Allison in Finland & South Korea

Allison, a graduate student at PSU, has set out on a summer of study abroad. First she studied at PSU's sister university Jyvaskyla in Finland and now she is at another sister university in South Korea, Hanyang University. She has been writing a blog about her experiences abroad. Check it out at http://allisonmkeegan.blogspot.com/2009/07/abc123.html.

Here is her last post as a sample:

One benefit I've received from studying both Finnish and Korean language is that I've been able to feel what it is like to be a child learning the alphabet for the first time. This feeling is true especially while learning Korean, since the characters are completely new to me. When I first began looking intensively at the Korean language, all I could ensue was that all those funky looking symbols meant something to somebody...but that somebody was certainly not me. I imagine that as a child I once felt the same way. My family has told me stories of how I used to listen to a story over and over, and then recite that story from memory while flipping the pages pretending as though I were actually reading. I can imagine the excitement I must have felt thinking as though I could actually read what "big people" could read.

Here I am, 20-something years after I first started "reading", and I am right back to that same beginning. I feel the same excitement when I can read more than a line or two in a story. The only difference now is that I feel myself holding in my excitement so as not to appear overly giddy and childlike. However, I've never been too good at holding back my excitement...so I am starting to just embrace it and feel happy about the accomplishments my class and I are making.

While I know we are making accomplishments, we are still often very confused because this language is so hard to grasp. I sit in class and I see my teacher try to explain things to us, and oftentimes I can see the frustration on her face because we just aren't picking it up. I completely understand her frustration because in her mind she is explaining something that is very easy and basic, and yet we are looking at her like a deer in headlights. I've been on that end many times while tutoring or teaching in a classroom, so I understand and can easily empathize with her point of view.

I feel as though this experience has given me the opportunity to empathize a little better with children in my future classroom. I knew that this experience would give me a chance to learn what it was like to be in the minority, with the hope that I could empathize with children in schools that also feel like they are in the minority. To my surprise, this experience has taught me so much more than that. At some point in time, all the students I work with will feel left out, behind or confused in the classroom...and I hope that I will be able to draw from this experience and have a greater amount of patience and understanding.