Building Global Bridges: From Construction to the Classroom
Host Lauren Cardillo sits down with Joshua Nieubuurt, an assistant professor at UMGC in Asia whose path to the "ivory tower" was anything but direct. Josh shares how he pivoted from a budding career as a general contractor in booming Nevada to teaching English in South Korea and Japan after the 2008 housing crisis.
He recounts the "ground-shaking" realization that his American upbringing was only one small piece of the human experience and how that perspective now fuels his work with Japanese bridge students and the military community. Josh dives into the fascinating intersection of digital rhetoric, AI, and memes, explaining how "cultural glue" can connect people even across language barriers.
From hilariously awkward sushi dinners to witnessing the transformative pride of a graduating student, Josh’s story is a masterclass in the power of reinvention.
Episode Information
Joshua Nieubuurt
I think AI is a fascinating tool. One of the things that I tell students is like, if you use it as a tool, as you would a hammer, it's going to be okay, but you can't expect your hammer to build your house by itself.
Narrator Voice
Welcome to the Umbc podcast Unstoppable Stories with your host, Lauren Cardillo.
Lauren Cardillo
Today I'm joined by Josh Newberg, who, like a lot of our students, sort of reinvented himself, went from general contractor to language teacher, and ended up in Asia. Josh, welcome. We're so glad you're here.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Thank you for letting me join you. Yeah. It was indeed my dream to one day be a general contractor. But that dream fell flat, and now I find myself here in my real dream profession, being a professor for Umbc in Asia.
Lauren Cardillo
So how did that sort of happen? You know, give me. Give me the background. You think you're going to be a general contractor? You end up on a flight to South Korea. What was your your thinking process for all of that?
Joshua Nieubuurt
Well, at the time I was a young man, so I don't know if my thinking process was linear, so to speak. But at the time, I was living in an area where construction was booming. My father was a, a subcontractor, and I saw all the people working around him. And I would go to the job sites and work myself and see the general contractors with these big, beautiful trucks and, with what I presumed was at my mind and most of my mind at the time, millions and millions of dollars, which is not true, but that's how I perceived it.
And I was like, I, I like money too. I want to make the big bucks. And so as I graduated from high school, I decided that, you know what? Just in case, maybe I should go to school and get something for, you know, my back pocket, just in case this doesn't work out or if I want to change in the future.
That was another lesson that I learned on construction sites is that, you know, as you get older, there's quite often times that you have unforeseen consequences of working in a hard labor industry. And so I wanted to make sure that if something did happen to me, I had, teaching credential or I could go to and pivot and do something else with my time.
So I graduated and I started going to a community college nearby. And then, of course, the floor dropped out from beneath us, and we had the housing crisis. And, I thought, you know what? I'm a genius. Thank goodness I had this original plan. I come back and say, oh, wow.
Lauren Cardillo
You know.
Joshua Nieubuurt
What? This was my original plan all along. I finished my day at the community college, then went to, local state university. University of Nevada, Reno. And, I continued on there. I started out in a teaching program, along with English. But as I moved through the program, I started getting a little disillusioned with the state of education in the United States at the time.
Not necessarily like the teachers or the students or things like that, but a lot of the policies that were kind of forcing teachers into, a box, so to speak. And so as I worked my way through that, I got to my final practicum and I just realized, I cannot do this. I ended up switching out my major the next week, to English, just pure English with a minor and, teaching English as a second only language.
And then, borrowed my horse into the sunset and barely, just barely graduated. Geez. Three weeks later, I was on a plane to South Korea.
Lauren Cardillo
So that was like 2008, 2009.
Joshua Nieubuurt
So it must have roughly been 2010 ish, 2000, ten 2011, I think.
Lauren Cardillo
So you sort you got some sort of communique from somebody in South Korea that said, get on a plane, ride your horse over here. I mean, what was it that you got?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I'm definitely not a spy, so no communiques there. But, I was looking into, getting out of America for a little bit. I what what I wanted to do was everybody told me, hey, you're young now. You're not married. You don't have kids. Like, if this is something that you want to do, like, you should go do it.
