Departures

The two-level suburban train clanks out of Central Station. Heading away from the city, it's not as crowded as the incoming trains, but I still find myself having to stand by the doors. We creak and rattle across several sets of points before finding our suburban heading, passing through increasingly unfamiliar station names. Outside, it's an achingly clear blue morning; the air is chilly, but the sun is starting to warm the day. It's June, which means the start of winter and the end of the semester just round the corner. Essay marking and clear blue skies. And that end-of-semester exhaustion. It's been another long semester: conferences in Manila, Vancouver, Singapore, Abu Dhabi; I was teaching from 7 to 9 last night; and here I amon a Friday morning, heading off to find a small language school somewhere in the suburbs whose address I fortunately remembered to print off from my e-mail late last night.

The TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) practicum. For many of us involved in teacher education, the teaching practicum holds, I think, a certain ambivalence: It's hard work; it's disruptive; it involves lots of traveling; it's too time consuming; it demands that we show expertise in a domain from which we are often increasingly distanced in our current work.