Improvised Educational Devices

That first time, I can’t remember how I got to the Carlton Hotel, but it was probably by foot, from the train station. It was my very first Cannes Film Festival, a 16 mm print boxed in cardboard hanging from my right hand; I was on a mission to sell the first feature film I ever produced. It was called Shot, and I was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Illinois where the film was made; I was a student of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter at the university library, someone who read myself into the cosmopolitan world of red carpet premieres and drinks with Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale or Jean-Paul Belmondo on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, the Mediterranean Sea undulating in the moonlight in front of us, just as it had done in Karel Reisz’s Isadora, a bouncy “Bye Bye Birdie” flapping around us, Pernod turning gray in our tall glasses.

I found the Carlton Hotel—it didn’t occur to me, a small town Illinois boy, that there would be other hotels, perhaps more economical—and I paused outside, wondering whether I’d be allowed to walk through the door. Imposing, elegant, extravagant, intimidating, a giant poster for Fellini’s Roma covering one side of the hotel’s face, another advertising Hitchcock’s Frenzy to the right of the door, the Carlton reached out to me, welcoming me into that phantasmagoria that is Hollywood, in the largest inclusive sense of the word.

“Come,” it said. “Come on in.”

I walked through the wide door amid a rush of people hurrying in both directions, my film in one hand and in my other a small baby blue suitcase—it was the only luggage we owned, the one my mother used when she went to the annual Housewares Show at McCormick Place in Chicago.

The first thing I saw was the wide staircase, carpeted red, rising from the lobby, and down it walked someone who could have been Susannah York, blonde and fair and beautiful. I gaped. She brushed past me, three men in pastels fast behind her.

“May I help you, sir?”

English, directed toward me. A man behind the desk, in uniform.

“A room?”

“Well . . . It is the festival. How many nights?”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars. Per night.”

I raised two fingers.

That, of course, was not how the conversation must have gone—I remember none of the actual words—but that was the result. I do remember the sweat in my palms as I signed the register. And how the man behind the desk towered, a bemused smirk welcoming me into my first five-star hotel.

I took the lift to my floor, having ignored the bellman trying to help me, doing so because I was afraid, because I didn’t want to have to worry about tipping, about making small talk, about interaction with someone clearly more worldly than I, someone who would most certainly find me an imposter in an instant, rob me of my valuables, leave me tied up in my underwear in a closet, as Alfred Hitchcock had left Cary Grant a decade before.

I turned the corner toward my room and heard the words “Throw it, you asshole!” and saw two very tall men playing Frisbee in the lush carpeted hallway. The voice was instantly recognizable. The two men became—were—Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, clearly drunk and outrageous, throwing that red plastic discus the full length of the corridor. They paid me no mind, not a word of caution, nor recognition, as I inched along the corridor wall ignored, trying to avoid the flying Frisbee. I found my room, and entered. I closed the door and opened my eyes to see a be-feathered bed in muted tones of beige and brown, Louis XIV chairs, and large French doors leading onto a marble balcony overlooking the terrace.

I was home.

But of course I wasn’t. I wandered the town, trying to get someone to look at my film. Shot. It was perhaps the first feature film ever made on a college campus. It was a rip-off of the The French Connection, set in the Illinois prairie, replete with drug deals, indiscriminate murder, imitation femmes fatale. It was terrible, but nobody knew, because no one at the Cannes Festival ever saw it.

During those 2 days I talked to not a single festival goer.

“He’s a shy boy,” my mother would always say.

I tried to knock on office doors, apartments rented to Lorimar and Fox and Pathe, but somehow couldn’t find the courage. I retreated to a table by myself on the Carlton Terrace, drinking pastis, thinking it made me look like I belonged. But no one talked to me there. The self-assured glided past me, crowded me, borrowed chairs from my table until there was no place available should anyone desire my company.

On my last evening, I shuffled my way up to the barriers lining the red carpet into the Palais to watch the crowds pour into that night’s film. A sobering flicker of insight told me then that my journey would not be an easy one, that I had much to learn if I wanted to be on the other side of that rope line, if I truly wanted to be one of them, a cosmopolitan.

I didn’t know then that it would be in the classroom that I learned to talk to strangers.

