An Ode to Grants

I guess in accordance with the title of this article I should start out with something like, “Oh Grant! Ye enabler, I love thee, how you rock my world!” Seriously though, I love grants. I just got back from my Fulbright mid-year conference, and after spending a weekend talking with people in my similar situation my utter disbelief in what I’ve been able to do this year is renewed. The Slovak commission is a little top-heavy with English teaching assistants this year (there are 8 of us, and only a handful of scholars or lecturers (*insert here, people who are pretty established in their life/ career paths and know more or less what they’re doing). The conference was joined with the Czech Republic though, who have far more of the later breed of grantees, which means I got to pick the brains of older, wiser, more experienced people as well as digest my adventures so far with other youngins’. I’m pretty sure I came away with a least one new mentor.

My fellow ETA’s and I (both Slovak and Czech) spent some time at the conference commiserating about the woes of our teaching assignments—the gross prevalence of plagiarism, the disorganized and often unpredictable nature of the Czech and Slovak educational systems, and the incredible task of trying to get students to speak in English Conversation class. Our complaints by no means pervaded the atmosphere though, because most of us couldn’t wait to talk about what a trip some of our students are, the cool ways we had found to weasel our ways into our respective communities, and how COOL it is that we’ve been given this year for exploration, experience, and development. Whether we were fresh out of undergrad, or had been dabbling with other prospects for a few years post-college (a few of the grantees did some work with Americore) none of us were quite ready to head off to graduate school this past fall but we all wanted to do something sort of kind of related to academics and or professionalism. I’m pretty sure the Fulbright grant has delivered more than some of us were expecting.


This video was supposed to be part of my presentation, because there is no way to sum up or concisely capture everything that I’ve been doing this year. We live in a visually stimulated society right, I’m going to roll with the old cliché “an picture says a thousand words.” I hope it’s not cheating if I include a little video too…