And if it doesn't work out, hey, always come home and go with your original plan. And, at the time, I had met my, gopher now wife at this point, and she's from Japan. And I was like, well, we'll see if this is going to work out. It's long distance. It's like the odds are stacked against us.
So, you know, I'll take a baby step on my way there and I'll go to Korea of all places. Which, looking back now, as I said before, my thought was not linear, and I have no idea how I ended up in Korea. But after a very, very long plane ride, I arrived at the airport, hoping that my boss would be there to greet me, and, he was not.
So I'm wandering around Pusan International Airport looking around for anybody that vaguely looks like a boss in my mind. Most of them ended up being taxi drivers asking me if I needed to go somewhere. Eventually he did show up with another coworker of mine, and I felt much, much more at ease. But it ended up being a huge, pivotal decision in my life that totally altered the way that I look at the world and the way that I interact with people, both from my own country as well as from others.
Lauren Cardillo
But how so? How did it change the way you look at the world?
Joshua Nieubuurt
So what was going into it? I was a fresh graduate, you know, I thought I had much like a teenager, right? I thought I had it, you know, more or less figured it out at this point. Boy, was I wrong. Jumping into Korean society. Society was totally different than I had imagined. I'd read books. I talked to people who had been there.
But actually doing it myself totally changed. My perception of what I thought I knew. And so, jumping into this new system, immediately, you kind of get hit with that freshness where you're like, wow, this is so amazing. Look at all these cool things. And then eventually go through, you know, several different stages. But even now, when I think back on my time in Korea, one of the things that always shocked me was the way that Korean drivers parked their cars.
And so just as an example, like on our sidewalks, you're not going to see a car in the States, right? Hopefully. Right. But, I worked right down the street from a Starbucks, and I kid you not. Almost every day, somebody was parked right up in front of the entrance of the Starbucks, got out of the car, went in.
Sometimes they stayed there and drank and things like that. Parked cars in random places. One another one was the scooters. I had never been in an area where there had been scooters. You know, I grew up in semi-rural America. So we had cars, we had trucks, we had things like that. Motorcycles. But never the massive amount of people that I saw on scooters or small motorcycles cruising around.
And, let's just say that they didn't always stop for pedestrians. So you had to be a little careful when crossing the street. I think it's much better now, but, at the time I would I would always triple check to make sure that I'm not going to be clipped by somebody or something like that. So these types of things really, really surprised me and really began to, allow my mind to blossom in a way that says, you know what?
Maybe the way that I grew up in the thoughts that I had, the information, the education, all of these things. It's only one small piece. What it means to be human. And it sounds so simple and so easy to say now. But at the time, it was really kind of ground shaking that, you know, I didn't have it all figured it out.
Even I didn't have a 10% figured it out. And, that kind of allowed me to open up my mind and say, you know what? People don't have to live in XYZ way. Like there's a multitude of ways, none of them better than the other. But what works for you is what's going to be important in whatever society that you find yourself in.
Lauren Cardillo
So now you work in a program where you get people in class who who maybe were like you back then, you know, who didn't know what they were doing or how this was all going to work. But now you're teaching English language to Japanese students.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Yeah, exactly.
Lauren Cardillo
How did you how did you end up there and how much are your experiences similar. You know, that that was sort of me. And you can do it too.
Joshua Nieubuurt
That's an excellent question. This journey is also not linear. After Korea, I ended up, coming back. I came to Japan for a month. Didn't have a car or anything like that, so I had to walk to a job interview. And it was working for a similar job that I had in Korea. I was working on a Kiowa, like an English conversation school.
And so I walked to this interview. They said, you got it, but you have to wait six months until the position opens up. So I got back on a plane, went back to the States, worked construction for that time again, and then found myself on another long plane ride to Japan. And in this position, this is probably the best experience that I've had as a teacher.
I got to work with students that were just babies. Literal babies, in a class called Mommy and Me. And it's just to kind of introduce them to, people who are foreign and to kind of let them hear the words as they work through it. And then my oldest student at that time, I believe they were 76 years old.