My last memory of that night outside the Palais is of a large man from India, in flowing white robes, a true entourage of sycophants surrounding him, walking down the red carpet, flashbulbs popping in his face, his free undulating laughter filling the air. Beside me, a woman said, “Shashi Kapoor! I love you!” I later learned, in that Illinois library, that he was Bollywood’s most famous star. Again, the woman screamed his name, and he turned to her, and I could see his deep brown eyes, the whites tinged blood red at the edges. He smiled at her and a gold tooth caught a spotlight, just like in the movies. The woman said, “Can I . . . ?” And he said, his voice booming, “Write to me, my dear! Write to me!” And she said, “What’s your address?” And it was then that he spread his arms wide toward the heavens and boomed:

“Shashi Kapoor, India!”

It was many years after that moment, after fumbling my way toward that dream, toward being able to say, “Nate Kohn, America!” that I became this:

Nate Kohn, PhD, is an educator, scholar, motion picture writer and producer, and festival director. At the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, he is a professor, teaching writing for the screen, producing for film and television, cultural studies and critical theory. He also serves as associate director of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards. He has published widely in scholarly journals and presented peer reviewed papers at the annual meetings of major academic associations. He is the festival director and cofounder of Roger Ebert’s Festival, now in its 15th year. His credits as a motion picture producer include the Academy Award nominated “Zulu Dawn,” starring Burt Lancaster, Peter O’Toole, Simon Sabela, and Bob Hoskins. He has written commissioned screenplays for companies in Los Angeles, London, Munich, Toronto, Montreal, Zagreb, and Johannesburg, and has been a consultant to production companies in Norway, Britain, and Germany. He produced Somebodies, a low-budget theatrical motion picture that premiered in dramatic competition at The Sundance Film Festival 2006 and has shown at other festivals, including Cleveland, Sarasota, Cinevegas, Black Harvest, and the AFI Festival in Los Angeles. In 2008, he was executive producer on the television series Somebodies for Black Entertainment Television. In 2010, he produced the Bahamas’ first indigenous feature film Rain that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was sold to Showtime. He also produced the feature film Bottleworld, starring Scott Wilson, Mya, and Anna Camp. He is currently producing the documentary feature Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker that premiered at SXSW 2013. His book, Pursuing Hollywood: Seduction, Obsession, Dread (2006) was published by Alta Mira Press.

In that short biography I wrote early in my academic career, I described myself as an educator first, Hollywood second. Strange how words appear on the page, without obvious forethought. The bio was for the Film Movement website, nothing to do with the academy. Why didn’t I put film producer first, or festival director, or writer? Those descriptors, actually closer to the truth, would have been better for that website. But I wrote educator, and it remained that way, had a ring to it, a pleasing puffery, magnanimously intimidating. I still use that biography today, when asked for one, updating it from time to time.

Full disclosure forces me to say that no one ever taught me to teach. I have never taken an education course. I do have a PhD, in Mass Communication. That was an accident of time, place, opportunity, desire, frustration, a left turn made in a moment of desperation when I could no longer imagine myself as cosmopolitan, as globe-trotter, as movie producer.

Then the University of Georgia hired me to teach, and to do other academic things. I was that rare creature: someone who had written and produced in the real world and who was armed with a doctoral degree. They didn’t seem to care that I had never ever taught before, never asked me the question. Somehow, they assumed I could do it—I had a PhD. Academia believes that if you can achieve the PhD, then you are able to do anything. You are a generalist, a general among generalists. You can teach, write, publish, edit, administrate, review, critique, expert witness, philosophize, pontificate on PBS, drink heavily and discuss football with absolute impunity and an unassailable authority. And most in academia, if not elsewhere, take you seriously.

Me, a teacher. I learned on the job, listened a lot, came out of one of my shells, found that speaking voice I somehow lost in first grade, said things just to hear myself sound smart, concerned, witty. Said things just because I could. Reveled in sounding smart. Imaging what it would have been like to have had that voice during my first visit to Cannes. How I might now be in Bel Air instead of Athens, GA.

Students came and went. They stayed the same age; I got older. I wasn’t sure what I was accomplishing in my classrooms. My undergraduates tried to write feature length screenplays, and my graduate students struggled with poststructural and postcolonial theory in a program where professors did mostly quantitative work, except for me, an Indian, and a bipolar bulimic. Teaching was easy; sometimes the discussions were engaging. Occasionally I would notice students actually listening to what I was saying, writing my words down, as if they meant something. That alarmed me—a little. I did wonder what, if anything, they were learning and if indeed they were, how that learning would serve them after graduation.

