I don’t typically write about leadership, but I’m having trouble getting last night’s zoom discussion out of my head. I’ll get it down here, to have some place to put it, to be able to look at it in words on the screen, to see if the Aha! I felt yesterday has turned into an Ugh. Thank you Manuel from the Nordic Building class of Lene Rachel Andersen.  

If you are reading this, you will know I have decided there is enough Aha! worth sharing. You’ll also understand that I’m being pretty vulnerable here – neither leadership nor complexity are expert areas. Help me out, those of you who think about leadership, who try to lead, and who are shaping culture. Are the notes below helpful?

Imagine a space full of options. These options are all potential factors to consider, current realities and future possibilities, or perhaps in complex systems terms, agents. 

The agents are all doing their own thing, and in so doing, they are having an effect (or not) on other agents in the system. Effects may be small or large, slow or fast, important or insignificant. It’s an ever-extending messy collection of variables. Into this interlocking, interactive hubbub walks a leader. What skills are going to be helpful? Here are at least a few.

1. What agents can the leader safely ignore? There are far too many to grasp, many or most of them are unlikely to have a significant impact on others. Trying to handle them all is impossible. So what is the heuristic, or the gut feeling as one of my colleagues puts it, to know which to ignore, at least for the moment?
2. Which agents will lend themselves to manipulation? The leader’s time, experience, ability, influence, collaborators, setting, and so on are all limited. Is there enough of what the leader needs to actually massage this or that agent, to actually give an agent a nudge in the first place?
3. Which nudges of which agents will have the desired effects on other agents? Can a leader leverage a change in one area to lead to further changes in another? Can the leader at least somewhat predict knock on effects?
4. Which agents need to be nudged simultaneously? Can a leader bring about a tipping point through collective nudges of multiple selected agents, so that the effect on additional agents ripples across the system? It seems likely to me that multiple agents need attention at the same time.
5. How do you keep up with constant changes in agents? Once an agent has undergone some degree of change, or changed other agents, things (might be) different. Even the space between the agents, the manner in which they have an effect on each other (or not), is changed. How does the leader keep up with the evolving changes?

I’m afraid the list could go on and on. For one thing, so far I’ve been thinking of one leader in this imagined hubbub of agents. But of course a leader is surrounded by other people, many of whom are leaders by title or personality, and all of whom have personal interest in their surrounding environment and any changes to it. They are exerting pressure on agents, purposefully or unintentionally, to remain the same or to change in a manner to their liking.

Complex indeed. Just before our zoom breakout room’s time expired, it occurred to me that 1-5 above, plus any additional considerations you would like to insert, are not necessarily about improvement to the existing system. A leader with a good sense for affecting change through the manipulation of the right agents may still be creating a worse system. More often than not it might be unclear if things are heading in a good or bad direction. 

And whether or not the direction is ethical?

I’ve worked in summer camps for over 20 years. Around about Summer 15 we were trying to have evening campfires with singing and s’mores in a beautiful outdoor location in the woods. Standard stuff, you’d think it would go well. 

It wasn’t going well at all. It was rowdy, we staff weren’t kumbaya’ing, we were full on crowd-controlling, policing with everything short of batons and protective gear. And losing the battle. Yet as director I kept scheduling campfires.

Until one evening, after the flames were doused and the students were mercifully dispersed  into separate floors in separate dorms where the chaos dropped from red to orange and then yellow as they wore themselves out, David, a thoughtful academic I had never worked with before, said: “You know, we don’t have to have a campfire.”

No campfire? No s’mores, no singing? No melancholy reflection, no giggling, no faces reflecting the flickering flames, no swaying back and forth to a sad song? Could it still be a summer camp?

Of course it could. After an initial moment of staring at David, we agreed to jettison the campfire. What a relief. 

(This happened over 15 years ago. I saw David again for the first time this past summer and thanked him for that moment. It was a BIG insight for me. He couldn’t recall it. Ah well …)

So one of the hallmarks of traditional summer camp just wasn’t helping the purpose of our summer camp. Instead of gamely persisting, David helped me get over it, to move beyond an assumption that was holding us back, in order that we might get on with the real purpose of summer camp, like having fun, learning, and building a healthy community together.

I recently thought about the campfires and David and those energetic (to put it nicely) students as I mulled over school startups. The things that are impeding progress to the big vision have to go, they need to be removed. You need to clear some things out to have a new way of doing school. But that is hard.

Then just this morning I mentioned to a colleague on a Zoom that I’d been involved with several new programs in schools, and on one occasion with an entirely new school, all of which talked the talk during the planning stages but walked it all back once the program started. (IF the program even started: I can also think of someone who threw in the towel before ever getting started, after watching progressive dreams fade in favor of school as it is easily understandable to investors.)

But I’m not giving up hope. You can have summer camp without campfires. You NEED to have summer camp without the campfire if it’s actually a dumpster fire. 

And you can be progressive in a school, or with facets of the school, I know you can. There are some out there. (Thank you for leading the way, for showing us possible futures.)

I’m thinking this afternoon of ways to help those who are starting a school, or a program, or any sort of new educational adventure that they want to keep innovative, different, and worth pouring so much time and effort into. Try some bullets and some questions.

Bullets – Make a bullet list of those things that are typically associated with schools but that arguably dampen and restrict innovation. Remove them when you can, decrease their importance if flat out removal isn’t possible. Do less of what drags you back to traditional schooly ways of being. You can have a summer camp without a campfire. What impediments to innovative practices can we remove in order to create a culture of craving learning, of doing learning because why would you not?

