A word of explanation...

What's that you said? What is “Pre-service Teaching”? I’m glad you asked...

I am on the cusp of completing my course of study in Teacher Education at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, OH which will grant me licensure to teach Language Arts classes to 7th-12th graders in Ohio schools. Before I may truthfully claim ownership of such hefty credentials, however, I must first successfully complete the Pre-service Teaching (sometimes referred to as “Student Teaching”) capstone to my course of study during which I am allowed to commandeer an existing classroom for a few months and wield the various teaching methods and strategies I have been honing for the past few years. Typically, one would be placed in a classroom within a school district local to one’s university when completing one’s Pre-service Teaching requirement, but, being practically anything and everything else besides typical, I – along with a small cadre of impetuously like-minded Teacher-Ed students – will be completing my Pre-service teaching in China where I will teach English as a second language to sixteen-year-old Chinese high school kids while immersing myself in Chinese culture.

This venture will be a challenge of mastodonic proportions, to be sure. Not only will I be completing my Pre-service Teaching requirement (which is, by all rights and privileges, the most difficult, most demanding component of my course of study in Teacher Education on its own), but I’ll also be completing it within a classroom environment with which I am totally unfamiliar with students whose grasp of the English language is shaky, at best, while simultaneously trying to acclimate myself to life within country and a culture vastly different from anything I’ve ever known and function on a day-to-day basis in a society where I – for the first time in my life – will be within the cultural minority.

And if all that wasn’t enough, there’s this to consider: my merry little band of travelers and I will be the first students to ever attempt a venture of this sort in the history of American academics. That is, we are the first ever American Teacher Education students to go to China to complete our Pre-service Teaching requirements. So, there’s no standard of excellence we have to worry about living up to, because we’re it! We’re the Gold Standard! We’re setting the bar! Whether or not future generations of American Teacher-Ed students are permitted to partake in an endeavor such as this hinges quite heavily upon our capacities to perform, to excel, and to be diplomatically sensitive! So, just in case this whole thing wasn’t enough of a pressure-cooker, we’ve got that sweet little cherry of anxiety to top it all off.

Not that I’m complaining or anything. Make no mistake of it, I consider myself extremely fortunate to be granted this monumental opportunity to not only travel around the planet and experience the cultural minutiae of a non-Western society, but to also gain a deeper understanding of the truly universal dilemmas and triumphs experienced in schools the world over. I’ve gained some level of celebrity by consistently responding to the derivative “What made you want to apply for this program?” question with “How could I not?” Seriously...how could I not? How could anyone not want to do what I’m doing? The experience of trying to teach in a Chinese boarding school while at the same time striving to make sense of day-to-day life in China will occasionally be a very trying, frustrating experience, I’m sure, but how could anyone be faced with an opportunity such as this – an opportunity to experience firsthand how life is lived half a world away (while simultaneously earning college credit) – and not leap toward it with unbridled fervor? Indeed, it will be a challenge that is truly epic in terms of both scope and complexity, but I consider that to be, without question, a substantial component of the venture’s allure. Why should I settle for earning my license to teach the same way everyone else does when I can earn it the way no one ever has before? Count me in.