In need of a vita line, I formed a club that met once a week to discuss culture—very few students or faculty came. Foucault, Deleuze, Stuart Hall, McLuhan, Carey, Denzin were not major draws around my college. Students did come to me about other things, worried about what they were going to do with their lives after graduation. How would they get a job in the entertainment industry? Or any industry. Their friends in advertising and public relations were doing fine—eight to five jobs in New York, Chicago, Portland. Happy parents and, most importantly, health insurance and prospects. But what about my students, the mass media, film, and television folks? Desperate, they asked what internships would I recommend and would I make introductions? And do internships lead to jobs? Should they rather go to grad school, get an MFA and if so where, and would I write letters of recommendation? I always said yes, offered my best advice, wrote enthusiastic letters for everyone no matter their GPA, but I had no real answers. When pushed, I told them to relax, getting a job just played into a capitalist hegemony, and I advised them to take a year and travel the world. None of them did. Their parents wouldn’t understand, let alone fund it. This isn’t Australia, or South Africa. Students came and went, few of them earning a place in memory. I began to think I was in the wrong place. I started to look back, outside the academy, to my old life as a movie producer. How could I stick my toe back in that treacherous swirl and yet still keep my academic paycheck coming in? Still retain the prestige of professor?

It was then that I decided to start a study abroad program that would take me back to the Cannes Film Festival every May. I like the South of France, the food, the vistas, the people, the price of a bottle of wine. I had old friends from around the world who attend the festival every year. I wanted to see them again, as I used to do during the 15-year period that I made a meager, sporadic living as a movie producer. I wanted them to admire the educator PhD epaulettes displayed on my shoulders. I wanted to be a festival presence again, this time without having to manufacture excuses for being there, as those attending without a film in competition feel obliged to do. And I wanted to introduce these friends to my students and my students to them. I was amazed how easily they were impressed with each other. I found I was doing something, maybe something surprising.

In the program I designed, I took 25 students from Georgia’s Bulldog Nation to the French Riviera to learn how to write practical film criticism, the kind you read in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times or the back pages of the New Yorker or online at rogerebert.com. I thought it would be good for them to see films from around the world, ones that never make it to the States. Like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Or A Screaming Man, by Chad’s Mahamat-Selen Haroun. I thought it would be a challenge for them to review films they’ve never seen before, never heard of, have no preconceived notions about, most set in places they can’t even imagine. I wanted them to see Asian films, African films, films from Iran and Israel, Belgium and Sweden, Rwanda and Argentina. I wanted to introduce them to filmmakers and film critics from other places and have them question each other about films, theory, criticism, art. It was a grand idea. I’m a good-idea person. Always have been. Or so I’ve been told.

The program is now 10 years old, and I’ve learned two things: One, if you force students to write 10 film reviews in 4 weeks, they write much better in the 10th review than they do in the first. Much much better. Nothing to do with me. It’s like exercise, taking your brain to the gym every day and toning the writing muscle. My contribution: forcing them to write. And two, at the end of the program, most of the students are suddenly cosmopolitan, citizens of the cosmos, brimming with self-confidence, somehow taller, able to negotiate any worlds they find themselves in, awash in swagger.

Listen to them, selected randomly, writing in anonymous program evaluations:

I discovered new passions that I never would have imagined possible. I have become extremely more confident in intense social situations. I have learned to balance punctuality and spontaneity. And most importantly, I experienced a sense of self-worth and importance among the cinematic elite which I achieved through determination and perseverance.

If I can weasel my way into the red carpet premiere screenings at Cannes, I can pretty much go anywhere and do anything. My sense of what is feasible has widened dramatically. I am less scared of what is going to happen when I am no longer an undergraduate at the University of Georgia.

I fought really hard to go to Cannes, and it changed me in every way I had hoped it would. I definitely feel confident enough to strike out on my own in some foreign land and make it work. I am absolutely sure of this.

I was thrown into a foreign country and foreign situations, and I was forced to problem solve and adapt on my own. After traveling to France, I am more self-confident than I have ever been.

