Testament to Education - A Short Autobiography

Hey guys, I just submitted this piece of writing as part of an application to be a teacher through the Fulbright Fellowship. I'm pretty happy with it, and I thought it could enjoy a larger audience. If the prose seems a bit rigid, and there seems to be an abundance of the 1st person pronoun, well; it's an application for a Fulbright, enough said. Thanks to those who helped with this, and thank you for the kind and helpful comments! -Robbie

Being an important element of an application to teach native German speakers in Austria, it would be logical to state here clearly that it was the radiance of the German language and culture that sparked a boundless intellectual curiosity in me that grows daily. This, I cannot do. It was not the German language that ushered in such intellectual curiosity and delivered my application into your hands. It was one teacher, Rich Schellhas, who imparted to me the great inspiration needed to both appreciate and succeed in my educational pursuits and become a driven teacher.

Rewind to age fifteen. After a satisfactory performance in middle school, I entered the ninth grade at St. Paul’s Upper School, an academy priding itself on its efficient manufacture of Ivy League scholars following their parents’ footsteps to success. Failing to grasp how fortunate I was to have the opportunity of a quality education, I entered an ill-advised period of teenaged rebellion, ignoring the looming precipitous academic threshold: suddenly permanent transcripts, the cold judgmental reality of college entrance exams, and the looming unknown of adulthood.

First quarter, freshman year, my results arrived in an official envelope. The result of the first permanent academic marking period of my life: 1.7 GPA, C- average. Transcript already besmirched. One step from suspension. The school’s academic immune system took swift action; parents were contacted and vague, frightening words were whispered in hushed tones during somber meetings behind heavy doors. The following Monday I was given a stern warning and a new schedule. Honors math was replaced with basic geometry, my much cherished daily free period with Study Skills, and, mysteriously, Advanced Japanese with Introductory German.

7:00 a.m. the following morning found me reciting the peculiarities of the German alphabet with odd fascination as Rich Schellhas, a bright young German teacher, danced around the classroom with an atypical exuberance for anyone rising early to help a troubled student catch up. His clever mnemonics made German’s infamous grammar admittedly fun. His limitless energy and humor made vocabulary lists lively and tangible. A smile crept across my face as Herr Schellhas’s contagious vigor permeated across my rebellious mind. Learning was suddenly a great joy.

That first bleak morning was a bold turning point. Rich’s influence set in motion a metamorphosis that continues to shape my life. From that first class, I blossomed into a sustained period of academic achievement, enjoying the swift current of scholarly pursuit that had previously overwhelmed me. Yet, to say that Rich saved me would be inaccurate. He offered his hand when I was stumbling, and with his help I lifted myself up. He proffered an infinite well of inspiration from which I drew intellectual curiosity that delivered me from disillusionment, allowing me to mature and later convey the same vigor that changes students’ lives. Three years later I graduated with a 3.7 average and was awarded with ‘Most Improved Academic Standing’; four years after that I would graduate from Union College with numerous fellowships and honors accrued, Cum laude, double major, prepping for a teaching fellowship in Cambodia.

My teaching fellowship brings a new set of challenges, and leads me to draw increasingly on those values I learned in Rich’s classroom. My school is a nonprofit specialty school for gifted impoverished street children, where students are given a safe place to live, medical and dental care, three balanced meals a day, and a thorough education. Before entering the school, many of my students were living in a large garbage dump in Phnom Penh. Some had lost families at an early age to HIV or another of the infectious diseases rampant among slum inhabitants. Intact families were often negligent or abusive.

The school is grounded on the conviction that education is a force that can break the cycle of corruption and poverty plaguing the developing world, and the school requires the same conviction from its staff. Teaching children at The Global Child expands my job description into something far more dynamic, encompassing, and challenging than merely a teacher, and it doesn’t end with the closing bell. My colleagues and I are teachers, mentors, confidants, and role models to students who have spent most of their lives without these figures. Whether it’s during a lesson in the classroom or while sharing a meal at the boarding house, the students look to us for guidance and inspiration.

