English

What did your childhood home look like? Describe it and its immediate surroundings in detail so that I can visualize it.

I grew up in a small town in the southern part of the US. Our house had one story, it was made of red brick and had a brown shingle roof. The garage was white painted wood. We had a front yard with a grass lawn, few medium-sized trees and one palm tree. In the back yard we had a big pecan tree and a small storage shed. We also had a small garden with some vegetables.

Tell me about a particularly embarrassing moment that you/a friend/a family member experienced.

Coming back After a holiday break, I landed at the airport and went out to long-term parking where I had left my car. When I got there, I reached for my keys but couldn't find them anywhere no matter how hard or where I looked. After searching through all of my luggage, I ended up getting a taxi back to my apartment, where I got the manager to let me in. He wasn’t very happy about the whole thing, and I had to make up an excuse as to why I didn’t have my own keys on me. I proceeded to search the apartment high and low for a spare while I was unpacking, to no avail. When I took the last thing out of my bag, I realized there was one zipper pocket I had forgotten about that I had not checked, and sure enough, there were my keys. Embarrassed I asked a friend to drive me to the airport to get my car, but he was busy, so I ended up paying for another taxi ride.

What do you most value in your current job? Why do you find it of greatest value? Has what you value in a job changed over the years, and if so, how?

I am a language teacher and on a very basic level, I very much value being involved in the profession of education, mostly because I believe that if the world is to improve, it needs to be done through personal, individual interactions. I grew up being fascinated with science, but a few planned adventures as well as happenstance, I became involved in learning a language while living abroad. Suddenly I felt as though my eyes and ears were opened to a world that that had always seemed so far away, like an astronaut exploring what people on the other side of the world really thought. At first, teaching was only the manifestation of a small desire on my own part to bring about better understanding between people, but now I realize the full extent to which language conveys, or even embodies culture, and just how crucial its role is in facilitating the global society that everyone knows must come to be in the future. Machines may help us translate discrete words and phrases, and no doubt they will get better and better at that task, but I expect that humans will always -- and exclusively -- be those who can bring true meaning to our ideas, by infusing them with culture, context and consequence.