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Travel And Transformation

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Lately, one of the toughest things about writing this column has been deciding what to write about. There is plenty of education news to discuss, but it’s mostly depressing—budget cuts and job shortages. I feel awful for the students going onto the market now. There are so many talented students in both English and Education that are entering a bleak job market and are essentially competing amongst themselves for a handful of positions. So anyway, I didn’t want to write about that because it’s nothing everyone doesn’t already know and isn’t already upset about.

So then I thought I should write about the New England Writing Projects Annual Retreat we’re hosting at UConn this weekend, but I really should write about that next week after it has happened and I have something to report on. Right now the only thing I could really write about is how frustrated I am by people who cancel at the last moment.

OK, so I will stop writing about that because I don’t want to get worked up. Especially since I’m really looking forward to the retreat and to the open mic event we organized with the Creative Writing kegiatan for Friday night.

But organizing a conference has certainly made the week a little crazy. And if that weren’t enough, my wife and six year old son leave tomorrow morning for Spain. My wife Amy is the head of a high school world language department, and she typically takes students abroad every other year. She has taken students to Spain (several times), Costa Rica (twice), Ecuador and the Galapagos, and Argentina and Uruguay. This year there was a trip to Costa Rica in November that had been planned well in advance. Then one day last spring a high school teacher named Cesar from Cordoba, Spain contacted Amy about doing a one-and-one home exchange between their schools. Students from the school in Cordoba would come to my wife’s school in the fall and then students from my wife’s school would go to Cordoba in the spring. The plan was for this to take place in 2010-11. Amy was eager to agree. Later that spring she got a call from Cesar, who said there was good news and bad news. The good news was that his school had gotten the grant they had applied for to get funding for the trip. The bad news was that the grant was for 2009-10, meaning Amy had to prepare to host students from Spain that coming fall. The insanity that ensued from that phone call is for another day. But now it is time for Amy’s students to head to Spain for the second half of the exchange. Tomorrow morning Amy, another teacher, eighteen high school students, my son, and the other teacher’s twelve year old daughter leave for Cordoba, where they will be till April 24.

Cormac is six and by the time he returns he will have been to thirteen US states, Quebec, London, Paris, Florence, Pisa, Madrid, and Cordoba. I didn’t go abroad to Spain until I was fifteen, and then not again till my girlfriend and I backpacked around Western Europe the summer after her senior year and my completion of the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates. Amy and I are so happy to be able to offer our kids the opportunity to travel, even if it means being ancillary to a group of high school students.

My trip abroad during my sophomore year of high school was simply transformative, and I only spent three weeks in Spain. For most of that time I lived with a family who had two kids my age—Susana, who was a year older than me, and Raul, who was a year younger than me—and a younger son. They lived in a contemporary flat in the new part of Valladolid, which had been the capital during the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus met the king and queen in Valladolid, and he died there not long after his voyage. We took a day trip to see the castle of Ferdinand and Isabella, which at the time was under no special protection, and I remember high school boys riding motor cross bikes up and down what had once been the moat.

I went to classes most days but took frequent day- and weekend trips. My favorite trips were to Salamanca and Segovia, and also an overnight trip to Toledo. Our trip to Segovia was memorable, in part, because we took a bus to the outskirts of town to visit a famous garden, where I got ‘lost’ with two Spanish girls I had met, and the bus returned to town without us. We had to hitchhike back. Oddly enough, when the Spanish students had come to my high school the previous fall and we took them on a day trip to New York, I got separated from the group with one of my classmates and one of the Spanish girls, and since I had spent the summers of my childhood in New York, I just gave the two of them a walking tour and made sure we got back to Penn Station by five in the evening to meet everyone for the train ride home.

So while I don’t hope that any of the students on this trip with my wife pull any of the stunts I pulled as a fifteen year old, I do hope that they—and my son—see amazing places and meet amazing people, and come back feeling transformed in some small way.
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