And so throughout the day, we'd start with young children first and then elementary school, intermediate school, high school students, and then adult students in the evening. And so through that experience, I got to gain so much information about how to reach these different groups of people that all had very, very different goals. Some of them were in control of their goals.
Some of them, were just being sent there because they had to go there and learning how to reach those students that took it as an obligation and not as something fun. Also inspired me to try to make this time valuable for them, and it is reciprocal. And that like as I was trying to teach them a language skill, they were also helping me to develop teaching skills.
And that is something that I like. I'm so grateful for as I find myself in the position that I'm in now, one of those groups of people where, study abroad students, you got students. And so they would be preparing to go abroad and seeing them in their shoes totally reminded me of me going to Korea or coming to Japan as well.
And I thought to myself, okay, what are the things that they need to know to go to these English speaking societies? And I tried to, give them not just language, but also culture and also kind of colloquial language that they could use and understand. As they made this lovely journey and they'd always come back and they'd bring back lovely souvenirs and things like that.
I think I must have gained 10 pounds from all the souvenirs they brought back. They were delicious, though. But having that opportunity also helped to prepare me for where I am now. Pivoting from that position, I started working at, Japanese universities as an adjunct and same kind of thing with another level. But the students were there because they wanted to be there.
Which made it great. A lot of them wanted to work in industries where English was important, or they wanted to go study abroad at some point, or they thought it would be great for the career development in the future. And once again, seeing a lot of these students, not much younger than I was at the time, was, a lovely opportunity to kind of look in the rearview mirror and say, well, what can I what can I give?
You know, these kids what can I give these young kids to help them prepare for that next step?
Lauren Cardillo
Because you were you were sort of you sort of did the same thing there. You know, you were trying to navigate like, how can I make my life better or learn the language or the culture? And they're doing the same thing. They're just a little behind you.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Exactly. Exactly right. They're really close, you know, objects in the rearview mirror made it clear, and they appear closer than they are. Right? But, they were right there. And so trying to give them the benefit of my experience and allow them to have that opportunity and the information that I, wasn't able to get, part of that non-linear journey that I had before, out of my friend base or my family, I was the only person to do this, so there was no map for me to take.
And so as you, as you see me wandering around, part of that journey was incredibly fantastic. It was an amazing experience. But also, there was a lot of time spent like, am I doing the right thing? Am I making the right decision? Not just for myself, but like for my students, for my family, these types of things as well.
And trying to, capture that in my job or in my personal life was a very important part of that experience as well. And I'm hoping that those students were able to take what I could give them and bring it with them further in their lives. Even now, I still come across my students that I had ten years ago.
And they're these are they'll have the mask on. They'll pull it down. Do you remember me? I saw two last week at Costco, of all places. And it was. It's so great to see them. And that they actually remember me. It's just blows my mind, and I'm like, oh, you know, kind of gets me to tear up a little bit.
And I'm like, they remember me.
Lauren Cardillo
I must have done something right. Well, you know, they wouldn't walk up to you if they didn't think, you know. Right? Right.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Exactly. And I probably turned around. They they flip me the bird from the back. If they weren't fans of me.
Lauren Cardillo
So how did you how did you ultimately end up at Umkc, which within a program that sounds like it was made just for you, even though it existed before you.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Existed much prior to me? But, as luck would have it, a job posting popped up online, and I was hoping to, you know, increase my workload as an adjunct to your only paid for the classes that you teach. And so I was like, well, I was returning before, you know, I like money. So I was like, what can I do to make a little bit more?
Jokes aside, the I wanted more teaching experience with a wider range of people. So, working at UMC would allow me also to work with, military students and the dependents as well. And so this job popped up and it was a rich program, but it's a way to kind of put my foot into the door. And so I showed up at the interview, with my supervisors, and, I had a little bit long hair and they probably walked in there like, who is this guy?
Luckily they were able to take a chance on me, and, I was able to step into that role and work at three different universities simultaneously, as well as begin branching into, more military, student based, classes as well.
Lauren Cardillo
I read some of the interviews you had done previously, and you talked about how when the students first come in for their first sort of I don't want even say, English language class, but the first class, how they had, like, these wide eyes and just the fear and how that changes over time. And one, how does that make you feel? The two how do you do that?