Questions– List some questions that might be useful to start a discussion, to disrupt the adoption of schooly practices. When you ask the question, don’t let anyone answer it immediately. Find together the next best question that takes you deeper, that challenges your thinking. Suspend the need for answers long enough to really get into the thinking.

These two processes overlap of course, these bullets and questions. Try one or the other, or both, whatever suits. I’ll start you with a few of each to share what I have in mind. But you find your own bullets and questions, that of course will be best.

Things that are typically associated with schools but that may well dampen and restrict innovation. 

• restricting student choice to the point that they are most often learning material they aren’t interested in or aren’t good at
• adult judgment about student work, in other words, a culture in which students work for adult opinion and verification
  • comparing students with each other
  • giving out prizes
  • working for a grade or mark on a rubric
  • measuring achievement with a test score
• completing work as opposed to learning from it (get that worksheet filled in!)
• and now you find bullets relevant to your situation … 

Questions that might be useful to start a discussion, to disrupt just a little the adoption of schooly practices we assume are necessary to have school.

• Do we really have to do X? Why? (The best answer probably shouldn’t be that every other school does it.) What value does it bring? What culture does it help make?
• What value does X bring for the students? the teachers? for society?
• What might some side effects be of doing X? Are those side effects moving us in the direction we want to go? Are those side effects creating a healthy culture?
• and now add your own questions.

Kumbayah and good luck!

In 2020 the American football team called the Washington Redskins finally ditched their name, yet they didn’t settle on their current name, the Washington Commanders, until 2022. In the interim they called themselves the Washington Football Team. Factual, if not very exciting. 

In 1980, St. Olaf College opened a new dorm. Some of my sister’s friends lived there her junior and senior years, and since the college hadn’t yet settled on a new name, the students called it New Dorm. Factual and not very exciting. My sister graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1982, and New Dorm was renamed Rand Hall in 1983, after former college president Sidney Rand. I arrived as a freshman in 1984. For me, Rand was still New Dorm, that’s all I had ever heard it called. For my friends, new to the college, it was Rand. I clung to the name New Dorm out of a sense of “I know better” or “I want to be different” or some other unhealthy bias toward the cantankerous.

Forty plus years after being a freshman in college I decided to create my own university masters program in Scandinavian Studies. After I had a handful of digital docs I made a Google folder to keep them in, naming it My Scandinavian Studies. Factual, like those other interim names, and not at all exciting. 

Now I’m approaching the middle of the first semester and I still haven’t settled on a name. I haven’t even mulled over any good candidates for a name. Furthermore, I don’t have a good term for describing my studies (my program?) and what I will receive from it (a masters degree?). I am marching off the map and haven’t any names for the places I will visit. It’s time for that to change.

So what  [program] am I in and what [degree] will I confer on myself when I am done? Maybe starting with the degree will be easiest.

The University of Bologna conferred the first university degrees over nine hundred years ago. The system of degrees were more or less like in medieval guilds, those organizations of craftsmen that looked after their financial interests by establishing some dos and don’ts. There were those learning the trade, those doing the trade, and those so good and experienced in doing the trade that they set the norms and kept others in line about how things were to be done, something we call teaching, I guess. Apprentices, journeymen, and masters, the masters being the teachers.

When this thinking and the terms to organize the thinking were pulled from the guilds into the university, the master, from the Latin magister, meaning teacher, signalled a license to teach. At  first it provided teacher status only at the university that had granted the master degree, but after intervention from the pope in 1233, anyone with a rank of master at the University of Toulouse could teach at any university, opening the gates to mobile masters (teachers) while laying the groundwork for university terminology.

Nowadays we have academic alphabet soup, with for example MA, MEd, MPhil, MFA and we haven’t yet filled the bowl, not even close. I suppose I could continue in this manner of creating new degrees and add a Master of Self (but MS is already taken, also called MSc, thank you Durham University in England, back in 1878). Or a Master of Agency (nope, MA) or a Master of Me (nope again, taken, Master of Management). Seems like I’m a little late to the name game.

One option, to open up more possibilities, is to switch the letters around, creating for example AM and SM. Some universities do this because they continue to enjoy the erudition of Latin: Artium magister and Scientiæ magister. That doesn’t help for the Master of Me, or the Me Master, of course. Plus Me Master just sounds stupid now that I’ve written it a few times. Maybe it sounded stupid after reading it just once, probably so.

Looking back over my own examples, MPhil sticks out for some reason. How about MSelf? That seems to be original and unclaimed, and it gets the idea across, a masters one did oneself … I’m going to let that simmer.

Let’s say I award myself an MSelf when this year of study draws to a close. Maybe I don’t need an additional name then for Scandinavian Studies. After all, what I am studying is indeed Scandinavia, at least a few aspects about it. Maybe what I am working on is an MSelf in Scandinavian Studies. 

Thinking, thinking … 

Mmmm…That might be it. MSelf is nicely like the word “myself,” the format is based on the accepted system of M-this-or-that, it doesn’t already exist anywhere else, and unless you disagree, I don’t think it has the feel of “trying too hard” or being “too cute.” Maybe just a little cute, but not trying to hard.

Here’s the test. Let’s imagine that over coffee a colleague says they heard I was working on a new degree. 

“Yes,” I say, “it’s an MSelf.”

“A what?”

“You know, a master degree I created myself. It’s an MSelf in Scandinavian Studies. Have you ever thought of doing an MSelf? I know you’ve already done quite a bit of work in ….”

