This Is What It Means To be a Teacher – Week 2

Dedicated to the memory of Mohammad Bahman-Beigi: nomadic teacher, writer, educator.

Mohammad Bahman-Beigi

Books are strewn on the floor. The night before our first day as English teachers. Everyone attempts to project what teaching will be like. Questions are floating in the air. How do you deal with real beginners? How do you discipline trouble-makers? What if students decide to speak Spanish and ignore me? I’m fine with adults, how do you entertain children? More theorizing and projecting follow. We plan our Monday minute by minute. Choose five different icebreakers for the first 7 minutes of class. We go over lesson # 1 and simultaneously attempt to predict our students’ level of English. More anxiety follows. How the heck am I supposed to teach my beginners “present perfect tense?” Do you think intermediate students can handle “frequency adjectives?” On the brighter side, our anxiety demonstrates that students are only thought of with care and thoughtfulness. The teaching day arrives.

Was it anything like we had projected? Yes. There was a classroom. There were students. But teaching was a foreign prospect, akin to a stranger who had concealed himself from us in spite of our deliberate and anxious attempts to get to know him. He’s unknowable, unpredictable, and queer. We look forward to meeting him with much anticipation. We are excited about him. At those times, he seems most aloof. Making an error or two affects our mood massively. Lack of response from students takes our entire planning into question. We get disappointed. And at those times, he gracefully comes around and gives us a sense of warmth and encouragement with his smile. A smile that only hardworking and free-spirited teachers can earn.

Today was a day filled with manic-depressive moments. Teaching is self-probation, self-annihilation, and self-reflection at the same time. It’s simultaneously five coffee-less hours, five joyful hours, five painful hours. It’s five hours smiling when you want to sob, five hours smiling meaninglessly when you want to rip a student apart, five hours standing when you want to open the door and run. Allow me to speak in the lamest terms, just standing before a group of gazing eyes who wait impatiently for you to open your mouth takes much fortitude. But until you have not opened your mouth, inspired them, been a friend to them, judged them, disciplined them, and loved them, you haven’t done the rest, which take a heart and a ruler. If you survive all this at the end, they call you a ‘teacher.’ Oh also, they tend to pay you.

Teaching five classes, five different age levels, and five different language levels is an appalling prospect, a massive task. I have my advanced group, a group of teenage girls who have been studying English for five years. They gracefully arrive late, reproach me if I let them go thirty seconds late, ask to be corrected, when corrected give me a dirty look. In their class, I try to be 'cool,' speak their 'language.' I probably come off archaic. Only if I understood those Spanish chatters… My intermediate highs are next. Also teenagers. I like them. They make awkward jokes. This girl asked me if I had a girlfriend. I nodded yes. She said, “She’s probably ugly.” I said, "why would you say that?" She said self-righteously as she was chewing her gum, “Oh I was just joking.” No matter how much I beg them to call me Aria, I still hear them say, “See you tomorrow teacher.” Next are spoiled, ten year olds. This girl, Natalia...I wish I had her confidence. Throughout college, I never volunteered to read poetry. I believed English poetry and Iranian accent do not go well together. Whenever this girl opens her mouth, she thinks she’s gracing the English language. They want to play hide and seek. They want to be in “boys” versus “girls” groups. I want to pull my hair. God forbid I leave the class for a second…they’re destructing something. My last class is with adults. They are motivated. A notebook in front, a dictionary, a sharpened pen, with their learning appetite. Before I open my mouth, they want to be corrected. Every grammatical point has to be elucidated to death. They already know more about the English grammar than most native speakers. But they cannot speak it.

Yes my dear friends, I go from talking about career change to past perfect tense, from Grandma Julie watering her flowers to this book is red in the afternoon, and from "Rose by any other name would be as sweet" to My name is Aria, nice to meet you at night. It’s a rollercoaster ride that sees me transform from a cool teacher, to a clown, from an entertaining baby sitter to a right-to-the-point lecturer. For all it’s worth, we have probed the 'true' meaning of teaching. But our queer friend, “teaching,” seems to be still in hiding.

However, today he seems to have graced us with his smile.