Joshua Nieubuurt
That's a fantastic question. Last night I actually gave a demonstrate live demonstration class, in town nearby. For a recruitment event for the bridge program. And those same eyes. The of the crowd. At this point, it kind of makes me laugh, but it also signals something in me that, I have used to feel when I would begin to start teaching a class.
But as I've developed my my own personal skill, I realized that I can see the end goal for my students cannot see the end goal. So it's my job and it's my opportunity and my joy to be able to help bring them from this heightened discomfort into a place where they feel incredibly comfortable, like really kind of exposing themselves in a way through language that, you know, not a lot of people really feel comfortable with.
Have you ever learned another language?
Lauren Cardillo
I'm trying.
Joshua Nieubuurt
I'm trying. And it can be scary to try and speak that language, right? Everybody's scared of making mistakes or looking silly or these types of things. And so the very first thing that I like to do is I like to start up with some pumped up music. So to try to shift their mind from, I'm scared to be here, what is everybody going to think of my English?
Everybody's better than me too. Yeah, I kind of like this. And the music that I start out with, it's going to fly now from Rocky Mountain, and then I don't. And, and, and immediately you see there shift from like, I'm scared to like, what is what is happening. They look to other people to see like, is this is this right?
Is this really my professor here? And then shifting into that, I try to place, heightened awareness on the class of making them feel comfortable.
Lauren Cardillo
And do you, do you share with them mistakes you've made? Because I know you made a notorious one with your soon to be in-laws. So do you share that? Sort of like the wall of shame?
Joshua Nieubuurt
Oh yeah, 100%. The very first lesson I the one of the biggest things I tell them is it's okay to make mistakes if you are not making mistakes, you are not trying hard enough. And like making these, we're not doing surgery right. So it's important to make mistakes so that you grow. And I tell them, I of course, I have a whole wall of shame, but one of the biggest ones that I like to tell them is the first time I sat down to dinner with my now wife's parents, we went to sushi.
It was a beautiful atmosphere. I had, you know, a very limited Japanese vocabulary at the time, but I had enough that I thought I'd be like, you know what? I'm going to try to impress these people, or at least show them that I'm trying. And so we finished our sushi, and it was absolutely delicious. We're sitting there, I have a little sushi baby in my tummy.
And, so I look, I look at them and I wanted to say like, like, I'm full, right? Which would be an okay. But, instead I looked at them dead in the eye and I said, oh. And I go, oh, by. Which translates to a roughly stomach boobs. And they started laughing so hard.
I started this day. I don't think I've heard my father in law, my father in law laughed this hard. They're laughing so hard. My wife, my, then girlfriend, now wife was laughing so hard and nobody would tell me. So I'm beet red. I'm like, in a sushi place. I'm the only foreigner there. And I'm like, what did I do?
I'm like, I hope I didn't offend them kind of thing. And, like, what did I say? What did I say to my microphone? I was like, handed me the phone and she's like, look, it up. And so immediately I look it up and I'm like, stomach, boobs. Oh my God. Oh, so you were if I can was yeah, I was halfway there, but unfortunately halfway in the wrong direction.
But through that, the students like to have a good laugh at that, as well as several other examples, that, that I'll hand out. But through that, they can realize, oh, this person has been in my shoes before. They understand what I'm feeling. And I think that's important, in particularly in bridge program classes, that the students don't feel less than you.
They should feel like it should be a cooperative effort where they feel like, okay, this person might have more information than me, they might have more expertise than me, but they're on the same journey as me, and they can understand where I'm trying to go.
Lauren Cardillo
Right? I read also that for you, writing is really hard for them to to do as well, you know, and that's another like I don't want to say challenge, but it is a challenge. So now you're, you actually have to write in the language and you have to not be afraid to make a fool of yourself. And I noticed you said that, you know, that's a really hard concept. How do you get over that?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I think writing is probably one of the most exposing things a person can do when you're speaking. There's lots of techniques that you can use to kind of hide how you feel or to obfuscate what you're thinking, these types of things. But when you're writing, you're really transposing what you are thinking on to the page and trying to convey it to people in a way that makes sense to them, which in my mind is complete magic.
