Teaching - Unit in Review

Unit I: Teaching Requires a Flair for the Dramatic
My teaching career began with wild hand gestures and loud movements in front of an astonished crowd of five middle-aged Chinese-Americans attending a five week intensive English program that dualed as a training course to earn my international teaching certificate. Their English skills being quite basic, I usually assumed my students didn’t understand anything I said, unless Connie, the most advanced of the group, translated softly until her classmates’ heads bobbled up and down with comprehension, giving me the sign to continue. Teaching English at that level required a knack for acting skills, comedy, and art, as well as a fair singing voice for demonstrating the “Hokey Pokey” and “The ABCs”.

Frankly, I felt more like an entertainer in the classroom, though I knew the students were there for more than simply entertainment. They were there for survival, because their inability to communicate in the language of this strange new country limited them daily. They wanted to be in that classroom and to learn, even without the incentive of high test scores and grades, because every new word was cause for celebration.

My students laughed when they didn’t understand me; they laughed when they did understand me; I laughed when I didn’t understand them. And every evening ended with appreciative smiles and echoes of “sank you, sank you” as they filed out the door and back to their homes. I often left wondering if they had really learned anything.

Unit II: Teaching Requires Discipline
I expected a similar thirst for knowledge from my Czech high school students when I entered my first classroom at Gymnazium Sokolov in West Bohemia, Czech Republic. But tests, and homework, and grades, and hormones soon doused those original, naïve expectations. These students didn’t want to be there – they were forced there by their school’s English language requirement. Nor did they particularly like the idea of me (a probable war-loving, dumb American) teaching them. I discovered quickly that their advanced English level required more than the parade of games and chalkboard doodles that had sufficed in my previous classroom. Rather than praise my obvious English genius, thanking their lucky stars for the opportunity to improve their speaking skills, they actually questioned my command of my native tongue, constantly bringing up exceptions to whatever grammar rule I attempted to explain and assuming these discrepancies in the English language were solely my fault.

In a nutshell, I was in their element, and I was the one who must learn to survive. I studied Czech, read books on Czech culture and sought advice from other teachers at the high school on standard classroom discipline. Overnight, I transformed into the infamous, hawk-eyed high school teacher that still haunts the nightmares of grown adults, prowling the classroom in the name of educational justice. I perused pencil-boxes for carefully prepared test cheat-sheets in script so small it could barely be read; my ears perked with canine alertness to the faint clicking of cellular phone buttons during lectures; and I surprised students with my acquired knowledge of Czech curse words that sent unknowing offenders home with disciplinary essay assignments.

Don’t get me wrong - we still had plenty of fun, or at least as much fun as a teenager will allow themselves in the classroom without jeopardizing their popularity. But it was an adopted, cautious sort of fun on my part that balanced my true personality with a need for adult responsibility at an age and within a culture where I wasn’t taken very seriously. And my students attempted fun after reconsidering their view of a stereotypical American English teacher, one they could possibly respect and be friends with at the same time.

Unit III – Teaching Requires Learning
I had been back in the United States for almost a year when the yearning to teach again reemerged while perusing an online volunteer site that advertised a local non-profit ESL program needing teachers. A few weeks later, I found myself standing in front of a mix of twelve Brazilian, Mexican and Russian students, most at least 10-40 years my elder. I had them turn to the first set of exercises in their workbooks, only to discover that everyone had worked ahead and completed the exercises in advance. After two years teaching high school English, I couldn’t imagine what kind of students voluntarily gave themselves homework? I was left without a lesson, and twelve sets of eyes were gazing eagerly at my astonished face, waiting to be entertained. I noticed a small note next to the teacher’s desk, left there by the educator who inhabited the room during the school day. “Control, command, power,” the note boasted – a phrase surely learned at some teaching seminar on classroom discipline. ”Yes”, I thought, “Control the classroom. Get your power back and command their attention again!” Then I realized the phrase only referred to printer maintenance commands. Yes, these were adults, and I was going to have to adapt my teaching methods yet again.

I recently gave the class a mid-term examination – six pages on reflexive pronouns and phrasal verbs. The Central and South American half of the room worked quietly, their eyes on their own papers, but my teacher’s ears perked up knowingly with the first hissing whispers from the Russian couple in the far corner. They projected a constant whir of conversation as they compared test answers, drawing annoyed glances from the other students. My first instinct was to collect their tests and give failing grades, but I quickly recognized my dilemma. First of all, how do you fail someone who’s there voluntarily? And secondly, how could I discipline a 65-year-old Russian married couple, especially since I understood their culture well enough from living in the Czech Republic to know that any good Slav would help their neighbor by sharing answers?

I finally asked them kindly to keep conversation to a minimum so as to not disturb the other students, who had grown up (like myself) being taught that cheating was the equivalent of lying.

“We’ll go over all the answers together next class,” I explained. “It isn’t really important to get every answer correct.”

Not understanding what I had tried to convey, Mariana stared at me imploringly - “But it is important to us,” she said.

And she was right – it was important, just as it had been important to my first Chinese students and my Czech high-schoolers. Ultimately, they all shared the desire to understand and to be understood, yet their status as foreigners and teenagers rendered this desire unattainable. And, from that perspective, it didn’t matter if my students had learned much English - they had learned that someone wanted to help them communicate outside of LA’s Chinatown, that someone believed in them enough to leave her home for two years to teach them English, and that someone who recognized the struggles of being a foreigner wanted to help them succeed in America.

And I learned a few lessons as well - that teaching is not only about conveying knowledge and giving homework – it’s about loving and serving, empathizing with and striving to understand your students, and always believing in what they are capable of achieving. In essence, whether or not I continue to actually teach, I hope I will always be a teacher – one that never stops learning.