Teacher Stories: Stories from the Edges of Language Teaching Page 3
I quit that job a soon as I found another one. That was a few months later. The Level-One teacher and others stayed longer either because they could not find another offer or because the Principal got them involved in long term contracts. My main headache in the ESL world is unprofessional management. No doubt, there are difficulties related to material, students and workload. Yet, those issues can be solved if there is a wise, flexible management. On the contrary, modern facilities and competent staff may be wasted if they were not guided in a professional manner.
Another darkness
Neil Scarth
The first thing I noticed about her were the dark pouches under her equally dark eyes. Actually, that’s not true: the first thing I noticed about her was her skin colour, a colour not usually seen in Bulgarian language classes. My first reaction was Finally, after 8 years in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, I have a Roma lady in my class. I’m suspicious of my own interest in the Roma. Is it an orientalist collecting of exotica, slightly voyeuristic, or is it a real sympathy with the underdog, the stubborn survivor on the physical and social edges of cities?
Anyway, she would turn out not to be of that race at all: she had joked about this herself some weeks later, well knowing people’s presuppositions. Her complexion was dark walnut (and not only the complexion: life had somehow been harsh on her skin, drying it, lining it, making it like a parchment map of tiredness, of the pull of gravity and time on the human face).
She was wearing a smart, brand-new looking, light grey suit with a skirt, but the suit couldn’t hide her discomfort. She shuffled at the back of the cramped room with rows of unpromising immovable desks, emitting gruff nicotine-sanded five-syllabled complaints about the terror of a first English class, directed at everyone and no one. She didn’t get a reply. People were busy with their own slight embarrassment. She stood out a mile. I immediately felt slightly protective: I would probably have felt the same way myself coming into a busy group of expectant strangers and with the prospect of being deprived of the safety net of your own language, and I was internally going through something similar. Trying to be breezy, welcoming and vaguely competent-looking whilst inwardly cringing with that familiar fear of Will they like me? Am I any good? What are they really looking for here? She sat at the back, protecting her shyness by hunching in and letting her black bushy hair with one or two white streaks be a dark cloud of vague unresponsiveness around her.
We started the lesson with the usual cheesy getting to know each other routines. It wasn’t that she didn’t attempt communication or avoid eye-contact: she clearly and deliberately apologised to me and the other students, raising her tarred voice from the back of the class and politely, firmly insisted that she just wanted to listen, which I nodded consentingly to, although it made me vaguely uneasy. After all, she had refused to pay tribute to the great God of Pairwork, one of the seven pillars of Communicative Language Teaching. What if the other students opted out of our jolly fiction of amiable sociability and fake phatic communion? I’d be left making small talk myself, as sometimes happened, and I had long since discovered that I was particularly dreadful at small-talk, turning into a simpering, faltering sycophant, like an apprentice undertaker who just realises he’s got the coffins all mixed up on his third day at work.
I had discovered I had the unfortunate knack, disastrous to a teacher, of showing outwardly when I felt what I was saying was hollow, or just playing for time, or just pedagogically pointless. That I wasn’t really interested in what they had done at the weekend. Or that I was interested but that I knew it was getting them nowhere to talk about it. That asking them what they would do if they won the lottery was not going to help them with anything at all, including their knowledge of English, but was just a prelude to some tired old grammar exercises. In such cases, I could hear my words echoing around the communicative vacuum, bouncing gently round my rib-cage before sinking meekly into the pit of my stomach.
She was always polite, though still clearly writhing with discomfort and self-reproach, and the other students got used to her asking every time to be a silent witness to their dry-run conversations. It would often mean the person sitting next to her working with the people in the next row, with someone having to turn round a bit uncomfortably in the minimal space between the desks. But we managed and her silence was vaguely benevolent, never eye-rolling in disapproval like some of the more active silences I had grown used to.
Then one day the power went off. This was not such a frequent occurrence: this was modern Sofia after all, three quarters into the upwardly mobile capitalist West by now.
