So You Wanna Be a Rock Star? Teach English.

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Being an English teacher in a foreign country is rarely assumed to be on par with being a rock star, but sometimes I have to second-guess myself. I am somewhat famous in my school in Spain. The kids come up to me constantly to touch my hair, marvel at my tattoos, and pepper me with questions of all kinds. I can be halfway across the soccer field and still hear my name being shouted from the open windows of the school. People blatantly point at me in the streets and the teachers go out of their way to accommodate my needs. During break, my coffee is already purchased before I even have a chance to pull out my wallet. If I happen to cough in the middle of class, I am immediately brought a glass of water. If there is anything that I need, I have no doubt that it would appear in front of me within seconds of asking, if not before. There is a rumor that the Basque people hold a very private and insular culture, but my experience has been nothing short of the opposite.

Further heightening my rock star complex is the fact that once a week, I paper the towns with self-promotion. In order to draw attention to my private conversation hour advertisements, I have designed my posters to resemble concert announcements. “El Mundo es Grande, Pero Podemos Hacerlo Mas Pequena” it reads, and this translates as: “The world is big, but we can make it smaller.” I decided on this slogan because when you are teaching someone another language – essentially, that is what you’re doing: making the world closer and more accessible to them.

Rock stars boast an aura of glamour and enchantment due their ability to cross boundaries and communicate with all kinds of people in a creative way. Yet as a language teacher, I like to think I have these same qualities. Think about the last time you witnessed a twenty-minute Phish jam or when Jimi Hendrix used to shred on the guitar. It’s all improvisation. They do what feels good, what makes sense, and what they think people will like and understand. It is a similar kind of communication when learning and teaching a language.

I have to find new ways to talk to people, with only a few words of mutual understanding. I use my hands. I laugh. I stick out my tongue. I point. I dance. I show pictures. I play songs on my iPod. I do anything I can. Every day is a puzzle where I have to figure out how I am going to convey what I want to say. Sometimes I don’t get it right. Sometimes, I perform a song terribly, but most of the time, I break through that fine layer of mist, hit that high note, and everything at once makes perfect sense to everyone in the room. Suddenly, I am talking to someone even though we cannot speak the same language. It is quite simply the most amazing thing I have ever experienced…and I get to experience it every single day. I am constantly invigorated by a skill that I never even knew I had: the ability to communicate, to teach English.

So please, never let the difference in language become a barrier for understanding and getting to know the rest of the world. People can and do communicate without words every single day. You can learn the true essence of someone’s character without even holding a conversation. When you want desperately to express yourself, you find a way and it is usually a method far more entertaining and memorable than speaking.

The strength of our universal commonality, sin palabras, is something that singer and conductor Bobby McFerrin already knows. His demonstration at this year’s World Science Festival shows that the pentatonic scale is not only beautiful, but mutually translatable, as are so many aspects of our existence.

So, I guess, sitting in the teacher lounge of my school while my students peek into the window at me and wave manically, beckoning me to play, my take-away message is this:

We can communicate without words, we can cross boundaries, improvise, re-create, and therefore, we all have a little bit of rock star in us.