Jon Gone to Bhutan

I note that there's this strange tendency for many posts on this blog to be about rain.  That shouldn't deceive anyone into thinking it rains constantly -- although that will be the case when the monsoons hit come summer.  And I've been told they hit hard around here. This post is a brief one, and takes the form of a sort of prose poem.  Wasn't trying to be all literary or anything, it just... I don't know, seemed like the only way to capture the feeling.                                                                ------------ It has been storming all night, sometimes angrily, sometimes softly, but always storming.  A stray puppy sleeps outside my door, under the cover of the porch roof, covered by a towel I sacrificed during the last storm to quiet the shivering of a different, col...

Hello again. I've spent most of this week trying to acquaint my students with an effective writing process.  I've tried to follow the prescribed curriculum, but I keep running into the inevitable fact that it seems to be written for students who speak English as a first language and who have been writing in English all their lives. Well - they have  been writing in English, but they've been writing in English like I wrote in French in high school.  It's one thing to learn how to write a sentence, another entirely to learn how to write with a readable and consistent voice. One example - for our first assigned essay, the advice was to begin by having students paraphrase the essay.  Fair enough.  Then we were advised to move on to other activities during the first class. (I should explain -- there's a national curriculum in Bhutan that all teachers are expected to follow, and along with it there's a "teacher's guide" that gives fairly precise sugg...

Well hello again! It seems like a lifetime has passed since I left Thimphu and the relative ease of internet access at the Dragon Roots Hotel.  It seems like several lifetimes have passed since I left the worlds of London and the US that, honestly, seem so distant that they feel like dream worlds, impossible lands of simplicity and plenty, where I didn't need to go knock on my neighbour's door every morning for help getting dressed, or keep the pot constantly on the boil for water either to purify or with which to bathe.  But all of these challenges have been a pleasure, a good form of weight lifting for the soul. The internet saga was not.  Not a pleasure, not gratifying, not beneficial.  But last night, at about 6:30, as I sat there huddled in my chair, insulating myself against another day's false hope, the roadblock on the information superhighway was finally suspended and, hallelujah, I was back in touch with the world. I think often here about small pleas...

3. Don’t live for an audience. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I begin my first blog entry with these two quotes. The first is from a list of ten “rules” I wrote for myself one early morning on the Heathrow Express, returning from having said goodbyes to all of my family back in Connecticut and New York, and on my way to saying goodbyes to all of my dear friends in London.   Ten rules, a pep talk of sorts, reminders to shore myself up for the challenges of the coming year, the coming future. The second, of course, is the famous closing couplet from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a favorite quote of mine and of many other English teachers.   I begin with this because in some way I think these sentiments are the best introduction to the first anecdote of my wanderings through the internal and external world. So, before I begin this first entry and thus this blog in general, I should offer...