I’d like to embark upon a brief ekphrasis of a unique website, byzantium1200.com.

Some of my favorite poems by my favorite poet dwell on the splendor and mystery of Byzantium. I’ve always been fascinated by the Eastern Roman Empire, and not entirely out of Gibbonish dispassionate historical interest, but for some of the more romantic reasons that I assume attracted Yeats: the enticingly tragic idea of a vanished civilization; the strange and fascinatingly odd persistence of a shard of the Roman Empire into the 1400s as a shadowy, besieged offshoot made strange by ecstatic Christianity and Eastern pomp; golden mosaics and clockwork songbirds.

As such, my idea of Byzantium is usually the sort of thing that regrettably looks less interesting the more closely you investigate it. Each new book I read about the history of the place threatens to diminish the allure of my romantic preconceptions. However, today I stumbled across something which is securely grounded in the actual history of the city yet which also, I feel, shares something of Yeats’s Platonic, clockwork-and-mosaics sense of wonder.

The website is nothing less than some driven person’s attempt to make a virtual reconstruction of the entire city of Constantinople. For some reason they decided to pretend to focus on the year 1200 A.D., but obviously the virtual edifices tend to have a timeless, golden-age quality. Over sixty buildings have been resurrected from nothing but dust, documents and the few stones which remain.

It’s not a museum exhibit, scholarly paper, movie backdrop or a video game, but something which intriguingly combines aspects of those more familiar types of project.

In fact, if you ask me this isn’t just an elaborate exercise in simulated 3D architecture. It’s a work of art that spits in the faces of Time and Ruin, and an example of mankind’s ability to put a heartbreaking amount of energy and effort into any sort of imaginative pursuit, no matter how clumsy or prosaic the tools involved might have seemed when they first appeared. Honestly, when you first saw Tron or played Pac-Man, did you think that in a decade or two people would be conjuring long-dead cities into minutely detailed virtual existence - for fun?

The site’s links section points to several other, similar online projects. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending the next couple of days perusing these - and wondering if I could ever do something similar with my pitiful skills in SketchUp.

At one point, I made an offhand, meant-to-be-encouraging comment like “Sure, I don’t mind explaining that for you… these are tough problems”. The student became quite indignant, and with arms akimbo and a big frown said: “No! Problems easy! I just can’t read them!” And she was right.

The problem was a ten-line mess of English which involved students playing several games of chess, then predicting how many more games they would require to be tied. But the actual problem was 7+2=9. Once I read it aloud, the student knew the answer within milliseconds.

I reflected to myself that I had unconsciously made the mistake of conflating math ability with linguistic ability, and taken her clear need for language help as a sign that she needed some degree of math help. She didn’t. In my role as an ESL teacher, I need to fight against the snap judgment that surface comprehension of one particular language indicates something about the skill of a student to comprehend what’s actually being asked. They weren’t hard problems; she just couldn’t read them.

Since I get embarrassed speaking nonsense to strangers, I like to try to learn language by reading. In the past, I’ve begun German studies by slogging through Grimm’s fairy tales, and learned rudimentary Spanish by proofreading translated 401(k) brochures at work. In order to help me learn Thai, I looked around for a book that I knew well enough already so that I wouldn’t be confused by the plot. I found The Return of the King by Tolkien, an ideal choice in terms of my familiarity with the material, but probably about a thousand pages too long for my purposes. Undeterred, I bought it and started right in. Let the grand project begin!

The Thai version of the series title is, oddly, the same as the English one; it actually says, more or less, LORD AAF DAA RINGS in Thai letters. You’d think they could have come up with their own version.

The book also came with a removable map. Thai pretty much looks like some kind of mutant Elvish already, so seeing Tolkien’s map actually in Thai letters is fascinating. Those big letters say GONDOR.

I just spent about an hour translating the first sentence. Thai has no spaces between words, and the vowel notations are a bit obscure to me at this point, so to my untrained eye, after figuring out what I thought the letters were in English, the first sentence in the book looked like this:

PPPNMNGLDAAKMAJIJTSAKLMKANGKNDLF

Not very promising. But wait! PPPN? KNDLF? I know those rascals! Things snowballed from there, if snowball is the right verb to describe an hour of agonizing dictionary research. Soon I had produced the following translation:

“Pippin watch pass through out come from under dressing gown of Gandalf.”

Not exactly a masterpiece of lucid prose, right? I must have gone wrong somewhere, right? Nope! It’s pretty much on target. The English version is:

“Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf’s cloak.”

I was close! Apparently, I can translate Tolkien from Thai. One sentence down, many, many thousand to go.

We’ve only been in Bangkok for two days, and I’ve already accomplished one of my most feverishly anticipated goals, which was to find a Thai chess set. I got a cheap plastic set with a newsprint board in Carrefour for peanuts, and it’s pretty cute although I had to cut off a lot of leftover plastic on the mold lines.

The Thai version of chess is called Makruk and is, from what I can tell, the closest extant version to the ancient Indian game of Chaturanga. So Makruk is a lot like the original version of chess from which our European chess, as well as Chinese Xiang Qi and Japanese Shogi (seen below).

