Angst and the road to Nogales...

Tomorrow, twenty-five students will arrive for their first class in the study of the human body. The classroom holds twenty-four in a three-tiered configuration. That extra student will not be a problem.

Other than the first semester back in the classroom, more than a year ago, I am as anxious as I have been. Being uneasy is an old friend (friend?) and a hallmark of my life's journey. The new...the unknown is always the same.

I will get up in the morning and head to Mexico. Well, not precisely, Mexico. The class is in Nogales, Arizona, on the US-Mexico border. The facility is in a refurbished grocery store in the parking lot of an old shopping center near the Mexico border.

The rub? For the majority of my students, English is their second language. Anatomy and physiology are challenging in their own right. Adding to the complexity of the course, I have ZERO Spanish stored anywhere in the recesses of my mind!

When accepting this course several months ago, it sounded exciting, as uncertainty always has. That was then. At the moment, the early eagerness has been tempered as an insidious dose of apprehension has crept in.

Getting there from here…

Interstate highway nineteen (I-19) is unique. It is entirely within the State of Arizona. It begins at a junction with I-10 in Tucson. It ends somewhere in the neighborhood of 91m (300 ft) north of the Mexican border in Nogales, Arizona. The drive between Tucson and Nogales is 101km (63 mi), making I-19, the sixth shortest primary Interstate in the contiguous 48 states. Another unique feature is that I-19 is the only interstate highway in the United States where road signs display distances in the metric system.

Too much information?...

I-19’s connection with I-10 provides a critical part of the CANMEX corridor that runs north-south via a circuitous series of highways from Mexico to Alberta, Canada. For the sake of completeness…Mexican Border (Nogales, Arizona) > I-19 Tucson > I-10 to Phoenix > Routes 60 and 93 (I- 11) through Arizona to Nevada > I-515 & 15 to Las Vegas > I-15 through Utah, Idaho, Montana > Alberta.

Getting there from here, part Deux…

In spite of some nervousness on my part, this is an excellent opportunity for any number of reasons. It will provide the chance to break complicated ideas and concepts down to make them more understandable. It will, as always, increase my own comprehension. That is the ongoing journey of the teacher.

There will be a chance to learn a little about the lives of these students. It has been my habit to learn the names of my students as quickly as possible. When they arrive in class, I welcome each of them individually. Names are meaningful icons. When one is called by name, there is a small, almost indiscernible 'sense of belonging.'

During the semester, I will learn a little about each of them. In turn, the students will learn a few things about me. There will be doors yet unopened to our collective minds. An opportunity, not just for academic understanding, but for community building.

This will also be a little more challenging because the course is a hybrid. It means there is one face to face lecture per week with the rest online, leading to more responsibility on the part of the students.

While I prefer more face to face class time, online courses are the direction higher education is going. Nationally, fully online courses have been taught by sixty-four-percent of full-time faculty, and sixty-five-percent of students have taken them. I am on the tail-end of the traditional classroom era. Or from the glass-half-full perspective, on the front end of fully engaged distance education.

As this experience unfolds, it will continue to add to the process of lifetime learning. Teaching, of course, is learning, and not a subtle phenomenon. Every time I engage the material, I have a deeper understanding, wider peripheral vision, and am able to teach it more clearly. Yes, indeed, it is a wonderfully edifying cycle (in opposition to a vicious cycle).

Getting there from here, part Trois…

There is another totally unrelated reason I am looking forward to this experience – road time! The drive to Nogales is an hour and a half from my home. This means I have three-hours alone in the car on each of my teaching days. This further means I’ll have the opportunity to listen to books, or courses, or podcasts or the music I love.

In my early career, I worked thirty-five miles from my home. Over that decade, I devoured untold numbers of books and courses. While driving around Tucson I get short listening segments. This will be the first time in years, I have had an extended mobile classroom.

And so the dance begins once again. Anxious, yes. Excited, yes - the hallmark of my life. 

Tomorrow morning I will arrive at a grocery store in a parking lot in Nogales, Arizona. I will get out of my car, walk to the door and open it…

Who knows?

- ted