You tell me, do you think that will work? Finding a suitable name may have been easier than I thought. Certainly faster than the National Football League and St. Olaf College handled their new names.

Tiden flyger, as they might say in Sweden – time flies – but I know better than to be confident of my translation until I’ve checked with a true blue (and yellow) Swede. I’ve translated “time flies” alone and online and because it is an idiom, well, you have to be careful.

The official start date of my self-created Scandinavian course was five weeks ago, and since I was as excited about the idea back then as I am now, I actually started a few weeks before the semester started. Being a student, professor, dean, and provost all in one certainly gives one a lot of flexibility! I should add “International Study Experience Coordinator” to that list, as you’ll see that office plays a role later, too. Read on!

It’s probably a little early for fall break. (I guess I should have a fall break. I just checked with the president, yep he says!). A little early, but my travel schedule with work made this week a natural one-week pause. A good chance to reflect, with my second cup of coffee after an excellent omelette across the street from the entrance to Ankara University. Nothing on my schedule until after lunch, just this reflection, some people-watching, Turkish background music, and this coffee. If I sound content, that’s right. This is living.

Not long after starting my Scandinavian Studies degree (I really need a different word than degree, but I’m not sure what that word is), I created a spreadsheet to track my progress. There are a number of notes there now, in a number of columns. The courses are language, literature, education, and cuisine. I’m making a lot of progress. There are now four columns for language, as I added an introductory text on Old Norse to Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Four columns for cuisine as well, since I’ve made recipes from four countries. Three columns for literature, I haven’t moved off the continent yet, but have read a variety of poems, plays, and novels. And education, well, that is a hodgepodge, a collection of notes on a spreadsheet that would turn the stomach of an accountant or anyone leaning toward a Type A personality. I have concentrated on Scandinavian folk high schools, but the author I relied on most, Lene Rachel Andersen, is a proponent of bildung, so I guess I need to add bildung to what I’ve learned about Scandinavian folk high schools and Scandinavian culture in general.

I’ll take a look at each course separately in the future, but for now, before the coffee cools completely, I think it’s really interesting how the different courses have started to reinforce each other, how I’m making connections across courses, how things blur, and how that doesn’t matter, in fact, I think that is making the learning both deeper and more interesting.

Let’s start with folk high schools and see how studying them related to my language learning, literature course, and future study abroad experience. My main educational “texts” are The Nordic Secret and Bildung, both by Andersen. The folk high schools are essentially opportunities for people around 18 years or older to study and live with one another in a mostly non-judgmental, uplifting, sort of way. The programs are partially government funded and they are open to foreigners. I’ve interviewed two Americans who attended folk high schools. They learned the language, of course, largely through getting involved with the activities that were offered. One spent time painting and photographing on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the other, when they found out she was a Spanish teacher, ended up teaching Spanish to interested Swedes, Swedes with a good sense for bildung, I would say.

Andersen’s review of educational thought from Comenius through the enlightenment, into which she brought so many philosophers and influencers (of the day!), made for the most enjoyable philosophy reading I remember in a long, long time. Connecting with the thoughts of those giants was inspiring, so much so that my Scandinavian Studies program supported two field trips that hadn’t been planned earlier – an excursion to the Comenius Museum and tomb in the Netherlands and coffee (twice!) at the café in nearby Vevey, Switzerland. There is an inscription on the outside wall claiming that Rousseau stayed there. Comenius, by the way, is perhaps best known for his notion that we should base our teaching on what children already know, Rousseau is known among other things for his novel Émile, which laid out a pedagogical program to make learning natural, though to our contemporary sensibilities it misses the mark. Field trips make connections and memories. They make things feel real. 

Learning about the folk high schools led me directly to their websites, both national “clearinghouse” type sites as well as sites for individual schools. There are roughly 80 folk high schools in each of Denmark and Norway, about twice that many in Sweden. I visited a number of them, virtually, reading and watching videos in Scandinavian about what they offer and why you should go there. Eventually I started searching for summer programs that cater to seniors. (Indeed, I’ll be 60 next summer, when my program requires a 3-week stay in Scandinavia). My research about the Medborgarskolar in Sweden led me to distans courses, some of which were just 90 minutes. Just sign up, there is no charge, talk about things in Swedish. I signed up, switched all my energy to Swedish for a bit, both on Duolingo and with my reading, a police story called The Last Winter by Åke Edwardson. And it worked. I was thrilled, I wasn’t the worst or best speaker in our group of five, I fit right in. Plus, the teacher asked us to send topics for the following week, so I asked if we could talk about Swedish folk high schools. I’m a bit of a Johnny One Note, or a dog with a bone, about my Ed course. And now its content was partially in Swedish, all while preparing me for my abroad requirement. Due to some error in the link, I was the only one on that second call the following week, so for the first 30 minutes I got to ask lots of questions. The teacher had even created slides for the course about folk high schools. I emailed her afterwards to see if I could interview the school’s director. We’ll see.
And that novel? I’ve had it in the house for a decade, something I always wanted to read. I needed the motivation of my course to finally do it. More than 450 pages of Swedish, I did it and I am very proud to have done it. It could be in my literature course, but I’ve listed it in my Swedish learning, ultimately who cares where I keep track of it. The fact is I have now read a police detective story in Swedish and believe I can do it again. That, for a learner, is huge.

This is my sixth and last post from my summer visit to Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota.

So I received Swiss citizenship a few years back, after living in Switzerland more than 12 years. It’s been 17 now, and counting. Way before moving to Switzerland I taught German at these summer immersion programs in Minnesota, at Concordia Language Villages. 