I mention all of this because my experience with researching the history of the game of chess has been a lot like my experience with new languages and cultures. As I was growing up, I was certain there was only one kind of chess. If I had known that there were Asian versions of chess (I didn’t), I would have definitely said that the European version was the only and best.

Now I know that versions of the same game are played all over the world, and I can’t imagine only being interested in one version. It’s the contrast between the different versions, their spectrum of colors and shapes and sizes, and the history behind how the different versions arose, which seems interesting to me - more interesting than the game itself, even. I feel the same way about languages, and the same way about cultures. How could I be content with knowing about just one?

Things have happened very quickly over the last couple of weeks and I’m still slightly in shock, but I think it’s starting to sink in. My wife Kim has been offered a job at the International School of Bangkok, and we’ll be moving there this summer.

I will be sad to leave Kuala Lumpur and the school where I’ve been having so much fun and gaining so much experience, but I am nothing but excited about this new opportunity to strike out on a new path and to learn more about a new part of the world.

I’ve always been fascinated by Thailand, its culture and religion, and its unique status as one of the few nations on Earth which have never been officially colonized by Europeans. I can’t wait!

Photo source: http://www.guidetothailand.com/

One of my favorite writers, Thomas Pynchon, gave a book of his early short stories the title Slow Learner. I feel that I catch on extremely quickly in certain aspects of life, but in terms of finding the most fulfilling career path I would have to admit I have definitely been a slow learner. Thus I recently found myself, having just turned 30, realizing for the first time that I would love to get a Master’s degree in education and to become an international school teacher. At the time, my wife was upset that I had not made this realization years ago; she is just one of many friends, family and coworkers who have, over the years, pointed out that I’d make a great teacher. But we all figure things out at our own pace, and I’m just glad that I have taken the right turn onto this immensely rewarding path.

My decision to become a teacher struck me suddenly. It did not, however, come hurtling down out of a clear blue sky. It was one of those moments in life where a jumble of apparently unrelated puzzle pieces suddenly come together to reveal a picture of unexpected beauty.

One piece of the puzzle was my love of languages and words. I first began to sense this intense interest when, as a child, I read everything I could get my hands on. I began to better understand it when, as an undergraduate English and History major, I was lucky enough to study abroad in London and learn about my own language in the land where it first developed. I began to broaden this interest when, after graduating, I worked in a translation firm and was exposed to bits and pieces of dozens of different languages. Finally, I began to deepen my love of languages and words when we moved to Munich, Germany, and I started trying to teach myself, in addition to the German I needed in the workplace, several other European languages. Now, my work as a full-time replacement/substitute teacher in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, constantly brings new and exhilarating opportunities to share my love of English and of languages in general with students whose first languages range from Icelandic to Japanese.

Another piece of the puzzle which led me to decide to become an international teacher was my longstanding fascination with travel and foreign cultures. As noted above, I was lucky enough to study abroad during college and then live and work in Europe a few years after that, and I now live and work in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All these experiences have only increased my appetite for new countries and new ways of looking at the world. International teachers are triply blessed: they interact with students, teachers and parents from many cultures, they live and work in fascinating places – and on top of all that, they have opportunities to travel to even more new places during their free time. I can think of few careers which provide such exciting exposure to the diversity our world has to offer.

The third, and perhaps most important, piece of the puzzle for my decision to become a teacher was my genuine love of helping people learn. This is why I began tutoring and adult ESL instruction in Munich around five years ago, but even those positions never seemed to be quite enough for me. My excess desire to share my enthusiasm for learning would spill over into long speeches on any number of topics, given to anyone who would listen. My conversational forays often began with things like “Actually, during the Roman Empire those were called…,” “Another word with that same root is…,” or “Did you know where that expression actually comes from?” Soon after I began substitute teaching at an international school, I realized to my surprise that I had found a place where I could share knowledge in a way that could truly make a difference in people’s lives. Now, even during my short time as a teacher, I feel I have definitely inspired many students with my enthusiasm, creativity and humor, and it’s been an extremely satisfying experience for me.

Until recently these three skills or interests of mine, along with several other, smaller pieces of the puzzle, were parts of my life, but always separately. I worked in a translation company, which satisfied my interest in language, but while working there I was unable to see new parts of the world. Then I lived in Europe and worked as a writer and editor, which let me travel and play with language, but I never felt like I was making a difference. Now I feel that I’ve realized where I belong. Every moment of growth I’ve had along the way has helped bring me to this important choice. My nine years of real-world professional experience as a writer and editor, for example, have given me the background to be able to truly share with students both the exacting practicalities and limitless possibilities of the English language. As I mentioned at the beginning of this statement, I may be a slow learner – but I wouldn’t have done it any other way.

This web log will contain professional information about me as an educator, as well as anything I might have to share regarding education. I am excited to have this forum to share my background, ideas and goals as a teacher with the world.

Please use the tabs above to navigate through what I have here so far.