Being able to share our innermost thoughts through that and the same kind of thing applies as before, like it's okay to make mistakes. The system that we have is, slightly different from what they're learning in their school. And so initially they will struggle with it. But once they realize the pattern of how, a traditional essay works, or how being able to give your opinion is a highly accepted thing and something that we are looking for.
They they really embrace it so they don't feel as shy as they would, as a, as they would in their first class. So, for example, the bridge program starts out learning these core skills, learning basic writing skills, and then it pivots into learning more advanced research writing skills. And as this is towards the end of their time, and by that time, they're generally pretty confident in their ability to express themselves.
And they've picked up enough tools that they can begin to piece it together. And the big part is fostering that learning community where they feel comfortable sharing it with their peers and with me as well.
Lauren Cardillo
Once again, you're listening to Josh Neubert on Unstoppable Stories. If you want to hear more stories like this, don't forget to like or subscribe our program on your favorite podcast platform. Josh, following that, by the end of the class, I read, you're playing like Star Wars or something else because they've achieved that. I mean, what are those faces look like? You know, they're no longer the little big eyes. What are what do they feel like? What are they thinking?
Joshua Nieubuurt
When they reached the end of the program, we have kind of a, It's not necessarily a graduation, but it is like, giving of a certificate. And this event is probably one of my favorites because I remember seeing them wide eyed and bushy tailed, like, oh, my God, I'm here. And then seeing them receive that diploma and seeing how much pride that they have in themselves, it's like a really, powerful thing.
As an instructor, you've seen their growth and development over this time, and then you can really see them. Here is the first goal among it. And that is like hugely rewarding, not just for them but also for us. And that, you know, it's not just English development, but it's also like personal development and interpersonal development with their peers.
They start out, they come in, they're usually strangers when they come into class, but by the time they end, they've created new friends, presumably for life. Some of the students I've had eight years ago still message me and say, hey, so and so and I, saw you, you know, saw your TEDx talk on, on social media or we, you know, saw you at the store, but you were too far away to say hi.
And like, knowing that they are still creating those communities and still like having these friends years after the fact of the bridge program is also remarkable to see. Like, wow, it's not just English, it's also community building.
Lauren Cardillo
Speaking of that TEDx talk, you are sort of an expert on memes, you know, and what they mean and how people use them. Some people would think that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Speaker 4
It's.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Definitely inside chat.
Lauren Cardillo
But explain how that how that sort of happened. What got you interested in what how do you see that as another way to communicate?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I think most people love memes, whether they know it or not. I mean, so just small genes of society to, to borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins that, you know, they are the things that connect us interpersonally. So, let's, let's, let's think back and let me bounce this idea off of you here. What is a movie that you loved when you were, as a child.
Lauren Cardillo
Star.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Wars or Disney? Star Wars, right. So you would recognize dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. That right. That type of thing would be a meme that connects both you and me and anybody else listening that can resonate with that and this type of connection, this type of cultural glue, is something I've been fascinated with for a long time.
I remember being a middle school student and, you know, before social media, we actually had to, you know, act out our memes. So this, you know, those will pop up late night into my mind. Like, do you remember when so-and-so said so-and-so? Like 25 years ago? And like, that meme can live on with you. And, this is what I find so fascinating about it is that I have group chats on my phone that are just purely memes.
We'll send each other reels or memes or things like that, but we're still communicating. We're still reaching out. We're still saying, hey, you know, I still like you as a friend. We're our lives are busy. We're doing lots of things. We can always connect. But I'm thinking about you and I think you would enjoy. And those are the types of things that I love about memes, is how they connect people.
Lauren Cardillo
Well, they're like short cuts to communication at 100%.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Yeah, 100%. They are. You know, they're so densely packed with information. And they, you know, they, they pop up like a pop up book and you're like, yeah, I get look at all this stuff in here. And every time there's, an event of cultural relevance, whether it's absurd or whether it's very, you know, really serious, they are there for us to express that when we don't necessarily have the words to express it, or we don't know where our opinion actually lies on this event, we can say, you know what?