I’ve returned for a few days to observe the learning here, and what do you know, I happened to be on site when a special event was organized with the high school students learning German, French, or Italian. They have all come to the French Village to celebrate Swiss National Day. Swiss National Day is actually tomorrow, August 1, but no matter – the date was selected by the Swiss because August 1 is a nice date, not because there was a particular event on that day. Call it Swiss practicality. And I’m happy to celebrate Switzerland any day of the year, it’s a nice place.

The Italian Village (Il Lago del Bosco) sends two song leaders to the stage to teach everyone a song. It’s about a Swiss person in the mountains (where else?) who meets a bird and greets it with a fantastic string of bird sounding syllables that are fun to sing and easy to learn if you are one of the German or French students. It’s the international language of singable syllables. At least, that’s my impression – the crowd is singing with gusto.

Uno Svizzero felice

passeggiando sui monti

quando vede un cuculo

lo saluta così:

O-LI-A … O-LI-I-A-CHI-CHI-A

O-LI-I-A-CHI-CUCU

O-LI-I—I-A-CHI-CHI-A

O-LI-I-A-CHI-CUCU

O-LI-I-A-CHI-CHI-A

O-LI-I-A-CHI-A-O …

A happy Swiss

went through the mountains

when he saw a cuckoo

and greeted it like this:

O-LI-A … O-LI-I-A-CHI-CHI-A …

They finish and turn the stage over to the Germans.

This crowd is easy to teach songs to, since the teaching method is similar no matter the language. The three German counselors, from Waldsee, start with call and response and everyone joins in. Since there are lots of color names in the text, they bring students up to the stage with the matching colored T-shirts as they teach the text: red for the moon, silver for the lake, green for the pine forest. They point to the shirts as they sing.

Roter Mond über’m Silbersee,

Feuerglut, wärmt den kalten Tee.

Kiefernwald in der Nacht

und noch ist der neue Tag nicht erwacht

Red moon over a silver lake

Fire glows, warms the cold tea

Pine forest in the night

and the new day is not yet awake

And then it’s time for a French chanson.

Two Lac du Bois staff members teach the song text, two others join in to accompany the song leaders with guitars when everyone is ready to learn the melody.

Enfant de la montagne

J’y retourne, j’y retourne

Enfant de la montagne

J’y retourne en chantant

La fatigue me gagne

Mais mon coeur est content

La fatigue me gagne 

Mais mon coeur est content

Child of the mountain

I return there, I return there

Child of the mountain

I return singing

Tiredness sets in

But my heart is happy

Tiredness sets in

But my heart is happy

Something which is a constant across teachers and languages is the language beyond the text that the teachers use to teach the songs. These are instructions and moments when the leaders need to get the whole group doing the same thing. For example, when the Italian song leaders want everyone to repeat after them as they sing, they say verso doppo verso, or “line by line.” All the students have been trained to shout out verso doppo verso with a gesture. When the French sing a whole song together the leaders say Tous ensemble, as in “everyone together,” and the entire group of French students yells out Tous ensemble tous ensemble ouai ouai !

You think they might get tired of this, but it’s just the opposite, really. By knowing and performing the rituals they all fit in, they form a community, everyone belongs. The fact that the rituals include language mean that long after this experience is over they are going to remember these phrases, and of course they will come up in other contexts, in their non-English language lives anyway, when it is just the right thing to say. They’ll just have to make sure to leave the gestures out or people might wonder!

To truly represent Switzerland’s language heritage, I suppose at this point the counselors could insert a song in Romansh, Switzerland’s fourth language. But it’s likely that no one knows one, and they don’t, and I’ve got nothing to offer them either. I just want to give Romansh speakers a shout out here. You, too, have a linguistic inheritance worth celebrating!

As a finale, the song leaders from all three programs, German, French, and Italian, climb on the stage for a song that everyone has learned, in the language of their program. I know it from my time in the German Village as a song about bringing in the grain before the rain arrives. In French and Italian the lyrics are about the morning winds. 

Quite a moment, all these American children singing in multiple world languages together.* I’ve been told from time to time, as a teacher trainer, that high school students won’t sing in world language classes. I know better, as does anyone who has ever passed through the gates of these Language Villages.

All these American children singing in multiple world languages in honor of my Switzerland. I feel proud, thankful, and amazed. As they are invited into the Paris building for dinner, I quietly step back toward the woods and down the path to my parked rental car. Returning here, for the classes and activities and now a tribute to my new home, has been a very private and meaningful experience, one of nostalgia, a sense of lost youth, and above all, hope for the future.

*These three songs, in Italian, German, and French, were then sung in a round as well. Pure joy.

Vento sottile, vento del mattino

Vento che scuoti la cima del mio pino

Vento che danzi, che balli

la gioia tu ci porti

Vento sottile

He ho spann den Wagen an

denn der Wind treibt Regen übers Land

Hol die gold’nen Garben, hol die gold’nen Garben

He ho, spann den Wagen an

Vent frais, vent du matin

Vent qui souffle au sommets des grands pins

Joie du vent qui passe

Allons dans le grand vent

This is the fifth of six observations from last summer’s language immersion programs in Minnesota, at Concordia Language Villages.

I’m met at the German building called the Bahnhof (though there are no trains) by the leader of the high school program. We decide to go to the learning group that is listening to and creating rap songs. I’m ushered into a room with five very energetic German speakers, fairly fluent, especially the teacher, who is the most energetic of all. This group is fired up.