L to R: Chamroun, Sreymum, and Leakena in Practical Science

After an overwhelming day at school, when the hectic boarding home is too frenzied to return to, my student Sophal turns to me for solace. When frustrated with his studies and troubled by the seemingly impossible task of building a happy and sustainable future for himself, Vutha turns to me for advice, guidance, and comfort. They trust me to help deliver them to a better future, and the stakes are too high to let them down.

Marot and Thina, with Soda in foreground

The power of education is absolute. I’ve witnessed it in my own past, and I continue to witness it in the progress of my students. Education provides them an escape from the nightmare of living in abject poverty, from a certain future of collecting rubbish or selling their body to the highest bidder. Every day we confront the dichotomy between the haunting shadow of our students’ past lives and their radiant hopes for the future.

Sophal in computer class

To imagine they were written off to become prostitutes and drug peddlers only underscores my resolve to help them realize their dreams. Now, those who once lived in festering mountains of garbage have a safe place to live, learn, and pursue their own ambitious futures: Sophal, the future businessman, Sopheak, our budding physician. It is no coincidence my students and I are both living and pursuing futures we dreamed of when seemingly destined for failure. It is education that joined us and granted the power to pursue a better future.

Rithyka hard at work

And after especially difficult days, when steps backward outnumber those forward, I lean on my own belief in the value of education. It is in these moments, when the begging mothers and their swollen-bellied toddlers clutching empty milk bottles tug my sleeve particularly hard, when the desperate prostitutes lining the streets claw especially aggressively, when I visit the shantytowns of my students and struggle to remain composed, when the whirlwind of human suffering seems destined to feast on the hope of my students, to snap their will, humanity, and future in its ferocious maw with one cataclysmic fatal snap; it is during these dark moments that Rich’s gift to a troubled fifteen year old student glows particularly bright. Just as he planted the seed of learning in my brain, so do I strive to inspire a thirst for knowledge in my students and help them fight the undertow of poverty that threatens to pull them back into the poisonous milieu. Such is the quintessential value of education; it is a brilliant, infinite, resilient gift that doesn’t elevate, but instead inspires others to elevate themselves in trying times, even empowering others in the process.

Thear

I understand the value of education in a way few others from my cushioned background can. I was once a teenager ungrateful for the opportunities laid out before me. It took one exceptionally skilled educator to wake me to the power of my mind and encourage me to pursue a path of intellectual passion. I have flown across the world and shed the comforts of home for my belief in the value of education. Through this journey I have not only gained a far more intimate understanding of this value, but I have attained the perspective and meaning to extend to others the illuminating gift of education that was shared with me and diverted my own path towards failure.

The Catch-22 of Selflessness: A Call to Service for Human Beings

An only slightly tangential introduction

Sweaty palms, mustard stained cuticles, garlic bread breathe, gravy marred unhemmed khakis, and the cornucopia of new scents erupting from the suddenly unfamiliar body beneath. Pock marked cheeks, whiteheads and blackheads, creamsicle colored benzoyl peroxide stains on your favorite t-shirt, Differin®, Basiron®, Accutane® and Clearasil®, weekend devastating breakouts, exfoliants and creams and pads. Cataclysmic classroom erections, nocturnal emissions and dirty sheets. Hair erupting in strange, horrifying places. The sudden and swift eradication of cooties, female breasts, trainer bras, a new attractive force that challenged gravity in it’s incessant, inexplicable, tenacious pull. “Mixers”, swaying with locked elbows and clasped slippery hands to Hits From the 90’s. The troubling sexually charged pubescent argot of First, Second, and Third bases, capped by the awe-inspiring act of a Home Run or Grand Slam. Head gear, braces, spacers, expanders, and the latest torturous breakthroughs in dentally applicable metal alloys. Hair gel, body odor, peach fuzz, scraggly facial hair and explosive follicles. The supersession of ordinary logic in the proximity of the opposite sex. Pheromones and the myriad awkward confrontations they induced. Sipping skunked beer in abandoned parking lots while nervously eyeing all remotely feasible exits.