I have always been shy and reluctant to put myself out there, but with study abroad you learn to seize every opportunity you are given. If I wanted to see a film, I had to make it happen. I couldn’t stand back; I had to do whatever I could to get into the theater.

Since Cannes, life feels more dynamic. I meet more people on a daily basis. I find myself interacting with strangers in a more positive way. I am more willing to admit that I don’t know about something. I’m more willing to forgive myself for my ignorance.

And this is not a fleeting phenomenon. On the crowded sidewalks of my campus the other day, my eye was drawn to a particular individual, someone who stood out in the mass of students and faculty, who was apart, somehow grander than the others, somehow fearless, someone who was inside looking out and outside looking in at the same time. Suddenly, I recognized him as a Cannes student, one of the timid ones on the first day in France, now the one who draws eyes, envy and curiosity in a crowd. Shoulders back and down, chest and head held high, he is at the same time Baudelaire’s flaneur and Appiah’s cosmopolitan, at ease in the world, comfortable among all he surveys.

As I reflect on this transformation, I wonder what to make of this unintended curriculum that becomes the context of the study abroad program I devised—this organic, student-generated curriculum that I never imaged and over which I have little control. Do I claim it? Capitalize on it? Advertise it? Discipline it? How could I do any of those things, ethically? Except, maybe write about it, here, in this paper, for this academic audience.

But I do find myself following it, this accidental, contextual curriculum. To see where it leads. Letting it become what it will, feeding it, in its expanding becoming. Perhaps even allowing it to teach me, the teacher, how it matters, why it is important. But rarely teaching it myself, never speaking it out loud to students, not wanting to give them expectations, simply providing the opportunity for it to rise up and take hold, mostly by feigning disinterest in what happens outside the classroom, beyond the borders of the intended curriculum.

But what do I learn from this wildly proliferating organic curriculum? Mostly I learn not to mess with it, to get out of its way, to depersonify “teacher” and let worlds become their own teachers.

I remember watching the students listen to Paul Cox, the Dutch-Australian filmmaker and humanist, who began his life in rural Holland, the first sounds he remembers, he tells them, are those of Nazi jackboots kicking in his family’s apartment door. Shaggy and bent in his black corduroy jacket, black tee-shirt and open sandals, which he wears in defiance of those German boots, his nicotine-stained fingers holding wrinkled pages from which he reads:

The history of man is the history of madness. Sanity, which is a state of enlightenment, can only occur when we recognize our past insanity. I ask for anarchy. Nothing new can happen unless you shake the foundations of the present system of ignorance, greed and hatred—although anarchy doesn’t need to be destruction. It is a part of the creative process. Question everything and everyone and then question yourself. So everything can indeed be forever fresh and new.

They are transfixed, as much by his soft voice and calm aura as by his words. He pauses, takes a sip from a bottle of Belgium beer, lights his pipe, puffing it back to life. Always the provocateur, the students catch the twinkle in his eye. He reads again:

What happens inside us when we long and wonder and don’t understand? When the spirit of death marches right through our conscience and licks at the foundations of all that is right and just and good? When reason becomes a nightmare and a threat? When we actually realize that all human activity is doomed? When that horrible silence invades our hearts?

To them, this European, who speaks from a faraway place of frightening torment, becomes a man who knows the world and who paints it vividly and explicitly for them, a man who can still find humor hidden in the lacunae of catastrophes they only know through images, yet he makes manifest to them in that moment. He concludes:

Art is a mixture of vision and kindness. Through vision we find divine origin—in the sea, in the sky, a tree, a simple leaf, or a single drop of rain. And kindness keeps us close to the child, close to all that represents the God of creation. Now, are there any questions?

Clearly, the students had never experienced such a person, world-weary, displaced by the terrors of 20th century history, yet still championing art-as-salvation, a not uncommon bipolarity, but one most of the students are experiencing for the first time. Kindly but directly, he answered their questions. After he left, they all asked for a copy of his remarks, and they began to walk the streets of Cannes as he walked them, a moving calm in the chaotic swirl of the crowds.

That day, in those interactions, both verbal and nonverbal, I suspect I learned as much or more than the students did.