This kind of makes sense to me, and maybe it's a little funny, or maybe just paints it in a way that I haven't thought of it before. And with everything that arrives in the zeitgeist, these will pop up from, once again, really silly things to incredibly serious things like we see today.
Lauren Cardillo
To those memes work. Just to back up for a second in in different languages, because a meme that I think is really funny may not work with somebody who only speaks Japanese. So how do you how do you sort of get that one across so that people understand there is a way to communicate?
Joshua Nieubuurt
Every, every culture has their memes, right? Being able to bridge memes between cultures and languages is a specialized skill, that takes, a huge amount of time to get. Now, there are certain, you know, cultural touchstones that will branch from one society to another society. But quite often they are located in their box of it. Right?
They are cultural genes, just like our genes reside in our own bodies. Cultural genes can just stay in there right? And they can even be just as small as, like, your friend group. It doesn't necessarily have to be so wide. But there are certain ones that will translate in between. With my students, I like to show them memes and show them how they work, and then ask them to show me memes from their country as well.
And sometimes it lands with students, and other times they have a harder time getting it. But one that came from Japan that people are like, oh yeah, this makes sense is I think is the artist name is Pikachu, though he's like, I have a pen, I have an apple. Apple pen. That guy, that is one that can kind of transcend, you know, different cultures or going back even further, like Opa, Gangnam Style or something like that.
Some memes have a wider reach than other memes. But they're still being able to bring us together. And sometimes, if you can find the right example, students can understand and begin to utilize them in their own work.
Lauren Cardillo
Yeah, I would think that Star Wars probably cuts across some cultures. You know, that people know that heavy breathing. You know.
Speaker 4
That's right.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Yeah. There's only been a couple students that didn't know Star Wars. And I was like, that's your homework this weekend. It's all right. You get to watch all of them.
Speaker 4
Oh no you you're right.
Lauren Cardillo
So I would imagine if I'm a new student in your class and, I'm nervous about where I'm headed, and I'm trying to sort of either reinvent myself or figure out what I'm doing that your energy, like, totally helps. Like, it sort of sucks them in. I mean, I have to imagine that's intentional because you want to you want to get them on board.
Joshua Nieubuurt
That's 100% true. It takes, like a lot of energy, but luckily I'm a high energy person. But like, being able to put that out and once and see that effort, they they are like, okay, this is meant to be fun. This is meant to be a safe space for us. So let's try to mirror that. And every once in a while, a lot of students, can say like, oh yes, this is a great time.
But every once in a while you have a scene that's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down a little bit. And so I also sometimes have to pull back just a little bit on the reins here as we pull back. And, you know, being a took as a young teacher, I didn't understand that. But as I grow in my own teaching skills, like it's something that I can learn from just based on the facial appearance or how they're interacting with me, like, okay, this person, I can be a little bit more hyper with this person.
I sit back just a little bit.
Lauren Cardillo
I get the whole high energy thing totally.
Speaker 4
Right.
Lauren Cardillo
Sometimes. Not at.
Speaker 4
All. Right? Yeah, right. Right. Cool. Calm down.
Lauren Cardillo
I like the horse. The horse is calming down. I do, I do like that. And you've also recently sort of got, I want to say sucked into that's not the right word, but we've been talking about AI and how that affects your teaching and how it that affects learning. There are good uses of AI and there's not good uses. How do you balance that when you're teaching or helping people learn things?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I think AI is a fascinating tool. My PhD dissertation was focused on AI and how it focuses on digital rhetoric. But one of the things that I tell students is like, if you use it as a tool, like as you would a hammer, it's going to be okay, but you can't expect your hammer to build it your house by itself.
Right? And so when we're utilizing AI and, see has a pretty forward thinking policy on AI usage and it's really being implemented into classes that whatever they do with it, whether it's just to clean up their draft for grammar, that's a that's an okay choice. Right. Especially as a teacher, I have never seen more, you know, grammar, free paper, grammar, free grammar, mistake free papers in my life.