It’s not fair. They were exempt from the horrors of high school. It was us, the normal ones, who suffered the awkwardness, the straight armed dances, the stuttering, the smells, we exposed our skin to the chemical horrors of myriad exfoliants, we donned the cool unfamiliar metal of headgear and its cruel orthodontic cousins, we gelled our hair until it became a prosecutable weapon in some states, sprayed ourselves with Axe® and Tag® and Old Spice®. We endured the awkward boners that always demarcated a disconcerting lump in our trim trousers immediately before rising to answer a question in class or walking down the school chapel’s infinite aisle flanked by walnut benches crowded with probing eyes. We flailed in our vain efforts to impress the opposite sex, for reasons that were muddy at best, we drank the skunked light beer, filled our cheeks with dip, jockeyed for social status in every conceivable way, all of it to no avail.

And they didn’t even have to try; they were a world apart. If you were cool, the incessant jockeying for popularity, the scrutinizing glances from your peers, the worrying about social standing and physical appearance, the fumbling advances on girls; nonexistent. And if your pubescent titillations were anything like mine, you probably wanted to be a world apart from this mess as well, and thus wasted a disturbing amount of time devising ways to join the ranks of the cool to become finally automatically exempt from the awkward horrors of puberty.

Revisit those hormone and pheromone drenched hallways, and now imagine in an attempt to find refuge in the sanctuary of cool, vocally declaring your coolness to the world.

No way. Any high school student, current or former, knows that coolness is not declared. Coolness is emanated; one must show, not tell. Being so overt about the whole issue is the least cool thing you could ever do, and will probably land you head first in the nearest public toilet.

And so the Catch-22 of my high school days: declaring coolness proves just the opposite.

A Segue

New Oxford American Dictionary - Selfless: Adjective. Concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one’s own; unselfish: an act of selfless devotion. Derivatives: Selflessly (adverb) Selflessness (noun). Synonyms: Unselfish, altruistic, self-sacrificing.

Cavalier attitudes towards usage dilutes words. Dilution of words obscures and twists their ordinary meaning. Twisting this meaning opens new pathways but also causes problems, as our once solid foundation of words and meanings shifts and rumbles underneath our feet. This is natural - language is the amoeba of a billion tongues, amorphous and unpredictable, stretching itself outwards, its cilia probing the limits, occasionally engulfing and incorporating stray bits of others.

But, as Thoerau keenly noted, “You never gain something but that you lose something.” Consider words like love or beauty, or soberly ponder the real definition of starving amidst our modern lexical orgy. Yes, languages undoubtedly forge new pathways of expression, yet the corpses left behind are vast and mutilated.

It is the active vivisection of “selfless” that has far reaching implications.

True Selfless is extremely rare, yet, we find the term now a victim of the hapless cleaver of overuse. At every turn, particularly among expat circles in Cambodia, you find individuals masquerading as Truly Selfless Persons.

Remember our nostalgic trip back to high school and the issue of coolness? Declaring yourself as selfless is different from declaring yourself as cool in exactly 3 ways:

• No retaliatory swirlies.
• It causes serious problems for others instead of yourself.
• It actually seems to work for a while, in like bringing attention, praise, and elevated social standing to yourself.

It makes even less sense, however. Declaring yourself as selfless simply directs attention and praise for this very quality inwards, selfishly, thereby directly opposing our above definition. And thus, the Catch-22 of my NGO days: If you claim to be selfish, through overt assertion or subtle insinuation, you have immediately and irrefutably proven yourself to be just the opposite.

So big deal - people are conceited, nothing new. But with TS specifically, a huge number of problems arise.

