The best classroom I have ever taught in had no walls. It was a conversation on a train in Japan, a debate in a café in Paris, a shared silence on a hillside in Portugal where the only language was the wind through the olive trees.
Travel has been, for me, the most rigorous and rewarding form of education. It has taught me things about language, culture, and human nature that no university course could have provided. And it has, in turn, profoundly shaped the educator I have become.
When I first began to travel seriously — not as a tourist, but as a learner, with an open notebook and a genuine hunger to understand — I was struck by the universality of certain human experiences and the extraordinary diversity of the forms they take. Grief looks different in Japan than it does in Ukraine. Celebration sounds different in Brazil than it does in England. Love is expressed through entirely different gestures in Morocco and in Sweden. Yet the underlying emotions are identical.
This insight — that the forms of human expression are infinitely varied while the substance is universal — has become the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy. When I work with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, I do not ask them to abandon their native ways of thinking and feeling. I ask them to add English to the rich repertoire they already possess.
In Japan, I learned the concept of *ma* — the meaningful pause, the eloquent silence. I brought this back to my classroom, where I began to teach my students that what you do not say is as important as what you do. In Portugal, I encountered the culture of *saudade*, and I used it to open conversations with my adult students about the emotional dimensions of language — the way certain words carry entire histories within them.
Leadership, I have come to believe, is fundamentally a linguistic act. The great leaders of history — from Mandela to Wangari Maathai — were, above all, extraordinary communicators. They understood that language is not merely descriptive; it is constitutive. The words we use do not simply describe the world; they help to create it.
This is what I try to instil in my students, particularly the young ones: the understanding that their voice matters, that their words have power, and that the ability to communicate with clarity, precision, and grace is one of the most valuable gifts they can give themselves and the world.
The road continues. The classroom is everywhere.