Within a minute they are listening to fast rap, the words projected on a screen. The words go by faster than I can keep up with, but the students are reading out loud as the text goes by. Apparently they are going to be doing some songs from the musical Hamilton in this class, too, the German version. The students find this particular rap text tricky (“This is so hard!”), but the teacher reminds them of Hamilton coming up soon, they are going to have to be able to hang with the tempo and the sheer amount of words. Oof. Viel Glück!

I get a little bit of the context when the teacher stops the video to explain part of the text. This is the story of the Disney Fantasia, which is based in part on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Der Zauberlehrling) a poem by Goethe written in 1797. I also am getting that the students worked with the story yesterday, they’ve drawn pictures that go with the text, they’ve seen the text before. That’s good because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a high school language class delivered at this pace with this much energy. There is NO time not to pay attention, I notice the pace is influencing me, too, I’m typing frantically. I’m out of breath! Please excuse any typos.

And then in a rush they get to the end. For the first time the students discuss a bit in English, and then something tips them back into German, I’m not sure what it was, the teacher didn’t have to ask them, they just switched back.

There’s lots of talking over each other, especially the two girls next to me and the teacher, loud and fast, simultaneous. Since the goal here is fluency, hurray! 

The teacher moves them to the next rap, based on “The Elf King” (Der Erlkönig), another poem by Goethe. Today they are going to listen to the musical rendition by Schubert. In a future class they are going to create a rap version of the story. I bet Goethe would appreciate the creativity. I imagine he’d also be impressed that his work is still current more than two hundred years after he wrote it. There is a video which starts with two riders, a father and a son, racing home on a horse. The students have the words in front of them, they sing with, under their breath. After the first stanza the teacher pauses the recording to check on comprehension. The students and teacher discuss a bit, write some notes. There is a moment to practice a grammar point: articles in the dative case. The student to my right says “Ich hasse Dativ.” I try not to chuckle out loud, every student of German goes through that, although I suspect this particular student loves the challenge of all the different forms of “the” that German speakers get to slot in at the right times.

As the teacher describes the story of the Erlkönig I focus on her hand gestures. Language teachers use them so often they sometimes can’t quit even when they aren’t teaching. Here it is necessary. She pulls on the shoulders of her T shirt when talking about clothes, waves her hands back and forth to help explain fog, mimics riding on a horse. Her arms are in constant motion. Between gesture-filled explanations we hear the baritone, accompanied by piano, singing to us the story of the Erlkönig, the father and son on their horse, deep in the foggy woods, the shadowy figures in the woods, something terrible is going to happen, I know the story. Do the students know? The son is panicked, pleads with the father, the father doesn’t get it, he thinks the son is just hearing the wind, seeing things in the fog. But there is more going on here.

“Sei ruhig, mein Kind,” says the father, as fathers will do. “Take it easy, no worries.” Usually fathers are right. This time he is not. Now and then my kids remind me of times I didn’t really hear them, times I was too wise as an adult to believe their child’s perception of things, though they were, actually, right, while I was wrong. Thank goodness the consequences were not so severe as in this poem, as what this singer will soon describe. 

And then the baritone arrives at the end. Schubert uses a stark V to I chord progression, making the end horribly final. The son is dead. The Erlkönig was real, in some form or another. Fathers everywhere, take heed.

This is the fourth of six observations at Concordia Language Villages, summer language immersion programs in Russian and thirteen other languages.

There’s nothing quite like participating in a language lesson when you don’t speak the language beyond “good day,” “thanks,” and “goodbye.” To be fair, I can also say with confidence, in Russian, “There’s the ceiling!” But to tell the truth, I haven’t yet found a context to use that sentence meaningfully.

Yulia gives me a quick overview of the class as we walk from breakfast to the classroom. The classroom is in a cabin in the Minnesota northwoods, with lots of windows. Turtle River Lake is visible across the path, there are oak trees and pine trees and a gentle wind. It’s sunny, this is summer in Minnesota on the lake.

The five high school students, their teacher, and I leave our shoes by the door and sit around a table. Yulia starts with a familiar song, the students jump in. I take a peak at the text, but, well, Russian is written in Cyrillic. Sometimes I can sound out the words, thanks to Duolingo, but if the words aren’t cognates with English, that’s about as far as I get. The meaning hides behind a screen of Russian.

I have a better shot at understanding the next activity. Vocabulary of family members, on cards, are laid on the table in two teams. браt, сесtра, сын, папа …. These I can recognize. Although the rules of the game aren’t entirely clear, it seems to follow many other card games I know, where players ask each other if they have an x or y (a particular family member in this case), and if they are lucky they get to play a card. If they are unlucky, the person they have asked gets to play a card. The game has therefore minimal prompts (the family vocabulary words) but lots of language required from each player. As the students push up against the limits of their Russian ability, Yulia helps with encouragement and vocabulary words. She is pulling Russian out of them, I guess you could say. She is getting more from them then they would produce if she weren’t there at the corner of the table, learning in, managing both the game and the learning. She repeats what they say, she pushes them to go further. 

There are lots of smiles, lots of pronunciation help. Students repeat after Yulia, she breaks words down into syllables to help them out.

The class is working on grammatical cases, as well as vocabulary, which I get when the student right of me answers “instrumental” in English. I know that’s a case in Russian grammar which requires certain endings on nouns. ”xорошо,” says Yulia, with great emphasis. “Good!” She’s happy with their effort, they are indeed all involved, thinking, trying. Yulia gives them time to work things out among themselves, figuring out the right endings to the vocabulary she writes on the board.