What’s at stake in paradoxically asserting TS

Something far greater than an exemption from awkward pubescent silliness. It runs deeper. It’s a matter of transcending the inconvenient burdens that make us human: jealousy, hurt, want, lust, selfishness. It is rising above these to become supra human in the eyes of peers. In arriving to the developing world with a wad of cash, you bedazzle the locals into loving you unconditionally with your boundless insinuations of personal greatness and worth. And when you return home with tales of the lives you have changed, not holding back one iota out of humility, not diverting attention to your subjects instead of yourself, you raise yourself up to such supra human status on the shoulders of those you have just three sentences ago claimed to protect. The ego becomes ravenous, the goal mutated from humanitarianism to ensuring the ego continues to grow assured of its TS. The fuel is the ecstasy spawned from knowing and believing deep in your being that you have transcended simple humanity, metamorphosed into a deity in the eyes of others and your own narcissistic inward glare, a fuel that is demanded by the ego in exponentially increasing quantities as time passes.

To be fair, being human is well, kind of shitty sometimes. I don’t like it when I get jealous, or when I’m selfish with my belongings. I don’t like being hurt, or being subject to human error. I want to be more too; we all do. But there is an important distinction between refining and controlling human urges, and sacrificing others for a false ascension to the ranks of the gods.

Why people masquerading as TS is a serious problem - I

Let’s look at this in it’s most malignant setting - a TSP running an NGO. As the intact ego is absolutely vital, TSPs tend to favor extreme exclusivity. Convincing yourself that you are supra human every waking hours takes some serious mental juice, even for the most narcissistic of us, and the introduction of an individual whose skills, innovation, depth of compassion, etc. even remotely challenge our TSP’s would set the facade ablaze in the eyes of everyone, including himself. Out of the question.

And so the gates are sealed shut, and with them the tragedy extends past the repugnant narcissism and begins affecting real people.

Neglecting a spirit of cooperation in approaching the cause you fight for (and upon which have built your entire TSP persona in the first place) places a limit on the potential for effective action. In Cambodia, as in every other country experiencing social problems (i.e. all of them), alleviation of the issues does not stand a chance when approached by one TSP and his cult of followers.

Instead of inclusion, the TSP dumbly plods on, gorging his ego on the worship of his close staff, so close it’s suffocating and honest criticism and debate becomes impossible, the whole organization a twisted feedback loop where anything can make sense if you say it enough times and with enough sparkle in your eyes. Where reaching out to others in a spirit of cooperation would extend your collective philanthropic potential and would in itself be a mandate taken on by being a TSP, it is shunned out of egotistic fear. Where increasing transparency and inviting criticism to improve methodology and expand the umbrella of provided aid, doors are sealed and bolted and the operation sheds all accountability, hiding beneath the facade of humanitarianism.

Asinine. NGOs should not exist to breed dependence on their existence, yet this becomes the motive, bred from a completely un-unselfish desire to feel important. Foreign NGOs are created and exist so that they may visualize a day when they are no longer necessary, the issue alleviated by attacking by addressing its most fundamental problems, or making it domestically sustainable in the hands of citizens. Instigating this radical dependency, pointless inclusivity, and disgusting worship, primarily through masquerading as TS and inflating an already bloated ego, is wrong and has ramifications for those the organization has pledged to protect and aid.

Why people masquerading as TS is a serious problem - II

The second tragedy occurs back on the home front. The bizarre solipsistic “selflessness” of TSPs ostracizes ordinary people from causes that naturally benefit from extended involvement. We’ve all dragged our feet to speeches and slideshows on behalf of NGOs like guilty sinners receiving their annual communion. Why this guilt ridden reluctance?