And I have now, which is, you know, fascinating. And it's great for me. But also on the other side of the coin, I remember what it was like before I. And I know that, you know, students are still making these mistakes, but they're being kind of covered up. Right? And so what I tell students is that, like, make sure that you're the person that's drafting your paper first, then, you have these kind of basic skills, in order to be able to do this out in the world, AI is certainly going to be a tool that we can utilize.
But as we move forward, you should be able to embody that skill. One of the most important things is that you need to be able to do these skills. You need to understand how they work and how they function. If we're writing an essay, it is vitally important that you understand what a thesis is, what a topic sentence is, what transitions are, how to utilize citations, and allowing, you know, a program to do that for you is not going to allow you to be able to do the thing.
So another example that I like to give students is that, like I asked them, you know, how many people can ride a bicycle or drive a car or something like that? Now imagine that you only watched YouTube videos of it. You know, you watched 20 hours of YouTube videos of how to ride a bicycle, and then you step out there and you're like, I know this.
And you get on the bicycle and you immediately fall over it, right? It's the same exact thing with writing or any other skill. If you're not exercising your mind in the way, you're not going to be able to ride that bicycle. You're not going to be able to build that house. You need to understand the concepts, and you need to apply your physical being to being able to do it.
And I can give you great ideas. It can be a great place to start, especially where I tell them, like, if you don't know anything about the subject, plug it in there. But be careful because, you know, as confident as I can sound, it still might lie to you. Or, on the other side of the coin, it might also try to gloss you up and say, this is the best thing I have ever seen.
You are a genius. You. Oh, my God, I can't believe it. Are you William Shakespeare? These types of things. And to be. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And then it'll say, stop lying to me. Right. But these types of things, you need to realize where your abilities are and how you can improve them. And, yeah, I can also help with that.
When it comes to a finished product, one of the things that I'll often see is that even though I saw the original draft and then I saw it cleaned up by, I quite often, I is taking out their voice, trying to put it into the framework of, okay, this is technically, you know, perfection, right?
The sentences are there. The grammar is in place, the citations are right. But it's taking out everything that makes writing human. And as we talked about before, it is the closest thing that we can to giving you our direct thoughts. It is that really deep personal space inside of your head that you're putting onto the page that somebody else gets to at least, you know, gloss over will never be inside your head.
But this is as close as we can get. Until Elon Musk figures out Neuralink and connects us all to the matrix. Where that happens. It's it's important that you are in the page. You are there, and that whoever's reading it can hear your voice in that paper.
Lauren Cardillo
Yeah. It's a it's a balance. It's a balance between your your own self voice and grammar, you know, and you have to figure that out for yourself 100%.
Joshua Nieubuurt
Yeah. Utilizing the systems that we have in place to convey your thoughts. And that's what it's all about. And if it's not your thought in the paper, like, what are you trying to do with this? Like getting a, a grade or a score is like that's, you know, that's the carrot. It's not the actual reward, though.
Lauren Cardillo
Do your do your students do your students ever think that you have it all figured out and they're trying to catch up? Do they understand that it's a constant evolution?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I try to make sure once again, early in the class, I tell them, you know, although I descended from my ivory tower into this classroom with Rose petals pirouetting down before me, I, too, am only human. And, jokes aside, I do tell them straight up, like I'm going to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes.
Let's be patient with each other as we go through this journey. And I think that, you know, resonates with students that, you know, although I might have a greater depth of knowledge in this specific field, they are also experts in something, even if it is their life or it's their job or, you know, something else that relates to what they do.
They are also experts, and I'm learning from them. And I want them to know that, you know, it's not a closed circuit like this is reciprocal.
Lauren Cardillo
Is there is there a student or two that you remember as long as you've been doing this, that they just stuck out for some reason, or they had a story, or they went and got an MBA in the States and came back, that inspires you.
Joshua Nieubuurt
You know, there's there's a lot of stories that inspire me, and quite often they're they're a little bit too brief. I'll give you two examples, one from the bridge program and one from the military community. In the bridge program, maybe my second or third year teaching, I had to fail a student. He just didn't show up.
He was okay at English speaking. He did. All right. But he just stopped coming one day, and I was like, this is. This is too bad. This is the way that it goes. Last year at graduation, I saw him walk across the stage with his bachelor's degree, and I saw him kind of side by me, and I was like, I was a fanboy. For a second.