There isn’t any raising of hands here. Students contribute in a way you would in any conversation, answering Yulia, yes, but also checking with each other, talking with each other. I suppose that’s also a function of the size of the class, just five. I’m not sure if I should think of that as a luxury or if I should think of class sizes of 30 and more as a failure of the way classes are usually set up.

“что это?” asks Yulia, holding up a simple, blank Venn Diagram, her eyebrows raised with the question. “это Venn Diagram,” the students answer and Yulia smiles. “по-русски: диаграмма Венна.“ She preps them for the activity by reading prompts, which the students repeat. She corrects pronunciation at times. She checks grammar. Then they are ready for the “Diagramma Venna.”

Learning a language is a monumental undertaking. Think of all the words there are to know. Each language has a word for everything, after all. And putting together those words in ways that make sense requires a fair number of rules. Unless you are learning a constructed language like Esperanto, the language existed long before we did our best to describe it in terms of a set of rules. There are, therefore, always exceptions, always things that are a bit more complicated than they would need to be. The language wasn’t engineered as much as grown, or rather, simply grew. People are a good way for a language to make more language, you might say, to borrow a formulation I first read in a Richard Dawkins’ text, something like a human is a good way for a gene to make more genes. An evolutionary metaphor is pretty appropriate. 

Linguists of the Lingthusiasm podcast devoted a good stretch of one episode to an interesting discussion about constructed languages. Constructed languages are ones people make up, for a book or movie or just for fun. The podcast hosts made the point that the first thing they would do to tell a constructed language from a natural language would be to look for exceptions to grammatical rules. If there aren’t exceptions, the language is not a naturally occurring language. Exceptions are a defining characteristic, exceptions are a feature of language. A language learner might want to embrace that complexity, looking for general patterns, avoiding the sheer amount of information necessary to memorize all the exceptions. This is in line with the applied linguists who recommend emphasizing communication over grammatical study, something they sometimes refer to as language acquisition instead of language learning. It’s all about recognizing patterns with fuzzy edges. Language as a system, and systems thinking, then, as an approach.

There are ripples on the surface of the lake, the leaves lightly flutter. A fan oscillates above us in the way of fans, there are the shoes piled by the door, a guitar in the far corner and several hoodies and beach towels hanging from dowels next to a red lifeguard rescue float of foam. Summer camp. 

But summer camp in Russian. While I was thinking about the nature of language learning the Venn Diagrams have filled up. The students share what they have written. Yulia uses the opportunity now and again to practice declensions and a few conjugations. She continues helping with pronunciation. She also checks the writing of the students next to her, making notes where the spelling could use a little attention.

One last thing about language learning. Getting familiar with a language is a process of discovering how the language has chosen to make sense. As you get more familiar with a language you slowly reveal its quirks and tics, moving from opaque and odd to familiar and comfortable. In the process, the speakers of those languages become a bit more familiar, more understandable. Language learning demystifies the speakers of a language. In this manner, language learning is a means to reduce prejudice, to understand how we get the same things done, differently, and how we do different things similarly.

My mom took pictures of my sister and me on the first day of school, standing on the back step of our suburban house. All cleaned up and smiling proudly, maybe a little nervously, we stood there together before cutting across the backyards on the way to school. It’s a tradition with a lot of families, and still is, only now the pictures are digital and often on social media before the kids arrive at school.

This year my daughter reminded me that I needed to snap a first day of school photo of myself. September 1 was the official first day of my self-created and self-led program in Scandinavian Studies. 

I sent the photo to my mom, to which I owe my Scandinavian heritage after all, and pulled up the Danish course on Duolingo. My next online language lesson is in Danish. I figure I should train my brain into Danish and away from Swedish and Norwegian. I haven’t met the tutor I selected on the iTalki app yet. I hope she will be as good as the Norwegian and Swedish tutors I’ve already met. 

On the first day of school in Denmark for the youngest children, teachers put out flags and flowers and welcome parents inside for a few celebratory speeches. In Sweden there is an upprop, where elementary students and parents gather together so the teachers can call out the children’s names and take them to their classroom. There the teachers can answer some parent questions and make the children feel at ease as much as possible. This is exactly what our experience was in Switzerland, too, standing with all the other parents, listening for our children’s names. Plus we made sure to take those first day of school photos.

There is no tradition to follow for the first day of a school I made up myself. Perhaps sitting in our quiet house, remembering previous first school days, is as good as anything else. My sister and I smiling into the camera together the one year we were in the same school, New Hope Elementary, she in grade 6, me in kindergarten. My oldest at the pink colored school at the bottom of the village, waiting to be called into class, and then that same young child, not so young anymore, on her way to high school classes at the American school. My youngest on the road below us, cutting through the path by the sports store, where I took a quick photo before there was any chance of running into her middle school classmates walking toward the bus stop, just in case a photo then would have been embarrassing for her. 

So, Paul, today’s the day! There’s no announcements and no new classmates to meet. But there is still the sense of a slow train leaving the station, soon to gather speed, scheduled to arrive May 9, nine months from now, when my family and I sweep into the cafeteria at Ikea for the celebratory graduation dinner of meatballs, potatoes, and lingonberries. It’s on our calendar already. I will have just one part of my program to finish after May 9 – the three-week abroad experience, the one I keep telling my family the international coordinator (also me) insists I have to complete. It’s the capstone experience, after all, of this wonderfully whimsical year of self-study. 

