Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
David Chavez
Introduction to TEFL, Fall 2019
I was born in a small oil company town in northeast Venezuela, where my father worked as a
mechanical engineer and where I lived until we moved to the US when I was 4. I may have acquired
some Spanish during that time, but if I had it was certainly lost by time my memories begin. After a four
year stint in the US where I completed kindergarten and first grade my family moved to Tibu, a tiny oil
camp on the eastern border of Colombia, and that is where my story begins at age 8.
The ColPet company school was an L-shaped building with Colombian students in one arm and
the Americans in the other. I don’t know much about the Colombian side, but on ours there were roughly
20 students. Grades K-2 were taught in one room, 3-5 in another and 6-8 (the big kids!) in a third. Once
a day we’d would troop over to the Colombian side for history lessons, taught in Spanish. My American
classmates had all lived in Colombia for years (most since birth) and were fully bilingual. I was not.
I have just one memory from the first day of class, but it is seared into my being. We all lined up
to wait for the teacher to lead us to her classroom on the Colombian side. I recall a tall woman, with dark,
shoulder length hair and a friendly face. She greeted us and explained what supplies we would need to
bring when we came for our lessons. I understood none of this but all my classmates were nodding in
comprehension while I stood there, absolutely terrified in my ignorance. What if she talks to me? Do I
reply in English? Will I get in trouble for not understanding? And what in the world is she even saying?
That helpless feeling of being alone in a bubble of incomprehension is something I have never forgotten.
Fast forward to tales of the conquistadors and the heroic exploits of Simon Bolivar. To playing
with Bernado Mejilla, the dentist’s son, while chattering away in Spanish. Somewhere in between I had
become completely fluent, but I honestly have no recollection of any of the steps along the way. What a
By 7th grade I had worked my way up to the big kids classroom when my father decided that he
had reached his career peak in Colombia and took a job with Aramco in Saudi Arabia. I was excited
about this move because I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was about to be gifted Arabic.
I was wrong. Unlike Colombia, where the expat and local families lived together, the foreigners
in Arabia were kept in tightly segregated communities with a main gate and guards. Guantanamo, if you
will. The school curriculum was fully US centric and the sole foreign language taught in school was
French. The only Arabs I was exposed to were the service workers at “the Club” and the shop keepers in
al-Khobar, all of whom spoke English. Nobody in my community cared nor needed to know Arabic and
I took a year of French in 9th grade, and that is the only time I have attempted to learn a foreign
language from scratch in a classroom setting. The class consisted of two students, myself and Jennifer
Rader. About a week after school began my family was forced to leave Arabia to deal with a series of
tragedies. When I returned a few months later Jennifer was well along in her studies and I was still at
Chapter 1. Our teacher, a bespectacled, cigarette smoking, French woman with a strong accent gave me
intense, accelerated lessons while Jennifer continued with the normal curriculum. I really enjoyed that
time, particularly the grammar lessons. It made sense and it was fun. After several weeks I caught up to
Jennifer and our teacher resumed teaching us together at the normal pace. And I got bored. Very bored.
To this day I regret not asking to keep the same fast pace, who knows what may have transpired? But I
didn’t and I have retained absolutely nothing from those lessons. I don’t know French. Quel dommage!
The Aramco school system was K-9, after which we were all sent abroad to continue our studies.
Some went to schools in Lebanon, some to Greece or Italy, many to Switzerland. As for me, I went to
Kemper Military School and College in Boonville, Missouri. KMS had a junior college component and I
took two years of college Spanish. I don’t recall a lot about those classes and don’t think I really learned
anything new. My Tibu days had been not so long ago, and my Spanish was only slightly creaky.
Merely knowing what “sounded right” was enough for me to get some college credit without having to
I didn’t take any language classes in college, my Kemper credits satisfying any requirements.
