A Virtual World Tour

Maryah lives is Saudi Arabia. She’s five years old and speaks under one hundred words of English. That’s where I come in. I teach her my language in thirty-minute chunks over Zoom. A lot my little students can obediently name off the objects on my vast collection of educational flash cards, but Maryah does so much more. She’s driven to communicate and has a talent for stringing her limited vocabulary together to really say something. Ignoring my lesson plan, she carries her phone to her room to show me her Barbie collection. “Like,” she says, holding up a messy-haired doll. She beams at me and grabs another. “Like. Oh yes. Happy. Pink!”

Sally lives in South Korea. Like many of my kids, she’s adopted an English name to use for her lessons. At the age of six, Sally speaks fantasies as facts, and does so with a level of fluency that almost makes me forget she’s speaking her second language. Every lesson with her is a journey into the absurd. She explains to me that fear smells like gummy bears and that she knows aliens are real because she saw one in the zoo. Her dream in life is to be a cat.

Chun Yu, in China, has been working with me since she was three years old. She’s seven now. She used to think I was an app, just a fat and weirdly human-looking version of Duolingo. She’s grown up enough to understand that I’m a real person, just foreign and far away.

As a kid, I used to watch this cartoon— Inspector Gadget. I don’t remember much about it, just that the inspector had a “TV Phone”. It seemed so amazing! A child of the 80’s and early 90’s, I couldn’t begin to imagine the technological advancements that would one day make my career possible. Sure, I daydreamed sometimes about having a super cool TV phone, but I would have never guessed that I’d grow up and find myself in an endless stream of video calls with people from all over the world.

I’m an English as a Foreign Language teacher, by the way. I started my career in Wuhan, China, where I lived and worked for eleven years. I switched to online teaching because I loved my job, but wanted to try something closer to home. So far, I’ve taught over five hundred students from thirty-eight different countries. Every day is a virtual trip around the globe. I might start the morning in Taiwan and finish up the afternoon in Germany, with a detour in Columbia along the way.

The COVID-19 pandemic made me realize the importance of the international connections my job allows me to be a part of.

Little Maryah, in eternally sweltering Saudi Arabia, got to build a snowman for the first time while she was deep in lockdown. It was the morning after a blizzard for me, and I carried my IPad outside, while Maryah’s face giggled on my Zoom screen. I dug into the snow on camera and started to build, letting Maryah instruct me on how many eyes our snowman should have and whether he should be happy or sad.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Sally proudly showed me how to use a face mask. Later, as the pandemic wore on, she showed me how she used her mask as a slingshot to pass notes in her newly reopened class. I tried to warn her against doing that, but I doubt it worked. At any rate, I’m sure her (hopefully not too germ-encrusted) notes are as vibrant and creative as she is.

While Chun Yu’s parents were in the thick of China’s extremely strict COVID lockdown, she observed how baba and mama always sat at the desks in their home offices, typing away on their computers. She wanted an office of her own, so her parents constructed one for her out of cardboard boxes. She took her English language classes in her “office” from that point forward, right up until the day when it eventually fell apart.

I tell these stories because they’ve made up the entirety of my life for past year. I have some serious respiratory problems, so I didn’t leave my house (except twice to vote) for a full twelve months during the pandemic’s height. During this time, I truly felt like I had the best and most interesting job in the world. I felt that way when Maryah took me to her window to show me a Saudi Arabian afternoon, and when Sally explained South Korean holidays to me. I felt that way because whenever Chun Yu had a snack or drink during our class, she’d press it against the camera of her computer to “share” it with me.

The world is big, and I’m a part of it. I can’t be out having adventures right now, but I can still learn, and I can still teach. I can impact others, and they can impact me. That’s the power of my job.