When I was their age, or younger, I read Hemingway and imagined myself in that clean well-lighted place on Paris’ left bank, writing short stories about the Midwestern plain where I was born and raised. But my story was a different one, for I was the son of an Austrian Jew, my father displaced by the same forces that destroyed Paul Cox’s plan to become a Catholic priest in parochial Holland. I belonged and didn’t belong in that small Illinois town. I inexplicably—to me—longed for Europe, egged on by Nick Charles.

I wanted to study abroad on my father’s continent, as he found himself “studying abroad” in 1941 amid alien cornfields, the accented outsider among Sinclair Lewis’ shop keepers, members of the Odd Fellows Lodge, which met once a month in a rented room downtown, above the Rexall Drug Store. I often wondered why he chose them, not the Rotary or the Lions or the American Legion, because he was a veteran having fought the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. Later it occurred to me that it might the name—Odd Fellows—for he was, indeed, one of those. A man who, until he was 33 years old, thrived as an untraveled bank clerk in Vienna before the Nazis rose up and drove him into a great unknown, a displaced person like so many others, he traveling to England, Illinois, Biloxi, New Guinea and back to Illinois where he had married and started a family. An exile, one of the 20th century’s mass migrators, still awkward, an odd fellow on the prairie, longing for his beloved Vienna.

So I roamed Europe when I was the age of my students, in search of some elusive belonging place, ending up in my father’s Vienna, staying for a short time in a tiny room in his sister’s apartment, the one who stayed behind, protected by her Nazi officer husband, the one his family had disowned, whom he hadn’t seen for 25 years. My study abroad context found in my father’s home, his found in an America I considered my home, both of us homeless and filled with longing, his for a known past, mine for an unknown future. And we became cosmopolitans learning life anew, with that cosmopolitan curiosity that Appiah (2006) speaks of, realizing that “once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not share” (p. 96).

This morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw not only the professor from the University of Georgia via the University of Illinois, but comfortingly I also see the disingenuous and devious face of Dr. Winkel, the quintessential Viennese survivor as he walked through a café near the Sacher Hotel, a copy of one of Holly Martins’ western novels clutched to his breast. Appiah’s deceptively simple lesson, telling us, in terms decidedly unacademic, that “we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but it will help us get used to one another” (p. 78).

It goes back to my assumed role as educator, that subject position I took on the day the University of Georgia hired me, a newly minted PhD in Mass Communication, to teach. An uncomfortable subject position for me then and even more so today, as all subject positions—Midwesterner, exile, writer, student—are for me uncomfortable, now and always.

I became an academic with no formal knowledge of how to teach the curriculum or even construct a curriculum—any curriculum. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word. But I learned as I fumbled through. Finally, I relaxed, remembering the lessons of silence and observation that I learned in my cosmopolitan travels, and I talked less and listened more, asked questions I didn’t know the answers to, and my students became in a way my teachers, as I finally became theirs. I learned to be at home with the sound of my voice, to overcome that shyness born in an anxious childhood—my mother worked, my father had an accent, we were different—that kept me quiet at the back of the classroom, the back of the crowd. I found myself in words, in writing, as I am doing here.

And then, in the Cannes program that I constructed out of whole cloth, students again surprised me, educated me, taught me, as my formal curriculum became nothing more than sleepwalked rote skills acquisition and the unintended curriculum, like improvised educational devices buried in the side of the road, stole my students’ hearts.

So what did I learn from the curriculum my students devised, created, stumbled into? What lessons did they learn from mixing with strangers from hundreds of countries in a frenetic overly constructed time-sensitive festival environment located in the land of topless beaches, four Euro bottles of drinkable wine, steak tartar, dramatic vistas, and a bizarrely haughty xenophobia—a land where lunch and love are infinitely more important, demanding and complex than, say, making a living?

I learn—and they do as well, for I point it out to them—that students, more often than educators, shape curriculum. The curricula that are most heavily prescribed—by federal mandates, state programs, benevolent teachers—are those that tend to be upended by circumstance, accident, curiosity. Students take prescribed curricula and bend them to purposes suited to their own lived experiences, their own perceived needs and desires.

