Fall 2020

Hello Everyone,

I want to use this space to do a few different things. I am going to tell you some stories from my time in Cameroon and also share a little of the TCK (Third Culture Kid) population that I work with. The idea will be to share a story and then highlight a piece of information could be useful to you in learning more about the kids and families I work with.  

Every morning in my classroom, we started out the day with a morning meeting. One of the things I noticed early on is that because of all of the cultural differences, kids would often not greet people because they don’t know what to say. So, in my classroom, we started out every morning with a different greeting. I had a bunch of different greetings on a little ring and every morning, we would flip the card to a new greeting and pass the greeting around in a circle. Some of the greetings were in different languages such as French, English, and Japanese. Others were silly greetings such as: saying good morning in the most high-pitched voice you can. Still, others came with actions such as bows or handshakes. I had gotten this set of greetings off of the internet and had not added to it or changed it. One day we were reading Tacky the Penguin and in part of the story, he greets the other penguins in a different way and everyone is shocked. We all thought it was so funny that we added the greeting to our ring of greetings and it was amazing to see everyone’s eyes light up and get engaged over a greeting that we had added together.  
As much fun as this was, one day we had the Korean families come in and teach us more about Korean culture. After learning more about the Korean language, one of my students’ eyes lit up as she turned to our Korean classmate and said “We could add Korean to our greetings so we can say good morning to you in Korean!” The smile on his face every time we used the Korean greeting said it all. To see the students grow into caring more about each other and the people around them was something special to be a part of.

Megan

What is a TCK?

The acronym TCK stands for Third Culture Kid. This refers to any kid who has spent a significant portion of their developmental years in a host culture that is different from their parents’ home culture and eventually (most likely) needs to repatriate. These kids end up developing another culture between themselves which is the “third” culture. Their lives are marked by many different things but TCKs seem to always be drawn to other TCKs who understand their experience on some level even if their home and host culture don’t overlap.