Teaching here for the past 3 weeks at Elkanah High School has been an enlightening blast!  The students are great - fun, funny, and incessantly curious.  They simply have to get the lowdown on the U.S. – What is McDonald’s like there?  Have you hung out with any BIG celebrities?  And, predictably, WHY Trump?  Great questions, all deserving respect, but after a full day of introducing myself and painting a choppy picture of my world, I had to forcibly yank my classes out of this growing whirlpool of fascination - the second day shift back to learning was a bit bumpy.  And though Elkanah students are buttoned up in uniforms and refined in speech, beneath their outward appearance lies a typical AHS student, eager for a good laugh and excited to learn in different ways.  So that is a small service that I can potentially provide here, offering novel delivery methods from which students might further appreciate the subject matter.  When I first afforded a couple of sophomore classes opportunities to move around the room from group to group, they enjoyed the musical-chairs piece immensely.  Allowing them to answer their own questions, furthermore, or deflecting them back to the entire class was equally interesting.  After just a few moments at the start, in which they noticeably adjusted to my personal style, they ran with it.  The energy they brought to analyzing To Kill A Mockingbird was truly awesome.  I simply hung back and enjoyed their take on America’s past, asking them to consider how Lee’s famous text mirrors their own history under apartheid law.  And that is where I learned!  The students were quick to connect racism with racism, with one astutely pointing out that “America seems as confused as us.”  With that, I asked if Harper Lee’s suggestion to “try to see things from the other person’s eyes” made sense, to which they all agreed.  And, in the end, we discussed ways to turn Lee’s encouragement into reality, an issue that lies at the heart of South African culture.  And the best part came when one of the quieter students identified, “if we can’t literally walk in the shoes of others, learning about them in books is probably the next best thing.”  With comments like that, how can I not look forward to teaching here, especially if I can help to bridge cultures through literature?