Ch. 7: “…So, now can you tell me how teaching is?”
Now that I’m 10–11 months in, I think I’m slightly more prepared to talk about teaching.
…but I still can’t do it in a coherent paragraph format, mainly because a nice blurb won’t do justice to the experience. So instead, here are some anecdotes from my journal in a temporal order to answer the question, “How is teaching?”
— — —
“During one of my first days of teaching, I genuinely lost control of my entire 7th grade class. I was trying to play a vocab game, and my co-teacher wasn’t in the room. Literally — and I’m using ‘literally’ literally — every one of the 42 students were yelling, screaming, or working on something else. I had a whiteboard marker in my hand that I had to stuff in my pocket because I came too close to chucking it at a certain group of boys. Then the craziness finally became too much, and I mumbled an explicit version of ‘holy cow’ because I’m a terrible human being. I am sure a student had heard me, as I heard the word vaguely repeated immediately after. I hadn’t meant it angrily; I was just that exasperated. But I doubt the nuance translates. So I carried on with the class, with a frozen smile on my face and hating myself.”
“These days I am devoid of all traits I’m proud of: creativity, charisma, confidence, presence. In class, I’m a drowning person, groping at anything to keep me afloat. My desire to impart some useful piece of knowledge, combined with the fact we only have 50 — now 40 — now 30 minutes of class left, combined with their lower-than-expected English level, combined with regular interruptions and disengagement, led to a fatal combination. On my part. I go numb and shut down like a overdriven computer. How could I be creative or charismatic when I can’t even just do?”
“Today I covered a 10th grade class for another teacher. I only teach 6th, 7th, and 8th so teaching older kids was a treat. We used the topic they’d just learned (present progressive) to talk about societal problems that mattered to them. I offered ‘public education.’ as a personal example, and they slowly contributed theirs. The board was soon filled with issues much bigger than 10th grade: poverty, violence, misconception of Cartagena’s culture, lack of public services, over-consumption. Then I asked them to use present progressive to write sentences describing a perfect world in which these problems did not exist. “Schools are providing enough resources”, for example. For the remainder of class, I watched students write sentences that went beyond their English abilities in order to capture what they care about. They asked me for words and even followed me out the door at the end of class so I can check what they’d written.”
“Today, I literally had to stand like a starfish at the doorway to keep my 6th graders from escaping class. I didn’t teach. I just played reverse bouncer. I thought I had things under control until three small firecrackers went off in the classroom, at which point I had to grab the vice-principal.”
“Count on Papa Park to drop some serious tough love: ‘It’s silly you’re frustrated, and even a bit pretentious. You’re not a teacher. You had 3 weeks of training and that was to save you from drowning, not to make you an exceptional swimmer. So calm down and stop stressing over a grammar point. Instead, be someone who believes in them. Love them first. Teach them second’.”
“The other day, my students gathered around my laptop as I led them through a presentation on Korea using regular and irregular verbs. I’d ask questions cold-call style and the kids would tell me the correct answer. Towards the end of the presentation, one of my less engaged students volunteered the correct answer. I couldn’t help beaming and saying, “You guys are really getting the hang of this!” and the class broke into full-out applause. It was weirdly bittersweet. The fact that the entire class instantly started cheering over an off-handed comment.”
“I am definitely seeing the ugliest sides of myself. Today, one of the students refused to look at me as I talked to her. I stood at her desk for half a minute before she rolled her eyes and finally acknowledged my presence. Then a boy threw his desk and left class when his group didn’t get the correct answer. Another girl laughed at my English (of all things) and began mimicking me in the back of the class. To top it off, the class ended earlier than I thought it would, so I only got through half of my lesson. I was a mess when I left. I hated that I’d yelled at the boy after throwing his desk, and I hated that I’d gotten visibly upset. And of course I find out later that the boy who had thrown the desk comes from a dysfunctional family, with his parents separated, his brother in jail, and his sister who had passed.”
“Given how classes were going, I decided to teach the high performers and the genuinely interested students separately. Perhaps at the expense of furthering the achievement gap, but otherwise, it would be at the expense of the students who actually want to learn and that seems just as unfair. I piloted the idea for a week and it went beautifully — the students enjoyed learning in a smaller classroom and also being selected. It also gave me leverage for the first time. If they misbehaved, I’d just say, ‘Look, if you don’t want to be here, you can go back,’ which would instantly make them stop.”
“I have a student named Lina. She actively participates in class but, most unfortunately, makes mistakes all over the place. But to my delight (and slight confusion) she never gave up. I was sensitive about correcting her work while keeping her interest alive. When I began teaching students separately, the teacher and I made sure she was in the small group, hoping our selection would give her an extra boost of confidence. It is now final exam week and she has gotten one of the highest grades in the class. I was grading her exam with some of the students watching me, and their exclamation upon seeing her name confirmed my observation about how far she’d come. I pulled her aside to later tell her that I was so proud of her and that she should be too.”
“Our volunteer contracts changed and now I’m at a new school. Despite it being only 15 minutes away from my previous school, it is another world. Still in a low-income neighborhood, but a few changes are making all the difference. Principals and vice-principals actively monitor and meet with the teachers. Many of the teachers have worked here for 10+ years and you can tell they are proud of their jobs. The school is located away from the main street, in a quiet corner of the neighborhood. To top it off, I will only teach 9th and 10th grade, see them twice a week, and the maximum class size is 35 for the most part. It’s worth noting that I haven’t even met the students yet, and yet I am so optimistic. Goes to show that school is so much more than what happens in the classroom . Similar to how 70–80% of what we communicate are non-verbal, I think 70–80% of the “communication” school has with its students are non-verbal.”
