Reflection

Hi all!

I’m settling into bed as I write this, ready to take on another week of classes, teaching and running around!

This semester is much busier than last, which in some respects is good; last semester I had a lot of free time, but this semester I have a pretty solid routine and I am busy on most days from 7am-6pm. I have chosen to do my ICIP (Independent Cultural Immersion Project) about my time teaching English at one of the high schools in Dijon. However, when I sat down to write some preliminary pages about the logistics of getting this internship, I hit a major wall. How could I possibly explain my choices without going through the entire story of my year since I landed in Paris 6 months ago?

I found myself writing a full page (in French, so one page was more than enough….) reflecting on the train ride from Tours to Dijon. I remember exactly what I was wearing and I remember the exact route I took to get from Gare d’Austerlitz to Gare de Lyon (and the choice expletives I was thinking while lugging a one-hundred pound suitcase across the streets of Paris). It’s strange how vividly I remember this scene.

Though it may sound cliché, one of the pillars of Jesuit education is reflection. We are told since freshman convocation that will we need to reflect on what we want out of our four years at Holy Cross; we are told to reflect on where we are in the present and how that will affect our future. I have grown to realize that reflection has become a critical personal exercise. A couple minutes of reflection allowed me to understand that the reason I remember so vividly lugging my suitcase around Paris is because it is the perfect snapshot of the anxiety and fear I had coming to Dijon. A couple more minutes of reflection also yields the realization that I have come so far from where I was on the 6th of September. In order to understand any one given moment (like choosing to teach English) it’s necessary to understand everything that came before.

So I hope whoever reads my ICIP is ready for a long, complicated story and I apologize in advance for all the French grammatical mistakes!

À la prochaine,

Thomas

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2016 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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