This time she was the first to speak while others coughed interrogatively towards the unexpected blackness. Darkness, she said, was her element. Nights, night shifts at the television studio where she worked as an engineer, a job she loved. Why they needed to stay there all night I didn’t understand. Did they record at night? Or was it editing? Maintenance? Maybe there were day shifts too, but it was the nights she talked about. Years of nights. You could hear the tiredness of all those years. She couldn’t sleep during the day you see. She lived with her sister. Neither were married.
She knew German, had learnt it in her youth. Now everyone wanted English. She worried about losing the job she loved. Her sister and her job: that was all she had.
Her English was good enough. Another barrier, not the language barrier, was at work in the class with the lights on. I listened. We all listened, as if there was nothing more natural in the world than listening to this voice sketching the boundaries of a whole life on the darkness.
I can’t remember the rest of the lesson: the lights must have come back on, she must have slid back into her black cloud of tired vagueness and evasion. The course must have continued with the usual awkward pleasantries, the occasional twenty seconds of collective mirth, the frequent twenty minutes of time trudging towards the classroom door and release.
Later I thought: ironic really—such deep reticence in the service of the least reticent of media. I had been glad of that power-cut though. Somehow it had lifted the threat in that heavy cloud of non-participation. How rarely we describe our whole lives in such brief completeness as she had done in that handful of unlit minutes. We always acted a little like the ones she worked for on the other side of the studio glass. Studied naturalness. Talking but watching ourselves talk too. Listening but feeling the quote-marks around our listening too.
I’ve had many well-lit hours in the classroom since then, but none have stuck with me like those minutes of darkness. Maybe one day I’d have my own moments with the lights off like that. And I’d start to tell my story, from the front of the class, weighing the simple words with my tiredness. No attempt to entertain, no plea for pity, no bid for approval, just telling.
Ironic really: my deep reticence in the service of a profession which is at best, uncomfortable with reticence. My private darkness unwelcome somehow in the cheerily flickering strip-lights of the classroom.
About the Authors
Greg Bond
My mother was a teacher. I have had the privilege of being taught by some great teachers. Back in school, my English teacher, Mr Thompson, brought in a teacup and saucer to illustrate Gerard Manley Hopkins's idea of inscape. That blew my mind and it would be a story of its own. Today I work as a teacher and trainer, moderator, facilitator, mediator, translator, editor, and writer. The older I get, the more I think it's
all just a roundabout way of connecting with people. https://www.bond-bond.de/home/
Sabine Cayrou
“One can only see with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”
I grew up in the south-west of France, in the town of the famous aviator Antoine de St Exupéry, who still inspires me. My cultural roots have Mediterranean origins, mixed with Occitan and Italian influences. We do not forget where we come from.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found my second home in this vibrant growing city, where I have been enjoyi
ng teaching my mother tongue for 12 years now.
Mohammed Qaid
I am an ESL teacher and translator from Yemen. I have an MA in TESOL and Cambridge CELTA. I spent 8 years doing lesson planning and TTT in several parts of the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Lebanon. This is only a lead-in so no need for realia and I won't be asking any CCQs.
Neil Scarth
Zig-zagged blindly through university before unwisely graduating in Norwegian which not surprisingly led to dead-end office temping. This made ELT seem strangely attractive, which it turned out to be (both strange and attractive). I’ve unintentionally taught exclusively in the confines of the former Ottoman Empire and sometimes translate.
Helen Waldron
Being a Business English trainer, I've outsourced this. And I have discovered I am a witty/unpredictable/iridescent/reliable/adult/charming erm independent erm business language teacher, who enjoys showing off (my) English. My students like me because I'm always up for a joke (with cats) and when I retire I'd like to buy a house on the coast of England and just wander around.
I did light a perfumed candle and leave that toxic company, though. That much is true. www.helenwaldron.com
Paul Walsh
I graduated in Fine Art in 2005, and since then have been teaching English abroad. In Poland I read James Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time and started a writer’s group with Joe Morin, who features in my story. We produced a story collection called “Help!”—which was an entirely appropriate title. In Saudi Arabia, I started another writing group to combat the tedium of living in an alcohol-free, quasi-totalitarian state. Now in Berlin, I try to organise grassroots organisations. And so it goes...
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