I was like, oh, my God.
Joshua Nieubuurt
You did it, kind of thing, because I didn't know what happened to this gentleman afterwards. But to see that, like, this person who, you know, like, failed this class and wasn't able to continue on, somehow got back on the horse and was able to go above and beyond, where I had seen them years prior. And that thing is like, that's something that blows my mind.
When it comes to our military community, it's such an amazing cross-section of America. There's so many different types of folks in the military that it's like going back to jumping into Korea. Talking to my students is the same thing, learning about their experience and their unique experience as Americans. It's just fascinating. A lot of them have lived particularly difficult lives in their childhood.
And hearing those, particularly through, their writing, like, really has exposed me to life that are different from mine and try to think about how I can reach these people and how I can help them, even in just a limited way, reach whatever goals that they have, either in the military or post military careers. To make make their life what it really deserves to be, which is much better than the cards that they were dealt when it began.
Lauren Cardillo
Did you ever end up with a class with, native Japanese and military together?
Joshua Nieubuurt
Yeah, occasionally I have classes. I've had classes where we had, military students, military dependents. Some of them were, foreign spouses and Japanese in one class. And it was it's it's a super fun dynamic because I can since are so fascinated to hear from these other two students that sometimes they're like, okay, okay, okay, I don't want to talk about my country or my life, I think anymore.
Let's like, let's focus on this thing. But those are my favorite dynamics where we have like very, very different groups of people and they say, wait a minute. We can actually learn from each other through this dialog, through our time in this class, and then grow from that, not only in these skills, but also as a human being.
It can be difficult to try to manage it, especially when, there are different kind of cultural boundaries at play. But as, as classes develop, students usually pick up on, okay, this is beyond the boundary and this is within the boundary that I can talk about kind of thing. And, you know, people are intelligent so they can figure it out themselves generally.
And it's it's a beautiful thing to see like these kind of relationships develop through time.
Lauren Cardillo
Did you ever think you were going to end up in this situation? I mean, it sounds like the perfect job for you. And I sort of, you know, went through different things and different hurdles or whatever, that it ended up being a place that uses your talents the best. Is that what you imagined one day?
Joshua Nieubuurt
I think a long time ago, I probably hoped for that. I never, never in a thousand years would have thought I would be here right now. You know, as a professor in Asia, teaching at Umkc, doing something that when I go to work, I don't feel like I'm going to work. I feel like, oh, this is this is an incredible thing that I get to do.
I get to go somewhere. I get to learn from my students. I get to teach them things that I like and enjoy. And then it's a win win situation. And, although, you know, perhaps I'd be a millionaire now at General Contracting, there's no Lamborghini parked out in front of my house, but there is one parked inside of my mind.
And so, I'm so lucky that despite my path being incredibly windy and non-linear, that I found myself in the position that I am, and I'm feel eternally grateful to be where I'm at now.
Lauren Cardillo
And when you see those, those students eventually walk across the stage or succeed or, you know, write that paper, how does that make you feel?
Joshua Nieubuurt
It's it's a warm, fuzzy feeling, to be honest with you. Yeah. There are times where you're so proud of this other human being. I can't, like, assimilate it to, like, my children, but, like, the closest thing that I can think of is seeing somebody that, you know, was not confident in their abilities, was not confident in themselves, and seeing them succeed is such a powerful experience.
Like, you know, I'm only a small, microscopic part of that. But being able to be a microscopic, microscopic part of that is a powerful thing. And, you know, we're all standing on other people's shoulders. And I hope that, you know, whatever these folks do is above and beyond anything that I can imagine. And I think that is the reward of this career, of this job of working with the military community as well.
Lauren Cardillo
Josh, thanks so much for joining us today. I just love listening to your journey and the journey of your students because they're similar and you guys are on the same path, but so, like, you're helping each other. So that's it's great. So for everybody out there, if you would like to hear more stories like this or from last year's season, just like or subscribe on your favorite podcast channel and hear more unstoppable stories again.
Josh, thank you so much and see you all soon.