Four years this week I was just back from teaching a six week summer program in London.\u00a0 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.<\/p>\n
I had injured my knee forty-eight hours before my flight from Detroit, and the surgeon said I’d be okay with a knee brace and Aleve, but would need surgery as soon as I got home.\u00a0 So I went because I didn’t want to disappoint the students, or myself.\u00a0 teaching abroad had been a dream of mine for a very long time.<\/p>\n
Now, I’d never taken Aleve before and it kept me from sleeping.\u00a0 Ditto the pain when the Aleve wore off and I couldn’t take more.\u00a0 I was also besieged by the unexpected 90-degree heat in London, which didn’t feel any better no matter how many times people told me the weather was unusual.<\/p>\n
To my horror, the flat that had been rented for me was a duplex, which meant I had to limp up and down the stairs there countless times a day, even though the surgeon advised me to avoid stairs.\u00a0 My phone or tablet always seemed to be on whichever floor I wasn’t on.<\/p>\n
My flat was at the top of the building and got so hot by late afternoon that it shut down my iPhone.\u00a0 The classroom I taught in at Regent’s College wasn’t air conditioned and the inscrutable powers-that-be would only give us a fan for one day.\u00a0 I had to teach while I was in pain, sleepless, and stressed by the heat.\u00a0 It was brutal.<\/p>\n
To truly add insult to injury, one night I tripped over the wild fringe on one rug, smacked my hand on an oak table on the way down.\u00a0 It swelled up grotesquely and I was soon in an emergency room where I passed out because the pain in my hand was so bad.\u00a0 I ended up with a cast which my students signed, hoping that I would survive till the end of the program.<\/p>\n
But my students–!\u00a0 They were amazing.\u00a0 In my many years of teaching, I’d never had a group so dedicated, funny, talented, and compassionate.\u00a0 No matter how I felt on any given day, spending time with them was joyful.\u00a0 I felt as if everything I’d ever learned about how to work with student writing and how to approach reading literature was focused with the intensity of a laser beam.\u00a0 Watching their writing blossom was one of the grandest experiences I’ve ever had as a teacher.\u00a0 And unlike the regular classes I taught back home with twenty-five students, I had only fifteen in each one, which made getting to know them and their work much easier.<\/p>\n
As I finally got my insomnia and pain\u00a0 under control, I was able to fully enjoy museums, plays, and relish the good food and drink at local restaurants and\u00a0 pubs.\u00a0 A friend from Germany came to spend the weekend nearby and we had great, intimate, sometimes uproarious meals together.\u00a0 I loved staying in Pimlico on a quiet square, and though London has never been my favorite city in Western Europe, right now, I miss being there.<\/p>\n
Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in many genres and teaches creative writing at www.writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four years this week I was just back from teaching a six week summer program in London.\u00a0 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I had injured my knee forty-eight hours before my flight from Detroit, and the surgeon said I’d be okay with a knee brace and Aleve, but … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1468,347],"tags":[95,1247,1163,1466,1467,837,1426,1465,1463,1464,341],"class_list":["post-3872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london","category-travel","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-creative-writing-workshops","tag-disability","tag-injuries","tag-insomnia","tag-london","tag-pimlico","tag-regents-college","tag-study-abroad","tag-teaching-abroad","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3872"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5536,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872\/revisions\/5536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}