Isaac took a good chunk of time to talk with me after lunch during the afternoon break, getting me ready for the four simultaneous afternoon classes called Materias Elegidas. Students who are taking the four-week summer course for a year of high school credit attend these electives – an hour a day.

I might not be able to see all four classes during the hour, we’ll see how far I get. I’m starting with art.

Pintura latina

The students sit around two long tables that, pushed together, make a square. The leader arrives and gives a bit of context for everyone, drawing a map of the Americas and, across the ocean, Spain. They are going to study art from Latinoamerica y España. The period that they will study, she explains, is from a time when the sense of identity came from Spain, when there wasn’t yet a great sense of independent identity outside of Spain. An interesting concept, the need to grow one’s identity, or in this case, the collective identity of an entire region or country.

The levels here are mixed, so Valeria lets the students know they can respond in English, too. This elicits quicker responses. It also makes for an interesting bilingual feel. One of the students answers first in English but then continues in Spanish. It’s not so easy to shut off the effort to stay in Spanish when it is emphasized all day long. I’ve had the same feeling today as I try to squeeze every ounce of Spanish I’ve got from my English-centric thoughts. 

Escritura artística

I scoot next door, tripping over a backpack, and join the creative writing class. They are also sitting around two long tables forming a square, but the teacher here is sitting with them, letting them write. And write they do. Every now and then someone asks a question, but Valen is particularly good here at staying out of their way. The teacher is here and ready, but letting them write. 

“¿Quién necesitas más tiempo?,” Valen asks, then adds, “OK, un minuto.”

After that minute is up a volunteer, Tomás, reads in Spanish and the others snap their fingers in quiet appreciation. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, grammatical mistakes are okay, the students are at various levels here. 

I guess that is the opportunity creative writing brings to a language learning experience. The right to write, the right not to worry too much. It feels good to hear the snapping fingers after each student reads. Positivity. And the teacher simply nods a bit each time. She’s here, she’s still supportive, she doesn’t overdo it, it’s not effusive praise or effusive anything else, just calm nods.

After they’ve all read she asks a few questions to the whole group. The students get a chance to talk about the writing as a whole or to answer something specific about a particular student’s writing. It’s a writers workshop, in Spanish, the class focus is on the content. Any mistakes in the language will iron themselves out with time, no doubt. That’s a big part of how language learning works. Communicate, then with a bit of focus on structure, when the time is right, crooked grammar is straightened out. 

I get ready to leave as the teacher provides a few reminders on the board. The students did their thing, they got cooking, as I like to say, right from the start. Then, using their own writing and reading, the teacher is pulling a little bit more out of them. Creating teachable moments. 

I hear her turning the class back to the students as I close the door quietly behind me. This class is theirs. 

Música latina

Music is in the room called Madrid. The previous rooms were Sevilla and Pamplona. It’s a small thing, I suppose, but having rooms that reflect the culture sort of keeps the immersion game going. I pictured rowing a boat in the park in Sevilla as I walked into that room, and of course the running of the bulls when I entered Pamplona. Now in Madrid I think of Guernica, the fantastic facades of the old buildings, and the metro with its overtaxed air conditioning. 

This room has a fan, a dozen students, and a patient teacher writing music adjectives on the board. Energetico, triste, lento, bailable. I like that word the best, bailable. Dance-able. I haven’t seen it before, but of course it belongs in a Spanish language program. Just after lunch a couple of students asked me, because I was sitting with my computer next to a speaker, if I couldn’t put on some music for them. They wanted to dance. 

I write that the teacher, Xime, is patient, because this class is the largest collection of boys I’ve run into in these Spanish classes, and as one would predict with late middle school and early high school, they have an undeniable boy sort of energy. You can feel things bubbling. The teacher is so on it. Keeping things going, ignoring the right things, not letting herself get distracted. Some of these boys will learn despite it all! And the girls, well, I sort of wish I could apologize to them on behalf of the boy energy. Looks like they are holding their own, though. 

And now comes the music. She’s got a prepared sheet for them to focus their attention. She goes over a few ground rules. Me gusta and No me gusta … expressing their opinions about the music she’s got cued up. The papers get passed around the table, we are ready to go. “Do you have a pen or pencil?” They do, they are in fact ready. 

And the first song is … a mariachi band! So cool. I remember the first time I encountered a real mariachi band, in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. It was like verification that they really existed. In the flesh! Coordinated outfits! Wide wide brims on those mariachi hats. And singing with bursting, genuine joy.

I have enough time to hear what the next type of music is. I’m guessing it is going to be flamenco. Maybe that’s the only other specifically latino genre I know. I can let you know if I’m right, very soon, the students just have to take a few mariachi notes first, and answer a few summary questions.

Oops! The next genre is Cumbia, from Colombia. I’ll have to listen to a bit of Cumbia tonight, I think to myself. It’s time to move to the last class, I’m going to get to all four.

Vida Saludable

The last classroom is named Granada. Reminds me of the Alhambra. I chaperoned a trip there once, high school students. And attended their morning Spanish class with them. That was a humbling experience.

This class is about healthy living. There is an objective on the board, the first time I’ve seen that today. There are two objectives: understanding the importance of drinking water and not other drinks, and when it is most important during the day to hydrate. Hidratarse in Spanish, I love words. That’s a really good one.

The teacher, Orlando, is clearly interested in healthy living and in sharing about healthy living with the students. What a nice example of teaching what you are interested in. There’s a guarantee of sorts when we set things up like this – a guarantee that that teacher will be motivated to be prepared, a guarantee that the teacher will be passionate. Things that matter A LOT for a successful class. 

