"How high are you?"
Believe it or not, this question doesn't come from somebody doubting my sobriety, but from my forty-something-year-old English student wondering about my height. I'm standing in front of a classroom of seven beginner-level adult students with question words such as "how," "why," "where," and "when" written on the board behind me.
"How tall," I correct said student with what I hope is an encouraging (and not a condescending) smile. She frowns, seems to be mulling this over for a few seconds and raises her hand again. "Missus," she says, "what is different of high and tall?"
"Good question," I say. "For example, mountains can be high, or birds can fly high. People are tall."
She still doesn't look convinced. "So persons cannot be high?" she insists.
Hm.
To my credit I have to say that I've born witness to so many questions and discussions in my teaching career - including (but not limited to) food-related debates about who is "the best cock" and whether "a white woman" (dame blanche ice cream) is the best dessert there is - that I don't even blink.
"Well," I start, then pause for a second and look around the room at the unsuspecting faces, debating whether I should try to explain the difference between being high and being tall even at the risk of confusing my poor students more or, worse yet, having them believe that I'm not just any teacher but a regular Walter White in disguise.
"No. People cannot be high," I conclude at last and cast a glance at the students, who thankfully seem happy with this explanation. It is at times like this when I'm contemplating on having a drug talk with seven middle-aged men and women that I wonder how the heck I ended up here.
How the Heck Did I End up Here?
Surprising as it may seem, I didn't always (ever) dream of being Michelle Pfeiffer tossing out candy bars to the dangerous-come-inspired minds in her classroom. No. I wanted to be a writer. In fact, I still do, but as long as my literary genius (or lack thereof) remains undiscovered by the larger public, a girl's gotta do something to pay the bills. That something turned out to be teaching. My background is in translation, so, for the longest time, making a career out of other people repeating and immortalizing my crazy ramblings in their notebooks wasn't even on my radar. But, as is the case with most good things in life, teaching came to me by a lucky accident and has stuck with me ever since.
I started my language teaching career in Portugal, which meant that most nights of the week I would walk to the university (yes, it was only a short walk away), greet the nice man at the reception who would say, "Boa noite, doutora" (Good evening, Doctor), to which I would say "I actually don't have a PhD" absolutely NEVER (c'mon, when else in my life would I ever get a chance to be called a doctor again?), and then I would proceed to the classroom and get to feel like an impostor for a few hours at a time teaching my mother tongue Finnish to a handful of amazing, motivated students. Here in Belgium it's teaching English - not Finnish - that makes me feel like an impostor because, guess what, turns out that there are not that many people in this country (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) who are eager to learn Finnish (whaaaaaaaat??). So, I teach (mostly) Business English which a comfortable yet not the smartest choice. The smart choice would be to teach kids and teens, because there are a lot more children than adults taking (or seeking to take) language classes. The only problem with that is that I'm deathly afraid of teaching kids. Don't get me wrong, they're cute and all, but if one day they were to realize that there's power in numbers, they could totally take me down.
Teenagers are even scarier, but in a different way. I'm not scared of them per se (well, a little) but I'm scared of myself around them, afraid that I'll regress back to a wannabe popular kid that makes embarrassing attempts at fitting in, except that this time the attempts would be a hundred times more facepalm-worthy given that I have about 15 to 20 years on these kids.
So, I stick to what I know - teaching adults - and wait for the day when some teaching police knocks on the door and arrests me for not knowing what I'm doing.
Do I Know What I'm Doing?
Where does my deep-rooted impostor syndrome stem from, then? I would say it has nothing to do with knowing the language (I think I got that part down) or even being able to impart my knowledge on others (I've been known to do that, too), and everything to do with the fact that I'm teaching in a bubble with no clue as to how other teachers are doing, if their students are learning faster and more effectively or not.
