Every language teacher I know starts class with the same question: "Hi, everyone- how are you today?" With my kiddos, the response is usually, "Teacher, I am fine!" with the occasional, "I am very, very, very, very, very so-so," via the class smart-ass. (Ah, how I do love the smart-asses). With adults, the answer is never so simple.
It's one of those universal, unwritten rules that teachers are expected to have the answers to far more than their subject matter. As a student, I sought out my favorite teachers for recommendations, for problem solving, for solutions to the hard questions. After all, don't we advise our children, "If something bad happens, if you need to talk to someone, tell your teacher." And if you're a new teacher like me, you've probably had a moment where you realized, "Wait, I'm the teacher. Oh crap! I'm the teacher!"
In the last six months I have become a confidant-- not in the way that I am to my friends and family-- but as Teacher, with a capital 'T.' And honestly, this terrified me; how on Earth am I supposed to be a resource for my students this way? Don't these people realize I'm merely putting up a good front as a functional adult?! But nonetheless, I have shared in a marriage, a broken engagement, two pregnancies, and countless birthdays. Fights with girlfriends, moments of pride and those of self-doubt, travels, hopes and regrets, and the all-important venting about bosses. And as I wrap up my classes this week, I have tried convince my students-- these hardworking, committed, complicated people-- how much I will miss them. Has every moment been rewarding? Do they sometimes drive me crazy? Well, I've found that people will text under the table whether they are thirteen or thirty... But I try-- haltingly, often awkwardly-- to thank them for inviting me into their lives.
About half of my classes are individual lessons, just two people sitting in a room trying to understand one another. Often the worksheet, the newspaper clippings, the CD-rom sit neglected on the table as we try to do what is at the heart of a language class: communicate. Many people think a teacher's job is to stand at the front of a room and impart knowledge into eager (or not-so-eager) brains, but I will argue that is a fraction of what my best teachers did for me. As I think back to my not so long ago schooldays and look ahead to the newest venture, I wonder if my teachers worried, as I do so often these days, that they wouldn't have the right answers. That they could teach verb tenses, spelling or math equations with the best of them, but that they would fail at that universal, unwritten rule. And I then I think-- I hope-- that maybe it didn't require that much work or worry. Maybe all they had to do was listen?
Love from,
Kerk