Underachiever

Posted by Laura

I teach at an international school with teenagers who come from host countries all over the world and multiple different passport countries are represented. On Friday, I had the daughter of a Wycliffe Bible translator teach the class - she's way more of an expert in biblical translation theory than I am. Based on her knowledge of her peers, she created this fantastic activity where she picked a verse in English to have a Korean volunteer translate into Korean followed by another Korean speaker translating it back to English. It was then given to a Mandarin speaker to do the same with another student who could translate back to English and pass it on to a German speaker finally having it translated a sixth time ending in a barely understandable sentence and aptly demonstrating the difficulty translators face when trying to convey the message of Scripture across languages.

I love the activity so much I tried it in my next class, but I only had one student fluent in Korean, and no Mandarin speakers. I just had three German speakers, one of whom was also able to speak and hear Lao fluently though he couldn't write it. I did have three fluent French speakers as well, so we completed the activity English-French-English-German-English, and I discovered that I only have one out of fifteen students in that class period who is monolingual. Oddly enough, the girl who can only speak English is a full German citizen with German parents and a German passport raised in Germany - on American military bases.

As the verse was being translated in each class, I chatted with the students about languages. The two Korean volunteers in the first class also each speak a third language after Korean and English - one Arabic and the other Russian. 

"So not only do you speak three languages, but you know three alphabets." I said, "This is incredible to me."

"It's not that big of a deal," the girl said, "The concept of alphabet is still the same, so you just learn another one as easily."

No way. 

The next class period I had a student tell me how embarrassing she found it to come to our school and only know two languages. "Well so many people know three or four. I mean Hannah knows like five," she explained. 

I'm so impressed with my students' grasp on languages that it often makes me feel like an underachiever. Some of these kids knew three languages before they hit puberty, and what have I got to show for myself? Sometimes I desperately need a reminder that I had a masters degree at 24, but even if I didn't have that, I've still done a lot by my mid twenties. And I'm still doing a lot. I've also always surrounded myself with these sort of overachievers at life who are constantly busy doing multiple incredible things. Sarah, Rachel, and Jordyne are those type of people. The four of us are living awesome lives, and we feel compelled to share some of that here on this blog, but we also lead such full and rich lives that there isn't always a chance for each of us to sit down and thoughtfully compose a reflection of our day or an insight worth reading.

We noticed a lull in posts here last month, but I promise you that it's not for a lack of excitement in our lives. Stay tuned, because we are anything but underachievers.