“During my first visit at my new school, the teachers nonchalantly acquainted me with these remarkable differences while apologizing for the ‘disarray’ of classrooms that were still cleaner than what I had seen before. After a certain point, I just started seeing what my former students didn’t have. And we weren’t even talking about American schools vs. Colombian schools. Nor private vs. public schools. We were talking about a public school vs. another public school that was 15 minutes further into poverty.”
“Although classes were supposed to start 2 weeks ago, due to recent elections, the Cartagena government had not renewed their contracts with school janitors and security guards for the new year, which meant no classes. We received news this past Tuesday that one of our students had been shot and killed in his neighborhood, along with his brother and a friend, allegedly over territorial disputes between narcotraffic groups. At the teacher’s meeting, one of the teachers noted the elephant in the room: if the school had been in session, perhaps the student would still be here. While the group collectively agreed that the fault was not ours but the government’s, I was mulling over this new role that school had never played in my life.”
“I took advantage of my new surroundings to start what I always thought was impossible: a long-term project. We are using Facebook to cover required topics for the semester. Students made a profile page to learn how to introduce themselves, made a ‘Likes’ page and gave each other ‘likes’ to review interrogatives, affirmatives, and negatives, and uploaded a picture of their family to learn family vocab. Debatable how effective it has been in learning English, but at least it keeps the students engaged. And they seem to have easier time remembering vocabulary when they have a real-life, interesting context. For better or for worse, many of my students know how to say ‘single’, ‘in a relationship’, and ‘it’s complicated’.”
“Today, my students started complaining that they were too hot and wanted water. When I told them they could get water at the end of class, they began dropping like flies, putting their heads on their desks and refusing to participate. Then a black market developed, with some of the students hustling other students’ money to sneak out and get other students to buy them water. The incident was not as funny at the time.”
“Today was International Women’s Day so students made cards in English for their friends, sisters, and mothers. But they had one rule: they couldn’t use their go-to words to describe women: ‘linda’, ‘hermosa’, ‘bella’, ‘reina’. Instead, they learned and used words to describe character: ‘honest’, ‘funny’, ‘intelligent’, ‘persevering’.”
“I asked students to copy down the bingo board I’d drawn on the white board (a blank 4x4) so we can use it to learn new vocabulary. I knew I’d made a huge mistake when the students broke out their rulers, color pencils, white-out, and markers. It didn’t matter how many times I repeated, ‘It doesn’t have to be pretty!’. We lost 40 minutes drawing and couldn’t play the game until the next class, at which point, to no one’s surprise, half of the students had lost their sheet and we had to spend another 20-minutes re-drawing the board. And again, by ‘board’ I mean 10 lines.”
“I’d told my students that the most important English phrase they’d want to know is, ‘How do you say…?’. Some of them have really taken it to heart and it is the only English phrase they know. But even if they overuse it, it makes me happy and I think it makes them happy too. The other day, a student asked me, ‘How do you say, ‘Gracias por la clase’?’. I was so filled with fuzzies that I don’t remember if I actually answered his question.”
“Sometimes I will have my friends from the States who are in town visit the school so that students have a chance to interact with more gringos. They would ask a simple question like, ‘What’s your name?’ and both my student and I would erupt in cheers and high fives when he / she answers, ‘My name is so-and-so’ without hesitation. I’m sure my friends think that I’m a terrible teacher or are at least weirded out, because what is up with the seemingly ‘low-bar’? Because I’ve come to realize that that interaction is actually a 4-step process. First, they have to have enough confidence to believe they can answer a question in English (especially in an outside-of-lessons context) and muster an interest to actively listen to the question without giving up. Then they have to actually understand the question. Then they have to believe in their own ability to respond in English without doubting themselves or being embarrassed. And then they have to come up with the actual answer in English. So basically, listening and speaking English is the easy part. What we are high-fiving over is their decision to listen and speak.”
“Today, was a review class to prepare for their upcoming final exam. It was awful. We had to stop class every 10–15 minutes due to disruptions — students walking around, yelling over us to continue their conversations, working on their math homework, etc. Even the focused students were zoning out, which only made us teachers get more frustrated. By the end of the 2-hour period, no one wanted to be there. Which they made clear when the bell rang, and they broke out into a thunderous applause. The first thought that came to mind — after having skipped lunch that day to teach 4 hours straight — was a cruder version of ‘I think I will buy my ticket home today’.”
“To my dismay, there was a thunderstorm this morning. Student attendance drops when there is rain, let alone a thunderstorm that floods streets and cuts power. I splashed my way to school (I had to take a different route as my usual path was under water) with extremely low expectations about Conversation Club [an optional English class that starts an hour before school]. To my greatest delight, I saw two of my regulars waiting (they were both surprised to see the other). As we got settled to do a basically private tutoring session, we took bets on how many more would come. They said 0. I said 1. Few minutes later, there was a knock on the door to everyone’s surprise. ‘Maybe that’s your 1', one of the boys chirped. But it wasn’t, because there were two. And then 1 more. And then 3 more. Until I had almost everyone in my usual group of students who I see every week, except today they had had to swim their way to get to a voluntary class.”
— — —
If these anecdotes appear jumpy and difficult to follow, that is pretty spot-on; teaching has been jumpy with high highs and low lows, and difficult to follow in terms of what happens everyday. Perhaps now the reader sees why I always pause too long or shrug a quick answer when asked how teaching has been.
The truth is that I have no idea. I’m a volunteer who has been put in a classroom for a year and does the best she can, while navigating a new culture, a new socioeconomic setting, a new language, and new skill sets.
But based on what I do know, it seems to me that teaching is the most draining, rewarding, heart-breaking, and meaningful profession any one can dare attempt to do.