I learn that I teach best when I move out of the way, allowing students the room to discover for themselves what it is they want to do, say, write, accomplish. Sure students may become more adept film critics, given the rigors of my classroom. Sure some of them might decide to pursue a career in practical film criticism or some other aspect of the business of making or selling motion pictures. But more importantly they realize that whether or not they ever capitalize on dreams of Hollywood success, they possess the tools to follow newly discovered passions, to overcome long-held fears, to strike out into cultural milieus that once seemed distant and unaffecting, to problem-solve and adapt to new situations, to seize opportunities as they present themselves, to interact with others in more powerful, confident, enriching ways.

I learn to trust my students as co-constructors in the process of learning. I give up the controls of the academic machine and occasionally good things happen, sometimes better things happen than those I have so carefully designed. Sometimes the ride up the mountain and back down becomes more exhilarating than being locked in a classroom staring out at the landscape.

I learn that the best learning is unpredictable, uncontrollable, pushing away from the edges of the panoptican, searching out lines of flight, finding presence in the unhomely, seeing the world always anew, like Baudelaire’s flaneur.

By treating students as adults, responsible for their own everyday lives in Cannes, and not making them travel in herds or eat together in safe-guarded dining halls, by allowing them to live in a French residence, not a student dormitory, by giving them tasks to see x-number of movies and interview x-numbers of people, but not telling them how to do that, I, by chance, afford students the opportunity to become travelers, as opposed to tourists or students—travelers, whom I define as those who find themselves free-floating in a strange land, not idly, but with purpose, responsible for their own well-being, without benefit of a lifeline or a brandy-toting St. Bernard or a shoulder to cry on.

Such territory can be truly dangerous for the traveler and many, when confronted by it, initially try to pull back if they can—as I did, on that first trip to Europe at age 17, when the lorry that gave me a lift pulled to a halt at the German border, not far from Paul Cox’s hometown of Arnhem, and a uniformed German guard glared at the name “Kohn” in my passport. At that moment I wanted to retreat, fear engulfed me, I felt an entire history on my shoulders; I wanted to evaporate in that moment, but I couldn’t, standing there frozen on a bitter cold European night, a blinding yellow headlight exposing my sudden absolute Jewishness. My terror. Then after the longest of moments and with a dismissive wave of his hand—I can still see that gloved hand in my mind’s eye—the guard let me pass, without kindness, into that foreign land.

For those who take the leap (or are shoved by a crafty teacher), inspired by something read or watched or dreamed, in search of ancestral roots or sense of purpose or a perceived once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—who under whatever circumstance move through the fantasy, danger, and desire associated with pedestrian travel into the unhomely beyond—the world becomes, in an instant, a perpetually foreign place of possibility, filled with the chance “to be part of a revisionary time . . . to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on the hither side” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 7).

And students sense that potential, the becoming exhilaration of being a stranger among strangers, of seeing everything as if with newborn eyes.

Edward Said, in talking about exile, with its inherent unhomeliness, captures this possibility in a quotation from a 12th century Saxon monk, Hugo of St. Victor: “[T]he man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” (Said, 1983, p. 7).

Or to put it another way, students find themselves capturing traveling moments of unhomeliness—living as if “the entire world is a foreign land”—with this curriculum, and they return to Georgia with those apprehended moments. And they then inscribe such moments into everyday life and make home suddenly unhomely. As Goethe talks about nations in the Napoleonic era, we can talk about these study abroad travelers who

could not return to their settled and independent life again without noticing that they had learned many foreign ideas and ways, which they had unconsciously adopted, and come to feel here and there previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs. (as quoted in Bhabha, 1994, p. 11)

So what happens to these students, educated by this unintended curriculum that they helped devise—knowingly or unknowingly or both—after they pass the course, get their grade, let their hair grow?

If their learned lessons add up to nothing more than a reckless feeling, a little liberation, a small swagger, a burst of confidence when confronting the neighbor or the academic advisor or the electric company or the political candidate, then the accidental curriculum proves its worth. I have done my job. The tiny miracle is simple: the potential for action, for doing things differently, for ethically embracing the other, is all garnered by doing a little something, by having traveled and poached the strength of strangers.

Which brings us, I suppose, to the takeaway. What is it that you, patient readers, are supposed to glean from these riffs on studying abroad?

I know not, for I now move aside so that you, dear readers, are positioned to join this journey, to see past the remnants of my history, perhaps poaching some bagatelles along the way, and then to venture into your own beyonds. What, if anything, have you learned from these pages, from these word-travels/travails? That is not for me to say.