The class is also a nice example, like in all four I’ve visited now, of focusing first and foremost on the subject matter. Content based learning, it’s called. It’s a version of immersion, hearing everything in Spanish, answering in Spanish (as one is able, there isn’t a prohibition of English as far as I know). When Orlando gets the pairs of students finalized, as he is now doing, I’m sure there will be a mix of English and Spanish among the students. I’m also sure they will continue to focus on the content of his class – healthy living – and in so doing, advance their ability to truly use Spanish as a functional language – creating new understanding and communicating with each other.

Orlando has a chance to talk to me a bit as the students are working. He catches me up since I’ve come into the class after it was in session for a while. He shares about the class, tells me he is originally from Puerto Rico. He’s all energy and preparedness. 

I’m sorry that I had to duck out of each class so quickly, but happy that I made it to all four! Teachers teaching the subjects that bring them joy, that’s joy itself. 

I’ve started the literature course of my self-constructed program in Scandinavian Studies.

I began my literature course with the book Hunger (Sult in the original Norwegian), by Knut Hamsun. I selected it because a few sites I surfed referred to this particular book as instrumental in introducing modern literature, with a long list of well-known authors who claim it shaped their writing. This appealed to me as a writer, I sort of felt like I might want to be part of that club.

That was one reason. The other reason I started with Hunger is that it happened to be one of the first three books I downloaded on the Kindle, sort of as practice to make sure I knew what I was doing, because it’s the first time I’m using a Kindle. I bought it expressly for this Scandinavian Studies program I’ve created. The other options were Hedda Gabler, a play by Henrik Ibsen, and Miss Julie, a play by August Strindberg. I chose the novel over the plays. 

Then, dutiful student I am, I read Hunger. I wouldn’t say hungrily, but with interest. It’s about an impoverished writer in his twenties, wandering around Oslo back in the 1880s when Oslo was called Christiania. The protagonist spirals slowly out of control due to hunger and whatever psychosis plagued him, whether it was his lofty ideals or something medical or both. I waited until I was done reading to look at any critiques and analyses and I haven’t discussed the novel with anyone in any depth, just the basic plot.

I noticed as I read that I began to relate my personal story to the unnamed protagonist, not because I am the same age now, nor starving nor crazy, but because I had once been a young man in my twenties in a foreign city (Regensburg) who was trying to be a writer, living frugally though by no means wanting for food, renting a single room along Hinter der Grieb in a building 700 years old, without any idea about how to sell anything I wrote, doubting constantly that what I wrote was worth writing, and looking in an awful lot of windows at what I imaged were cozy and comfortable existences as I walked the streets in my cheap black jean jacket from an Aldi store, wondering how I belonged in all this, this, world.

Hamsun’s protagonist was far more extreme, the sort of person talking and yelling to himself, unwashed, emaciated, the type of person that puts you on high alert when you encounter him. And I find now, as I start to read about the story, that Hamsun drew on his own feelings of being a wandering writer in a city that didn’t care if he was there or not, an outsider looking in. I bet all those famous writers found their own inner selves in Hamsun’s protagonist, too, and as it turns out, in Hamsun himself. 

Fair enough. Now, since this is the first piece of literature of my Scandinavian Studies course, I am left wondering how much analysis I am supposed to do to make the experience academic. I’m trying to think back to high school and university courses. What did we do? Discuss the chunk of assigned reading, usually trying to say what we thought the teacher or professor might like to hear. Sometimes we read aloud in class. In high school we wrote book reviews, at the university we wrote essays. 

I’m free from these requirements, of course. I’m the student, yes, but also the teacher, dean, president,  and accrediting agency. So I have hit on this: I am going to submit as my homework questions that the story raised for me. Perhaps the type of questions a professor might offer as writing prompts for students. Thank you to Irina Lupu and the conversation we had this morning about the worth of creating one’s own program of study, that is the genesis here.

• In what way is it realistic to attribute the modernization of the novel to a single book?
• As Hamsun was writing the book, did he feel he was doing something extraordinarily innovative? Does that matter to how we perceive the role of the book in the history of literature?
• To what extent was it necessary that Hamsun himself be suffering like his protagonist (since there are many parallels during Hamsun’s time in Copenhagen, while writing the first part of the book)?
• Do authors write as they write because it is how they know how to write, or are they in some sense attuned to “playing” their potential audience? (This actually comes up in Hunger, when the editor of the newspaper tells the protagonist to write something people want to read, to move away from his esoteric philosophical inquiries that the editor cannot pay for. The protagonist assures the editor that he can do that, but … he can’t.)
• Why do we take “academic measures” after reading a novel or listening to a symphony or looking at artwork? Does the analysis cheapen the experience? Does the analysis as a group create unhelpful groupthink? Could we imagine a class in which university students read a book without a requirement to analyze? Could we give credit for such an experience? And does this hint at a need to analyze as a manner to justify the position or status of the instructor?
• What did I miss in understanding this novel due to the number of years between right now today and when it was first published (135 years)? What might I have gained? What meaning might have shifted because I read the novel in English translation?
• One analysis I read claimed that Hamsun was influenced by the protagonist of Dostoeyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (As much as I remember, that unlucky character killed a woman with a blunt object for a small amount of money and, from that point on, suffered a psychotic breakdown due to his swirling thoughts of guilt – his punishment. If that isn’t the usual interpretation, it’s because I read the book on my own, during that time I was wandering the streets in Regensburg, not as a student of literature.) How might we ever trace the importance of the influence of whom and what we read on our own thinking?