I taught English in Costa Rica before I went to college. I'm not an especially outdoorsy guy, but sometimes I would spot wildlife while whitewater rafting or walking in the rainforest at 5 A.M.
I learned my English from Keith Spurgeon. He had some small children, and I was young, too, and so we spoke the language together, and it was fantastic.
Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.
I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!
I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.
