My MissTEPings

Misstep - a blunder; to take a wrong, misplaced or awkward step; to go astray. Hmmmm... that sounds like a certain phenomena I've become quite familiar with during this process of learning how to "teach" and become a "teacher".

The summer after graduating from UC Davis with a B.A. in Spanish in 2012, I made the step up to graduate school at UCSB's Gevirtz Teacher Education Program. Fearing the worst of Norcal prejudices to be true, I nervously embarked on the 8 hour drive down south along the 101 leaving behind my beloved Bay Area. Upon arriving, I surrendered any biases, now replaced with awe for the exquisitely stunning combination of ragged mountains, friendly coastline, and faraway islands on the horizon.. the adventure began! I met several of my new student cooperative house-mates gearing up for that night's Isla Vista toga party. Although our house seemed surrounded by fiendish fraternities, it was also just a block from campus and a HopSkip&aJump to the beach. I rode my bike around IV, and wondered who had made the infamous grammatical error upon naming the fiesta street Del Playa, instead of De La Playa. In the mornings I picked and ate fresh avocados from the tree in my front yard and oranges from the back. Then I rushed my bike the 1 minute ride to the Gevirtz School of Ed. building to make it in time to join the pre-class gymnastic Knoll-tivities, craft a 10-minute feely free write, charlar con mis colegas en Spanglish, design innovative butcher-paper sketchings, or alter and admire post-it-covered walls once bare. Between classes I ran in the sand at campus point, and afterwards washed the oil stains off the bottoms of my feet. In the fall I started student teaching and the beach trips became few and far between... I struggled to discover my style, role, and objectives as a student teacher, while also trying to write a first chapter of my thesis inquiry paper. I met inspiring, caring, and challenging colleagues, students and teachers. I had ups and downs.. and turnings all around;  and still made great headway towards achieving many of my personal and professional goals. But then, I took a step away...

A pretty hefty step indeed - all the way down to marvelous Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! The change of scenery has taken me astray from TEP, but not from teaching. For the past 7 months I have been working as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in several undergraduate English courses at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, teaching two of my own extension courses: one on Cultural Comparisons between Brazil & the States (looking at such topics as college-life, Brazilian Funk vs. Hip-hop, Valentine's Day vs. o Dia dos Namorados, the sudden surge of Brazilian Protests vs. Occupy Wall Street, etc), and the other course on Applying Interactive Teaching Techniques for Language Teachers (a real snoozeFest in contrast, right!?).

Despite the added intensity that comes with... living in a packed city of over 6 million brasileiros, shifting away from my second language of comfort (Español to Portuñol -> a Spanish & Portuguese hybrid), finding shelter from sudden tropical flash downpours with my 2 dollar umbrella, holding onto a moto-taxi for dear life while speedily squeezing through the skinny streets that wind up & into an enigmatic favelas of improvised cliff-hugging dwellings, staring bright-eyed and bushy tailed into the clearing mists of anti-riot tear-gas that obscures the battle-line between protestors and police when suddenly receiving a face-full of the putrid fumes myself, and more... yes, despite these now-laughable loco life experiences, the step away from TEP has also allowed me to temporarily escape our jam-packed schedule, lower my gears, take a deep breath of rapidly diminishing Amazonian air, ruminate some more upon our foundations, and experiment with creative ways to apply what I have learned thus far to a foreign reality - so the trip to Brazil... NOT a misplaced step in the least! ..Not counting, of course, the many awkward attempts at shimmying my way into a sprightly stepping roda de samba, forró festa, or dimly-lit zouk disarray.

My 10-month journey and eventual departure is rapidly coming to a close, and while a precipitated sense of Saudades for Rio grows, I know that I am almost ready to return and finish what I started in Santa Barbara. MissTEP? I sure do - I look forward to rejoining the community, reentering as a confusingly old & yet new kid of the cohort, and stumbling over a Spanish now infested with Brazilian Portuguese flavors.