The fastest year of our lives

Talk of the Quad: Stung and restless

As the old saying goes, sometimes you are the scorpion and sometimes you are not. More often, however, you are the 20-year-old ecology student who found the scorpion with your foot.
Ceini—who was rubbing my spasming calf muscle—said, “Well, at least now you have a great story to tell.”
“You can definitely win the Most Badass Bowdoin Abroad Experience Award,” Graham chuckled. “If this doesn’t kill you first.”
We all laughed, though my peers and I were out of our depth in the rural South African bush. Could scorpions kill you? How necessary was a trip to the hospital? With no Internet access, no cell phone service and no car, the decision was made for us. We would stay at the Tshulu camp for the night.
Philly, our South African game guard, squashed the scorpion with his boot. He placed the body in a Sasko bread bag to assess the creature from behind a plastic barricade. The scorpion had a big tail and small pinchers.
“Did you know this area has some of the most poisonous scorpions in the world?” he asked. “But those ones are smaller. You should have really watched where you were stepping.”We later found out the scorpion was actually the most poisonous in southern Africa. The Parabuthus granulatus kills about four to six people in South Africa every year—usually children, but I digress. I received a smaller dose of the toxins, saving me from an expensive helicopter ride to the not-so-nearby hospital. It was an unfortunate circumstance with very fortunate results. For that, I am grateful.
As I sat in bed that night, alternating from one odd position to the next to quell the pain, I began to think about how peculiar the whole situation was. Of course the only serious scorpion sting in my abroad programs’ history occurred at our most isolated travel location. Of course the scorpion was the most poisonous species in the region. And of course I was stung while procrastinating to avoid writing a 20 page literature paper. Karma is cruel.
Though the situation included all of the factors that could go horribly wrong, it did not. I never went to the hospital. Instead, I subsisted on an absurd amount of ibuprofen—a limited and precious resource abroad.
We should have tried to denature the venom with hot packs; we instead tried to numb my hypersensitive nerves with ice. I could have, and probably should have, presented systemic symptoms up to eight hours after the sting. I should have been hospitalized for six days, with a steady stream of nerve block pulsing through my veins. But it wasn’t necessary. In that moment, I was both lucky and cursed.
The burning and stinging sensation travelled up to my knee. I found myself contemplating how I ended up running into a scorpion while wearing shoes and a headlamp. The necessary precautions were not enough to fend off the insidious savannah fauna. So what went wrong?
I replayed the scene in a loop as I paced the floor to increase circulation to my limb. Instead of looking at my feet with the headlamp, I was illuminating the path further ahead. My negligence opened a prime opportunity for the scorpion.
The venom made one notion clear. Looking too far into the future can cripple you in the present; preparation does not imply protection.
As the last of midterms roll through, it is important to remember precautions, like studying, only go so far. I plan to take a pause from work to appreciate the view, the chirping of crickets, sun rays peeking through the clouds, and laughs shared with my professors.
If we can disregard the path ahead and focus on where we are now, we may just avoid the threatening tail of the scorpion at our feet. If the scorpion stings, the toxins may take a few days to process. But I promise, the pain subsides by the time you finish watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” for the fourth time. (For clarification purposes, in addition to a shortage of ibuprofen in the African savannah, there are also limited movie options.)
To quote seven-time American Dodgeball Association of America All-Star Patches O’Houlihan, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” Instead, I would recommend skipping the wrenches altogether. Preparation is only effective to a point and obstacles will tackle you regardless. So you may as well stop to smell the pine trees along the way. Just watch your step.
Elana Vlodaver is a member of the Class of 2016.

Talk of the Quad: The Bowdoin myth

I applied to Bowdoin for two reasons: The College had accepted my best friend early decision, and the Office of Admissions had sent me a glossy brochure, inside of which was one photo in particular that appealed to the romantic idealism of my 17-year-old self.
The photo showed a group of Bowdoin boys, bundled in brightly colored winter jackets as they played pickup hockey on the Quad. Hubbard Hall, framed by a row of trees and bathed in the light of a winter sunset, loomed in the background.
For me, the photo was—and remains—a more generous offer than William DeWitt Hyde’s “Offer of the College.” It offered me a myth of Bowdoin, the myth of a place where the past bled into the present, a place where I could participate in academic toil one day and tomfoolery the next, a place with a literary quality that I'll never be able to describe.
Daily life at the College can’t possibly live up to this myth. During a hectic day of quizzes, 100-page readings, club meetings, essays and internship applications, it’s impossible to remain conscious of everything that life at Bowdoin means. At the end of that sort of busy day, I trudge home across the Quad, my head down, already scheduling myself for a frantic tomorrow.
When I look back at Bowdoin, I won’t remember those days. I’ll remember my four years at Bowdoin for those rare moments when the myth overcame the mundane—those moments when I lived the myth.
I’ll remember a Saturday in January of my sophomore year when two friends and I set out to convert Reed House’s backyard into an ice rink.
We ran garden hoses from Reed’s basement bathroom up the stairs, out a window, and across the yard. None of us had any rink-making experience (and we were all humanities majors), so we expected the process would only take a few minutes. We thought it would be as simple as spraying some water, watching it freeze, and grabbing some skates.
It quickly became clear that we wouldn’t be skating for hours, so we descended into the basement and ratcheted up the water pressure by turning on the hot water. The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beers, watching “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and intermittently checking on the glacial progress of the rink. Just before dinner, a towel-clad Reed resident burst into our room and informed us with polite anger that there was no hot water in our 28-person House. And when the hot water returned 36 hours later, the rink was still hardly more than a soggy lawn.
I’ll remember reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance” in the very same Massachusetts Hall in which Hawthorne studied. I’ll remember poring through “Tales from Bowdoin,” a 1901 book described as “some gathered fragments and fancies of undergraduate life in the past and present told by Bowdoin men.” Lounging on the windowsill in the Shannon Room, I’d put the book down from time to time and looked out on the Quad, imagining the Bowdoin men of the 19th century mischievously sneaking toward the Chapel under the cover of darkness.
But most of all, I’ll remember late nights at the Orient House when, after 13 hours of work, we clustered around a computer and collaborated on the final and most important part of the production process: conjuring up a suitably clever name for the editorial. We would spend all night considering Bowdoin’s purpose and its policies, and it all culminated in this pre-dawn moment when every joke was hilarious and no suggestion was too terrible to consider.
At the end of those nights, I strolled across the Quad and stopped at its center to gaze up at Hubbard Hall, which often looked as if it had been superimposed in front of the stars. And in those brief moments, I knew full well that I was living the myth of Bowdoin.
Garrett Casey is a member of the Class of 2015 and a co-editor in chief of the Orient.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Benjamin Vinel

