This time, we decided to do an interview with the new linguistics teacher! Her name is Ms. Trower, and she recently graduated from the University Of Chicago to come to teach at BASIS, so she is completely new and fresh to teaching! She certainly had many stories to share and had thorough responses so stick around for her thoughts on some wacky and quirky questions! Some responses were edited for clarity and concision.
Carolyn: What do you teach?
Ms. Trower: I teach linguistics here at BASIS Peoria to the seventh grade.
C: Where did you go to college and what was the coolest thing you studied there?
T: I went to the University of Chicago for my undergrad where I had a number of lovely teachers, experiences, and friends. The best class I ever took was with a professor called Ada Palmer who must have access to a Time Turner or some sort of time travel machine, or just the ability to not sleep, ‘cause I don’t know how she does it. She’s a science fiction author, a composer, and studies intellectual history and censorship from the periods of the ancient times all the way to the Enlightenment period. She also has the largest or second-largest collection of Japanese manga and anime in the United States. The best class that I ever took from her was something called the Italian Renaissance. During fourth and fifth week, we all got character sheets to be particular people during the 1492 papal election. And we all got costumes, so I was Cardinal Pietro Bambo, at your service. Every day during class, we would meet and write letters to each other and then we would receive them with these beautiful wax seals. It really taught us social history and the different ways of playing out how history works. We have choices, but based on the way in which society worked at the time, there were only certain decisions you can make. It was the best experience of my life. There’s no period of time that I know as intimately as I know that.
C: What was your favorite school (college) tradition and why?
T: At the University of Chicago in 1987, people from my dorm of Snell-Hitchcock started this tiny little tradition that became an annual phenomenon known as Scav. Scav is short for the University of Chicago’s Scavenger Hunt, but it’s not like any scavenger hunt you’ve ever done. It’s like “Here is a line from Kant. We want you to apply it along with the latest pop song.” One that I did was sort a stack of sandpaper using only my tongue. There was another event where you had to eat a banana including the peel as fast as you could. There was one where you had to build a life-sized snow globe of an actual place on Earth, so we made a life-sized snow globe of Paris. Another one that was a little bit before my time was right when Taylor Swift had just released 1989, you had to turn it into 989, the Gregorian chant version. It’s just this pile of craziness, and there’s usually around 300 items to complete in less than four days. We’re competing against each other, but we’re really competing against the list and trying to create the coolest items that we can.
C: How has teaching at BASIS been so far?
T: Pretty good. It’s been really weird this year given that I know what almost none of my students look like. But it’s really engaging to deal with these topics that I’ve known about for years but that don’t really get taught to people until college. I never got the chance to learn formally about linguistics until I was at the University of Chicago, but I started getting interested in it on my own in seventh grade so being able to teach this stuff to seventh graders is really, really fun.
C: Which was your favorite class at BASIS? Which was the hardest class at BASIS?
T: When I was at BASIS, there was an elective called Cultural Theory taught by Mr. Meyerowitz. I kind of think of it as being like Scav because it was a way of learning about history and literature in a non-standard way. We learned about the concept of gift-giving in society as we were talking about fairy tales. We talked about Star Wars and the Cold War at the same time, bringing together things that aren’t normally talked about in conjunction with each other. The hardest class wasn’t actually a class in and of itself, it was more a specific part of a class: Physics C – electricity and magnetism. I got mechanics; that was fine. But electricity and magnetism wrecked me.
C: What are three book recommendations you have?
T: Well, I did mention Ada Palmer, so I am going to have to recommend her book series Terra Ignota which means “Undiscovered Country” or “Undiscovered Land.” The first book is called Too Like the Lightning which is from a line in Romeo and Juliet. This whole book series is set 400 to 500 years in this utopian future that is changing. Now, it’s written as if it were history from the Enlightenment period. Another good book is Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch, who is an internet linguist from Quebec. It’s basically a linguist talking about how language has changed on the internet, how it has changed over time, and specific ways we use language on the internet which are very different from how we use language IRL. A third one is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is often unfairly maligned for being long, which it certainly is, but the story is so rich. It’s about the social change that’s happening during the period of the Napoleonic wars in Russia. It tracks the different families and their feelings on topics relating to Russia’s role in the world, language, France, their social fortunes within aristocratic society, their politics, whether to care about the peasants or not… it’s a really rich social tapestry.
C: What is your favorite holiday movie?
T: I’m gonna have to go with a Russian one called Ирония судьбы or The Irony of Fate. And it’s a comedy from the 70s that I’m calling a holiday film because it’s a tradition in Russia to watch this film every year on New Years. It’s a romantic comedy that plays off the Soviet truth that all cities in the Soviet Union are alike. They all have streets with the same names and a lot of the typical, Soviet concrete block apartments were all created at once, so they all look very, very similar. The plot is that this guy in Moscow goes with his friends to a bathhouse every year together to bring in the new year. Shenanigans happen, and he is accidentally placed on a different plane than the one he was supposed to get on. So he gets off the plane and instead of being in Moscow, he’s in St. Petersburg. He enters a different apartment and his key works! So he’s in the wrong apartment with this other woman, and there’s a whole bunch of shenanigans where he answers the phone when her boyfriend calls, and she answers the phone when his fiancee is trying to get ahold of him, so over the course of the New Year their lives have entirely changed because his key works in a different apartment.
C: Why did you decide to study linguistics?
T: I’ve always been really interested in language and how it works. There are things we do in English that you don’t do in other languages, and things that other languages do that English doesn’t do, and it’s really fascinating looking at all those differences and similarities. How many different weird sounds you can make, how many different ways you can order a sentence depending on which language you speak… language really is a key to culture and to storytelling, so I’ve always found it interesting that way.
C: What was it like teaching in Georgia?
T: It was sadly interrupted by COVID-19, but I taught in a tiny town of about 2,000 people up in the Caucasus mountains in Georgia (the Georgia between Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) about an hour outside of the capital. It was called Tianeti, and it’s in the region of Mtskheta-Tianeti. I lived with a family of two parents and a kid, and I taught at two different schools alongside three different co-teachers. It was a really weird experience. Georgian schools start at nine in the morning unless it’s winter in which case it starts at ten because everyone walks to school. There’s no break for lunch; the longest break I had was a fifteen-minute break so generally, I wouldn’t eat lunch and just have an early dinner when I got home. I’d teach from nine or ten in the morning till one or two in the afternoon. That’s like… six classes in a row. And I taught all grades from second to twelfth. My favorite school was less well-equipped. The facilities were more newly renovated in the other school. In my favorite school, they did not have indoor toilets. They only had outdoor squat toilets, so that was interesting in the winter.
C: What would the worse ice cream flavor be?
T: I’m going to have to say vomited up jonjoli. I love Georgian food except for this one thing called jonjoli, which is a flower that’s been pickled. I’m not the biggest vinegary person, so I just really don’t like jonjoli. If I’m at someone’s house, I’ll eat a little bit of it and make sure they see me eating it, and then I won’t touch it again. I’m a good guest, but I have my limits. But yes, things can always be made worse by vomit.
C: What advice do you have for BASIS students?
T: Take time off. Learning is important, achieving goals is important, working hard is important, but burnout is real. And if you have a break, take a break. Take a walk, watch some shows on Netflix, read a book for fun, learn something for fun, do whatever makes you happy. I don’t care if you have a test the next day; nothing will be detrimentally affected by taking a short break. Now, get back to your work after your break. Don’t just check out. But do give yourself breaks.