Also, there are a lot of variables. Each student is different and each group has different dynamics. The same exercise that took one group of people two hours can take another one half an hour to complete. This can sometimes throw you off and mess with your time management, and let me tell you, nothing is more demoralizing than reaching the end of the last exercise you planned, glancing at your watch, and realizing there's still 45 minutes of class left. As you have no material left to use, you quickly snap into teaching crisis mode, which - at least for me - means introducing an unimaginative, boring topic that nobody cares about, such as, "What did you do last weekend?" and praying it doesn't produce equally unimaginative responses such as, "I slept" or "Nothing," the mother of all passive-aggressive I-want-to-make-my-teacher's-life-miserable answers. Student: If your language teacher ever tells you to talk about your weekend, especially towards the end of the class, there's a possibility that they are less interested in your ability to speak in the past tense and more motivated by the fact that they just ran out of teaching material and are desperately trying to kill time. Also, if your teacher seems to have a sudden peculiar interest in something trivial you just said ("Did you say you had eggs for breakfast, Pierre? How did you have your eggs? Sunny-side up? Is that your favorite way to have eggs? What's your least favorite way to have your eggs and why? Class, over-easy eggs vs. sunny-side up - discuss!") you can be almost certain your poor teacher is grasping at straws.
A lot of times an exercise can change completely from one group to another. One speaking activity I've used with several groups is where students have to pretend-start a new civilization by choosing a number of people from a list. All of these imaginary new civilization candidates have one important skill and one weakness that could create problems in the new civilization. And, of course, there's only room for so many people (cue the eerie music), so you have to choose wisely. This exercise has the potential to be really fun, or it can fail miserably. I once had a class of two students who selected their candidates in just a few minutes, meaning, the more chatty one of the two did the selecting and the shyer one repeatedly said, "I agree" to avoid having to talk more (to be fair, I would have done the same had the tables been turned, but in my defense, I'm Finnish and have cultural stereotypes to live up to - what's his excuse?)
I tried my best to encourage them to speak more. "Okay, and what is your argument?" I said. "Why would you not choose the poet, for example?"
The more chatty student shook his head and said, "I don't like poet."
I wasn't going to give up that easily. "Okay. Any particular reason?"
"I don't like poet," he repeated.
"And the police?" I ventured.
"I don't like police."
"And what about the fisherman? You don't like fishermen either?"
The student seemed to decide that for variety's sake it was time to change his answer, so he shrugged and said, "It's not his lucky day."
Desperately, I turned to the other, shyer student. "And what do you think?"
"I agree."
At least I was wise enough at that point to cut my losses and move on to the next activity.
The same exercise, in the hands of five intermediate students, had a very different outcome. The students selected a gourmet cook, a poet who grows his own food, a fisherman, a farmer, and a monk who brews beer to start their pretend-civilization. No health care professionals, no engineers, no scientists. I asked if everybody agreed on these choices - they did. These guys wanted to eat, everything else be damned!
Tentatively, I asked, "And what if someone, for example, gets sick?
"That's very good," one of the guys said with a broad smile.
"Very good if someone gets sick?" I echoed. I often do this to encourage self-correction, but this time, nobody was going to self-correct.
"Yes, very good," he announced happily. "If he got sick, then he would die and we would have more to eat!"
And to this cannibalistic Alive-inspired comment I replied, "That's a great second conditional sentence, Jean-Marie! Good job!" because, you know, you have to be encouraging and stuff, the hell with sick people in an imaginary new civilization.
Then there are the role plays, which are either excruciatingly painful or really funny to witness. I once conducted a funny one with my class of two intermediate students. Student A was instructed to be a travel agent who had to try to sell the most expensive vacation in some far-away island to Student B. Student B was instructed to spend the least amount of money possible. Neither of them knew about each other's agendas, so they couldn't understand why I was holding my sides and trying to keep the laughter in through it all. (By the way, I didn't invent this role play myself, but the one who did deserves a freaking medal!) Here's a section of that role play conversation:
Student A: This hotel is a little more expensive, but it's in the center of the city.
Student B: I don't want to be in the center of the city. I want the cheaper option.
Student A: But the center is the place to be!
Student B: I don't want to be in the place to be! I want the cheaper option.
Student A: Okay, let me check. Oh, sorry, the cheaper option is sold out. You can only be in the place to be.
Student B: Then I'll change the travel agency.
Student A: Sorry, we're the only travel agency here. So, one reservation for the place to be?
Of course, there are a lot more examples than these but for the sake of brevity, I'll save them for a possible part two (maybe sometime in the future). To my students, past and present, I would like to say a big thank you for keeping my life interesting and - often - funny! You guys are awesome, I salute you!
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