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			Adventures of a Transient Teacher Barbara Hüppauf
			"How are you doing?" she asked me when she picked me up at JFK. Dazed after the 25 hour flight from Sydney and a case of flu, I responded, "Fine. And how are you going?" Looking just a bit puzzled, she answered, "We are going straight to your apartment. You’ll like it, it’s on Bleeker Street." This was only the first of a string of strange encounters after my arrival in New York, but from them I learned more than just how to say "how are you doing?" On that day, we took the bus to Manhattan (I tried to get in on the wrong side of the bus, of course), my friend took me to my apartment and left me to get rid of my jet lag. Curiosity as well as the need for some flu medication got me out of bed a few hours later. I asked the first friendly looking lady for the nearest chemist and drew a blanc stare, but the friendly beggar on the corner (that optimist holding the small bucket) sent me to a supermarket. There I decided I might as well do my shopping; not finding any baskets, I asked the shop assistant for a shopping trolley. This time the response was a smile and a "I heard they are planning a tourist trolley for 42nd Street, but we don’t plan to have one in the shop." However, once I described a shopping cart, he found me one. Having filled my cart with milk, tea and other essentials. I found the cashier only to find many people waiting. I asked the last woman "Is this the end of the queue?" To which she replied, looking me over: "You’re not from here." Wasn’t she right! Then she asked me where I lived. "In Bleeker Street" I told her, but she was not amused. My claiming to live in the street stopped the conversation then and there. Originally, I am from Germany, but I have lived and worked in Great Britain, France, and for nearly eighteen years I called Sydney, Australia home. When I told people that I was moving to New York, I was inundated by warnings and advice. I was told always to walk purposefully and never to look up at the rooftops, advice that I luckily disregarded. Looking up to the rooftops I discovered the beautiful intricate upper parts of Manhattan buildings and my slow and purposeless strolls led me to discover the existence of museums outside of Manhatten that can indeed be visited without risking life or limb. However, since I had worked for years teaching ESP and English in the Workplace, none of those well meant warnings ever referred to possible language problems. Some advice there would have been useful. Now you could argue that I should have known that George B.Shaw called America and Britain two countries divided by the same language. I ought to have remembered Halliday’s and Candlin’s studies of Indian English as spoken by health professionals in Britain. But I simply didn’t make the connection, feeling very secure in my Australian version of the Queen’s English. As I only watch the kind of American films shown in art houses, I was less aware than my children of the American language. The odd American colleague I had met at work stood out by his accent and not because communication was a problem. My most frequent encounter with American English had been the spell check on my computer. Writing "centre" as center did not seem a daunting task and a pair of "pyjamas" fits even if spelled as pajama. So the reality of Manhattan lingo hit me totally unaware. Or is it "unawares?" Being a German speaker I had no difficulties with ""He schleps in all the way from Westchester" although I am sure that a mensch is something rarer than "ein Mensch." Where I come from we "schmuse" physically, not to be recommended when schmoozing with colleagues. But good old Aussi words were surprisingly much more of a problem. For instance, when I asked for the "lift" to take me to the "book launch" ( book presentation), the nice gentleman felt it necessary to accompany me to the other end of the lobby. Later I discovered that "the bill" was the check, a "cheque” was still a check but the "restroom" not for rest and the "loo" an unknown convenience. When I chatted with some graduate students whom, only a few weeks earlier, I would have called "postgraduate" and discovered that a "thesis" is a dissertation supervised by people who were not "staff" in a "faculty" but faculty in a department, I knew that I was in for a hard time. How would I learn to communicate with people who insisted on not only using different words for the same things but the same words for different things? Take the problem of ordering food in a restaurant. A "lemonade" is a soda, which is not a "soda water". "Mineral water is bottled water, "ketch-up" is sauce and "chips" are still chips when cold but in a hot state are called French fries. Luckily the waitress knew that a "bill" is a check. It was easy to simply learn new words for new things, like a Community Board is not a "local council" or a latte to go is not a "white coffee" and who would have thought that one could drink coffee from styrofoam cups in the subway? Sure, I longed to be back in Williams Street and sit at No Names and sip my macchiato brought by a waitress who was paid an hourly wage and did not expect a gratuity, but homesickness is a price even adventurers have to pay, let alone us poor transients. By the time I started teaching, I knew I hadn’t been to the school of hard knocks in vain. When I tell my students that the only way to learn fast is to make mistakes, my voice rings true. Whenever I start teaching a new course, I schedule a session in the second week on culture shock. I don’t use a text, I just draw on my own mishaps. My students, mostly Russian professionals with a pretty good command of British English, nearly kill themselves laughing. They have their own amazing stories. It is an invaluable bonding session. It also gives them hope: if their language teacher found herself in so many language related scrapes and survived to tell the tale, so would they. Being a native speaker of English is hard work in NY. West Indian English speakers try to speak white American English when in workplaces. African Americans need to speak standard American as well as their dialect if they want to succeed in whitecollar workplaces. In academic settings, it seems to be the Australians who do all the language work to prevent misunderstandings. I have begun to wonder to what extent communication actually takes place. I have been collecting an increasing number of anecdotes from people who have fallen into the trap of thinking that there is one English only. I have been forced to develop a new sensitivity to non-verbal communication. A blank stare or a slight frown activate my repair strategies. I had no choice but to become an active listener and reader, always ready to check and clarify. In spite of the disadvantages of speaking a non –local variety of English, I am thrilled with the language explorations opened to me because of it. Funnily enough, many New Yorkers are blissfully unaware of the many Englishes spoken in this world because others seem to do most of the translating. Published in Literacy Update, February 1996 p 4 and reprinted in The Informant, Spring 1996