old SIL (Wycliffe) colleague who has worked at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington for over 20 years now. I had emailed her in DC and it turned out very conveniently that she would be attending ACTFL for her organization, as well. She’s been in touch with all aspects of foreign language teaching in the US, so I figured she would be a good person to talk to about what was going on in my field - and who was doing it.

I saved a good $400 staying with Mom’s old Baltimore friends Bill and Miriam Hyde. They were members of the Presbyterian church near Johns Hopkins nursing school, and Miriam’s parents, the Hasting’s, were like second parents to her (both now deceased). Bill is an retired Bell Telephone engineer who loves to travel, and they showed me a map of the 20-odd cruises they had taken all over the seven seas. They also treated me to a slide show of part of the Lewis and Clark trail they had prepared for a public show.
Yesterday, the day before Thanksgiving, I ventured up the New Jersey Turnpike up to Manhattan (but not into it) to visit some other friends of Mom’s living in the Jersey suburb of Rutherford, Tuggo and Verla Tagliabue. Eight miles from the city and yet it’s another world - a real small town with a cute downtown, Victorian homes and lots of tree-lined streets. Verla (nee Harmelink) was born in Sheboygan county just one day after Mom, and they both attended high school and Central College together. (Central is where Verla met ex-GI student Tuggo from New Jersey.) I hadn’t realized how often our family had visited them over the years. Tuggo mentioned that Dad had sold them the station wagon from our ‘64 US vacation and that Tuggo had driven us to the Manhattan docks in it to catch the Queen Mary for England! Verla has had serious medical problems the last year especially and uses a walker and wheelchair to get around. That made eating lunch out a bit of a major operation, but I think they appreciated the chance to get out - especially on a beautiful fall day like yesterday.

Tomorrow my East Coast adventure comes to an end. I have to return my rental car to Alamo by noon and fly back to LA. But now I have a pile of foreign language publisher catalogs, business cards of useful contacts, and a long to-do list to follow up on all the leads the ACTFL conference gave me.