Welp....maybe not...

I would have been in Thailand for four days today.

I was scheduled to leave home on July 18, which means (after travel time), I would have been in-country July 19, ready to take in the culture.

I'm honestly OK with the fact that I couldn't, given the unprecedented "global pandemic" nature of the world right now. As a World History teacher, I am copacetic with the way things go and flow in human events.

But it really is a bummer that I don't get to be in Thailand, experiencing that culture, those people, and learning about the ways our lives converge and diverge. I've been looking forward to the international field experience with Fulbright since September 2019, and excited about Thailand since November 2019. So, it's been 8 months that I've been practicing Thai, reading about the cultural differences, and prepping myself mentally for a trip that hasn't happened.

I am still thrilled to get to be a part of the Fulbright TGC program. I learned so much, and brought so many enriching ideas and practices to my classroom. I am looking forward to collaborating with my fellow Fulbright fellows in how to do a virtual "global comptence" education for our students. I have to admit, the lockdown/quarantine derailed me a bit. I knew that I didn't have to do my field experience blog, and avoided thinking about the fact that I wouldn't be traveling.

But it's still a very important thing to bring to students. I will still get to travel in 2021 (God willing), so that's not a lost cause. I still have students starting in August, and they need to be exposed to different ways of thinking about the world, especially with this crazy pandemic/unrest time they're seeing in their lives and in society. They need to learn how to see other people not as "Other," but as "another."

So, I'm going to keep plugging along, and will dig in on better ways to present global competence in a virtual setting. It's an important thing to work on, and our students deserve the world. So I have to find a way to bring it to them.