Mojo-meister & I are heading to Ft. Lauderdale to have a few days of quality time with my son, T before he departs for France for nine months to teach conversational English to 8-11 yr. olds. OK, here's where I do the proud mom thing... I am so proud of this kid for a gazillion reasons, but now I'm SO proud of the way he is evolving as an adult. He has taken a "responsibility pill" or something in the past couple years or so and is handling his life and preparing his future now with amazing grace and fortitude. The world is, indeed, his oyster... well, if there is still a "world" to crack open in the future, but that's another subject. 

My boy speaks French, Arabic and Spanish fluently, and also speaks a fair amount of German, a little Italian and Japanese, a tadsky of Russian, and is now teaching himself a bit of Polish just for kicks. My son personifies the new generation, and in my eyes, the new hope for a future where the greater world is better understood by its inhabitants. These kids were raised in a digital world, a connected world where a lot of the old rules no longer applied. This generation (do they have a letter, like "GenX", et. al.?) was one of the first to get "sophisticated" at a very early age, which was both a good and bad thing, depending on how you look at it. In some ways, these kids missed some of the innocence of childhood. Their world was one of constant and ever-changing stimulation and information and instant gratification, mainly in digital form (ie: video games, internet, cell phones, IM'ing, texting, et. al.). On the other hand, perhaps they are better equipped to deal with a world in which the digital rules change about every five minutes - something often lamented by we in the dinosaur generations.

So my little globe-trotting polyglot is off to his biggest adventure to date in his young life. Since he will only be working about 15 hours a week, T is planning to "see Europe" in his off time. Knowing him, he will have the train system, the youth hostel system and the where-to-eat-cheap system down pat in a very short time. I imagine he will meet a lot of interesting people by chance, he will probably have some getting-lost-and-ending-up-in-an-extra-cool-place adventures, possibly some getting-lost-and-ending-up-in-not-so-cool-places adventures, and so on and so on. Wow. This is one set of adventures that I will, indeed, get tremendous vicarious thrills from. I will confess, too, that I am already scheming my "Mom is coming for a visit" adventure, probably in the Spring... France is really nice in the Spring. Ironically, T is going to be living and working in the town of Nancy, which is only about 5 or 10 km. from Metz - a beautiful little Medieval town near the German border where T and I stayed one night during our 2004 European adventure. 

T has no teaching experience, and until this job came up, had never expressed any particular desire to teach. Now, however, he is really looking forward to opening his student's minds to the wonders of fluency in another language, just as T, himself experienced with his first high school French teacher, Mdm. Forsythe. Mdm. F was one of those rare and gifted teachers that few people are lucky enough to ever experience in any level of education. She really inspired T in so many ways and basically gave him a future in a sense. T's love of language and linguistics was brought to life by Mdm. F, and he bit into it with great gusto.