Ohio is a meme…

What I learned from my students at the vocational high school in Kaçanik in my first weeks of co-teaching English, is that "Ohio is a meme". During the first class with my students, my co-teacher, gave students a chance to ask me questions about myself or the U.S. In one of the early classes, students were quiet and it felt like pulling teeth to get them to talk. So, I drew a terrible outline of the United States on the board and asked them to tell me the city or states they knew in the U.S.A. California, Florida, New York, and Texas were the common states, while New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago were the cities most often mentioned. I would draw arrows and write the words on the outline until the whole board was a messy masterpiece. The best part of this activity was that it broke the ice and students started talking.

In one class, as students called out the places they knew, someone said “Ohio”. Well, I was surprised and excited, because this is the state that I was born in and my husband and I both have family there. I asked the student how he knew of Ohio and he said “YouTube”. I assumed he followed a YouTuber from Ohio and made a mental note to look it up later. In another class, the same thing happened. Students were calling out all the better-known cities and states when someone called out “Ohio”. I responded “YouTube” and the students said “Yes”.

Later on, back in my apartment, I look up “YouTuber Ohio”. Nothing, significant came up in my search and then I forgot about it. In the second week of class, one of the students who knew of Ohio asked me if I looked up the “memes of Ohio”. Oh, so now I got it, it is not a YouTube influencer that these students were following, but it is memes of Ohio that they had seen on YouTube.

For those of you who are old like me and who did not spend your career with middle schoolers and are not clear on what a meme is, this is Miriam-Webster’s definition: “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media”. The doge meme of Shiba Inu dog that became popular in 2013, was one of the first memes, I remember. My middle schools were crazy about “doge” and wanted to use the photo in all their projects.

Doge (meme). (2024, May 28). In Wikipedia. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_(meme)

So after class, I went back to my apartment and spent a little time looking up memes about Ohio, and guess what, there are a lot. What helped me to understand this craze a bit and the back story behind the Ohio memes, was watching a YouTube video entitled “Do you know Every Ohio Meme? on Sumito Media. If you are curious, you might want to check it out.

This was all very fun and interesting, however; my takeaway is that it is a very, small world. Kaçanik is over 5,000 miles (~8,000 kilometers) from the state of Ohio, yet it was from 10th graders in Kaçanik that I learned “Ohio is a meme”.

In another less upbeat conversation in the first days of school, a student told me that the people of America are bad. I asked him why he thought that and then I hoped his English was good enough that he could explain his comment. Fortunately, his English was good enough and what he said was that Americans have guns and they shoot other people. Indeed, there are far too many guns in the U.S and there are way too many shootings, but I know that for the most part, the people of America are good.

I understood his comments because the media focuses on the tragic, violent, and negative events more than they focus on the good that is being done. The U.S. as a country need to present a better image to the world, but we can only do that by changing our bad behavior. So I was not surprised when I heard a similar comment from another student during my first week.

One of the three goals of Peace Corps and its purpose for volunteers is: “to promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served”. I hope that while I serve, I can dispel the images that students see in the media and help them to understand that not all Americans carry guns and shoot people and that not all Americans are bad people.