What Has Teaching Ever Taught You?
It is something of a cliché that the best teachers always learn from their students. It has become a cliché, though, because it is true, or at least it should be true. For example, some of the things I have learned this week include
- why there isn’t one standard voltage for all of Brazil from a retired electrical engineer,
- how to do a cool magic trick from an amateur magician
- I realised that I like fantasy books, but hate fantasy films, while I love whodunits on the screen, but find them boring as a form a literature.
But these are all one-0ffs. There are other things I have learned that have taken me whole career, so far, to develop,
Portuguese
When I first arrived in Brazil I knew no Portuguese at all. I have been lucky to have found a number of different sources to learn some of the language, but undoubtedly one of the main forms, at least at the beginning, was in my English classes. I am not talking about teachers who directly, and shamelessly, ask their students how they say such and such in Portuguese. Instead, I picked up a lot from the mistakes my students constantly made.
For example, I noticed very early on that a common mistake was when students said ‘I am living here for 10 years’. I realised that if all my students were saying this it was probably because of some negative language transference. In future classes I was always on the look out ofr patterns of common errors in English so I could incorporate them into my own Portuguese.
Patience
Apparently, as a teenager I wasn’t the most patient of people, especially when it came to people who didn’t know what I knew. The phrase ‘he doesn’t suffer fools gladly’ could almost have been created just for me.
I can lay no claim to being the most patient person in the world now, but I have come to realise that not knowing something is great. It just provides you with an opportunity to learn something.
Business
I now work for myself as a freelance teacher, trainer and materials writer. This means I have had to develop skills more commonly associated with running a business than controlling a classroom. I still need to work on my negotiation skills, but I am improving all the time with experience. There is a chance that I would have worked for myself if I had never become a teacher, but we’ll never know.
Upside down…
I quickly learned to read upside down when I became a teacher. While monitoring writing exercises it was much easier to read the wrong way up than interrupt the students to see what had been written.
…and back-to-front
Think reading upside down is no biggie? To be honest, it isn’t. I was able to master it pretty quickly. It took me a lot longer, though, to master my party piece which is being able to write upside down. Since I started teaching a lot of private classes I have found it makes things slightly more efficient if I can write something on a piece of paper and have my students read it as I write. As they usually haven’t mastered the art of reading upside down, this meant I have developed the skill of writing upside down and back-to-front. The sad thing is that my handwriting is often more legible this way than when I write in the more traditional manner.
And what about you, my reader? What has teaching ever taught you?
P.S. In preparing for this blog I learned about the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Image Credits
Hand up by Charlie Baker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Ring by Taymaz Valley (CC BY 2.0)
Student silhouette by John Jordan (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