Contributor

April 17, 2015

Every year, five postgraduate foreigners come to Bowdoin to teach their respective mother tongues as teaching fellows (TFs): two for French and one for Spanish, German and Italian.

The college has partnerships with universities that conduct interviews with students holding the equivalent of a B.A. in English. In each university, the student deemed to be the most adequate is offered a position as a TF. Bowdoin also sends its own students to be TFs in some of those universities.

I am one of this year’s TFs, coming from Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France after a year teaching in an English secondary school. I have to say, the Bowdoin experience has exceeded my expectations—and the expectations of most of the other TFs.

The conditions we are offered are quite exceptional—Bowdoin provides us with accommodation, food, a return flight ticket and a $5,000 stipend. Although it is not easy to save money when you travel during vacations, this enabled us to come here in a comfortable financial situation, and we can enjoy Bowdoin’s amazing food (though not all TFs agree that it’s amazing).

Obviously, living on the campus of an American college is a valuable experience for us—we can embrace a very different culture from our own. A year at Bowdoin is basically a year of free activities. I’ve had a great time singing with the Bowdoin Chamber Choir, and I’ve enjoyed free culture with all the concerts, shows and conferences on various topics. Public conferences are quite rare in France, so I appreciate even more the fact that every day or so, there is an opportunity to improve my knowledge of society, history, politics and many other subjects.

Teaching is an important part of our schedule and is something we enjoy—that’s why we are here! However, we do not have the same workload—the Spanish TF normally is the busiest because of the size of the Spanish department.

On the other hand, the French TFs teach only three hours a week this semester but we are involved in many other activities—WBOR’s French-speaking radio program, “Pardon my French,” drama with a French literature class, helping with vocabulary in the Contemporary France through the Media course and preparing a website about recurrent mistakes in French.
We also do not teach the same way. While most TFs lead conversation hours, with the Spanish TF also giving literature-related classes, the German TF’s task is different.

“I assist a professor in the German class,” said Sarah Kissel, who studies at Mainz University. “Then I work with each student one-on-one. So basically, a lot of conversation and helping them with their writings.”

“I really like it when I help them, it’s a difficult language. I think it’s really cool to see their improvement, especially last semester,” she added. “I had these weekly conservation classes with them, and we could really realize the improvement they made over the few months. That was really cool”.

Teaching represents three challenges for us. The first one is that we need to be ready to explain any grammar rule the students might ask about. It does not sound amazingly difficult, but we are not trained as teachers and in most cases, we have been taking those grammar rules for granted since our childhood and never really thought about them.

I have often found myself in the position of being asked about grammar and having to analyze my own language in my mind so that I can figure it out and give an answer. This has definitely proved enriching as that way, we really learn a lot about our respective mother tongues.

The second challenge is that we have to prepare lessons. The main aim is getting the students to speak freely, but it is never easy to give them that confidence. The lesson needs to be a conversation more than a lecture, and whenever possible, fun. I try to draw inspiration from the TFs who taught me English at university, but my composed nature means I am not necessarily the most fun TF. My colleagues do not lack imagination, though.
“I do my best to find activities that work. It’s kind of a challenge,” said Tatiana Le Mestric, a French TF from the University of Western Britanny. “I adapted the game of beer pong to make students practice conjugations. I think that was fun. The students were really surprised, but it worked!”

The third challenge basically is our position as a TF. We are in this no man’s land between students and faculty. According to our OneCards, we’re faculty, but we’re allowed to take classes as students, and we have student insurance. We are not much older than actual students, so finding the right balance can be hard, especially with those we teach.

“Sometimes, trying to be friendly and serious at the same time is challenging,” said Angela Lavecchia, who studied in Naples, Italy. “You have to force them, at some point, to do what they’re supposed to do. For me, it’s kind of challenging, but I still like it”.

While some of us have found it hard to get acquainted with students outside the classes we teach, we certainly enjoyed each other’s company.

“I have met wonderful people and I’m really glad that I can call the other TFs my friends,” Lavecchia added. “I really think that if it wasn’t for them, my experience at Bowdoin wouldn’t be as happy and cheerful as it is.”

Most of us have decided what we are going to do after Bowdoin. While I am tackling a career in journalism, most TFs are obviously going to try to teach again. Le Mestric is considering another teaching experience abroad, while Kissel needs another one or two years at university to eventually teach English and German. And Lavecchia has applied to be an English teacher in a high school back in Italy. We are soon going our separate ways, but we will certainly keep very fond memories of our time at Bowdoin.

Benjamin Vinel is a teaching fellow in French at Bowdoin.

Comments are permanently closed.