One summer, between my freshman and sophomore years, I attempted an Arabic class at the Aramco
training department. It was just my buddy Brian Bowman and I in that class, taught by an unenthusiastic
American. The bored teacher, coupled with the lack of any real need for Arabic, made it difficult to
maintain interest. Brian and I convinced ourselves to quit after having mastered little beyond “Where’s
the hammer? Maybe it’s under the car.” and “No thank you, I don’t smoke.” and proceeded to spend the
After college came graduate school and fortuitous sequence of connections which led me to
CICESE, the Center for Scientific Studies and Higher Education in Ensenada, Mexico. CICESE was a
newly established institution and a master’s degree plus zero experience was all one needed to get a
research and teaching position, so I was fully qualified. By this time my Spanish had receded. I could
speak smoothly enough, and had sufficient vocabulary to pass for proficient, but had a very difficult time
understanding most of what I heard. It took many weeks of complete immersion before I had developed
my ear and became truly fluent. I taught seismology at CICESE by essentially copying my own lessons
which I had taken two years previous. I started out preparing the lecture notes in English but at some
point I switched to Spanish, probably when I started thinking in it, however it may have been the other
way around.
The collapse of the peso in 1983 motivated me to leave Mexico and take a job with an oil
company in Houston, where I quickly learned that I didn’t like Houston, didn’t like Texas and didn’t like
the oil business. I escaped by returning to graduate school in 1984. That was right about the time the
personal computer appeared and I turned out to be a rather good programmer. That skill, plus being in the
right place at the right time, got me an invitation to participate in a project to install seismometers around
the Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and beginning in 1986 I started making frequent trips to the dark
Russian is a language I never expected to hear, much less speak. Little by little, trip after trip, I
started to collect words and phrases, mostly while drunk. In the waning days of the USSR and for a few
subsequent years, the caricature of the vodka swilling Russian was very true. I recall many, many
evenings sitting around a table with a group of Russians, drinking vodka and swapping stories through an
interpreter. After the vodka kicked in my inhibitions would vanish and I had great fun trying out my tiny
vocabulary. Grammar was learned through mimicry, often to humorous effect as I would typically get my
own gender wrong while mimicking female speakers. That’s how I learned about declensions.
I never formally studied Russian, and didn’t achieve conversational proficiency until I moved
there in 1990. By then I had taken a job at UCSD and was helping to build and maintain a global
seismographic network. Our stations in the USSR were not performing well because our colleagues
lacked experience with American technology and were further burdened by the Soviet ethic of “they
pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”. I eagerly accepted an offer to live in Russia in order to keep
things running and in 1990 moved to Obninsk, 100 km south of Moscow. At the time it was a closed city
and I was the only foreigner in town. Most of my colleagues spoke little to no English and I picked up a
lot of vocabulary via hand gestures. The interpreter would give me informal grammar and vocabulary
lessons in the mornings, and I would practice them with my colleagues. This proved to be very effective
and after about 6 months I had attained a level of proficient confidence to where I was no longer tense
while out and about on my own. One happy memory is when I was asked for directions from a stranger,
he noticed my accent and assumed I was from Soviet Georgia, refusing to believe I was American.
I never learned to read or write in Russian. At one point I had memorized the Cyrillic alphabet
through rote repetition, which simplified navigating my Russian-English dictionary but I never got
beyond sounding out words. It is pointless try to write when you can’t read, so I made no attempt at that.
I stopped speaking Russian regularly when I returned to San Diego in 1993, and my proficiency has
suffered. I’ve returned to the Russian speaking world several times in subsequent years and each time it
recovers after a few days of continual practice, so I think the basic language is there permanently.
I’ve observed something interesting about how my brain processes language. I can switch
between English and Spanish or English and Russian easily (e.g. while acting as an interpreter), but what
I absolutely cannot do is toggle between Spanish and Russian. I once visited a seismic station in
Tajikistan whose resident operator had spent several years in Cuba while in the navy and spoke good
Spanish. I found it impossible to talk to him in Spanish and then to the others in Russian. I would
stumble and struggle and often mixed or confused the two. Similarly, on a trip to Ensenada with some
friends from Obninsk I found myself speaking in Russian to the Mexicans and Spanish to the Russians
and it was only their bemused expressions which made me realize something was wrong. I feel like I
have one spot for processing foreign language and have to move the grammar and vocabulary over there
each time I want to use it. I think my stumbling comes from having to continually swap one for the other
while true polyglots have multiple processors or can do the swap instantly. Or something like that.
Afterword
My feeble efforts at Arabic were not a complete waste. I returned to Saudi Arabia a few times as an adult
to service the UCSD seismic station outside of Riyadh. In 2014, on what was to be my last trip there, I
needed a hammer but the toolbox was nowhere to be found. “Where’s the hammer?” I called out to
Mohammed, standing by the truck. And then with a grin stretching from ear to ear, I offered “Maybe it’s