When you have TSPs galloping around preaching their supra humanity to all who will listen, elevating themselves on the shoulders of humanitarianism, it inspires deep seated and conflicted feelings of inferiority in the audience. We’ve all seen it - the crowds looking up starry eyed but strangely stuck, buying up the TSP routine until they’re emotionally broke, perfectly kind hearted and capable people turning to their neighbor exclaiming “What an incredible person! I’d love to help others like he does, but I just don’t think I have it in me,” when the simple act of turning to your neighbor and saying just that affirms that yet, you really do have it in you to change the world. These speeches and presentations get such a mediocre reputation because they inspire such conflicted feelings of inferiority in the audience, and ignore that there is a huge population of capable individuals listening whose inclusion is vital to solving the overarching social issues of our planet. They’re just turned off by the whole deal because every event they drag their feet to out of self conscious guilt leaves them with a lingering, haunting sense of inadequacy.

A 21st century shocker; we have enough to feel inadequate enough. I don’t even watch television, and at the end of most days I feel fat, ugly, and stupid, my teeth not white enough, my hair not lush enough, my toes of freakish proportions, my skin too dark or too pale (depending on the day) and my nose of horrific inclination towards my left ear. Humanitarianism shouldn’t be another source of inferiority.

The good news for the rest of us

True selflessness is not a requisite quality for doing service work.

It is not necessary to change the world. And you certainly don’t have to transcend humanity to change people’s lives.

(In fact, you shouldn’t want to. These TSPs are typically flying so high that they’re completely out of touch with real issues that do plague their organizations, so that the whole mess ends up imploding after a number of years. When you gain supra human status in your eyes, you also lose something: empathy, and the ability to communicate with ordinary people that matter.)

As long as cultivated guilt just barely wins out over disinclination spurred by feelings of inferiority, efforts to include others, raise money, generate support, and drum up awareness will continue to garner only lukewarm support. It’s not a matter of amplifying guilt towards the audience’s naivete towards important issues, as many TSPs would allege, but rather approaching the issue with a strong emphasis on individual potential. It requires being humble and inclusive. Realizing, emphasizing, and most importantly celebrating the power of the inspired individual. Understanding that people want to help, but denting egos for personal gain isn’t beneficial for anyone except the self. Guilt must be replaced by encouragement for others to strive for their own potential to make a difference.

Concluding words and a confession

Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor by one person. Indifference will fester so long as TSP’s talk down to others for their own conscious. If narcissistic ostracizing of the people we really do need to extinguish our planets’ infernos, TSPs betray the very root of their putative status, and we as a community bound by our humanity suffer despite their supposedly valiant efforts. It is only through the few becoming the many, unabashed inclusion, and setting our egos aside for the good of others will the supernumerary problems that beleaguer our planet be addressed.

And so, in closing, a confession. I am not truly selfless. I am human. Subject to the same human pangs of selfishness, jealousy, envy, turmoil, strife, etc. that afflict all of us Homo sapiens. To put it simply, you and I are not all that different. Trust me on this one.

You, the reader, can do what I and many others do. We were not born in mangers, bitten by radioactive bugs, dispatched by some higher power. We are like you. We have needs, frustrations, vendettas, jealousies, setbacks, weaknesses. We are human.

It doesn’t take flying to Cambodia to help either. Find a local cause to work with; there are countless options. Tutor at risk youth, organize a fundraiser, work the soup kitchen, volunteer at your local hospital. You’ll be surprised to find what you’re capable of (and you’ll find that you really do have it in you). The inspired individual can move worlds.

More importantly - and speaking from experience on this one - I think the experience will bring you newfound and boundless passion in all facets of your life. It will bring you universally applicable perspective. After all, we are human - we can all be a little selfish. By no means does it preclude you from doing amazing things.

And if you’re one of my TSPs, I implore you: stop telling, start showing, and join us. You're just as capable of making this world a better place as anyone else, and there’s pride, not shame, in that knowledge. We need you.

“If you want to be important - wonderful. If you want to be recognized - wonderful. If you want to be great - wonderful. But, recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness.” -MLK

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