"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." -Jimi Hendrix

Spring 09 American Culture (Reflection)

About two months ago, I was asked to create a class blog for my American Culture class that I've started teaching for the first time here at Woodbury University.  At first, I was really exited about starting a class blog.  I knew that incorporating an additional learning tool such as a bog would provide my students with a wonderful opportunity to really get personal in their pursuit of better understanding the craziness of American culture.  I also saw the blog project as a great opportunity to examine my own lifelong struggles in grasping the essence of American society.  I had lofty ideas about what I wanted to do with my blog.  Yet, as with so many of my other lofty ideas, my blog project somehow ended up on the back burner.  Now that we are quickly drawing closer to the end of the Spring o9 semester, I have returned to my blog for some much needed reflection.

The Spring 09 semester here at Woodbury got off to a real shaky start.  We didn't have any books, we didn't have a classroom, our students were confused, and in the midst of all this chaos and commotion, I was trying desperately to maintain a sense of order.  As a fairly new teacher who was--and still is--trying to learn the ropes of teaching, I was frustrated and began to question my own abilities as an instructor.  "Wait a minute," I thought, "isn't an American culture instructor supposed to be some kind of an expert on American culture?"  "Shouldn't an American culture teacher have a clear understanding of the American psyche? What Americans like? What they don't like? What they believe in? What motivates them? What discourages them? What they find most important? AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!  Let me be very clear about this, I'm no expert on American culture.  In fact, I'm not an expert on anything.  Hell, I'm not even American.

I'm Armenian.  I was born in Iran.  I spend the majority of my most impressionable years living under a hostile revolutionary climate, in the midst of a raging war between two groups of people I couldn't be any more different from. As a child, such a foreign concept as war doesn't quite seem real to you, but when I made a game of collecting bullet shells and bomb pieces for fun, my parents quickly decided it was time for us to move to a friendlier place.   

"Don't," "speak," and "English" were the first words I learned, and they made up all the speaking I did in my first few months of school in America. Mostly, much like some of my students today, I relied on embarrassing hand and face gestures to make any form of communication.  Close to twenty-five years later, I now find myself teaching a subject that I have struggled with for so many years. 

Over the course of the last 16 weeks, my students and I have spend a great deal of time and energy trying to make better sense of the intricate details that make up American culture. What are Americans like? What do Americans do? In this huge nation of people from everywhere, is there really a national character?  The one sure answer that we have managed to agree on is that there is great diversity in the ethnic makeup of America.  Americans are self-reliant, independent, resourceful, and  pragmatic.  Americans always have been optimistic, believing in the basic goodness of their country and their innate desire to improve their quality of life. Even though all these generalizations about typical American values, attitudes, and beliefs do explain a lot about the American people, they still do not seem fully capture the sheer progressiveness of America culture. The great American novelist and humorist Mark Twain described the typical Englishman as a "person who does things because they have been done before" and the typical American as "a person who does things because they haven't been done before."  As a nation of immigrants, the U.S. has had a continual influx of people with a pioneering spirit, with the the courage to make major changes in their lives.  This is exactly what my students and I have tried to accomplish this semester.

When asked to define the nature of the American people in a recent writing assignment, one of my students stated that Americans are people who "love to try something new." I completely agree with this particular student's perspective and would just like to add that perhaps this "love to try something new" is driven by the American people's natural sense of curiosity and their hopeful belief that newer may be better.  As a new teacher, I can only hope to pass on to my students the great American tradition of the new.