Bridget's Bunia Blog 43

What is teaching?

The students seem to think it's a stage play and they are the actors. They come to the classroom stage with their carefully prepared script of a lesson plan: 'Teacher asks pupil such and such...' 'Pupil answers such and such...' But the pupils don't have a copy of the script! The students expect to execute a clear, non-interrupted presentation from the time of the curtain-rising bell to the time of the curtain-falling bell, and even if they don't receive applause at the end of their performance, they don't expect catcalls to follow their exit from the classroom. Gradually, these students are being disabused of this notion. They are learning that a teacher cannot stay distanced from the audience, and that the audience has a mind of its own.

No, teaching is more like going on a journey through a forest. You have to be at a destination by a certain time but apart from that certainty nothing is definite. You're taking some teenagers on a journey. Teenagers who are reluctant, bored, listless or - joy of joys - enthusiastic and focused. Sometimes they take you on trails where you get lost and it's time-consuming to find your way back to the main path. Sometimes they want to stop and examine the flora and fauna. Sometimes they find notices nailed to trees that they don't understand. As the journey leader, you have to keep moving them along the path to the destination while making sense of their questions and comments. But sometimes it's they who teach you things; they surprise you with their perception and knowledge; it's they who get you back from digressions.

Every Thursday morning I wake up with the lightness of knowing that I don't have to teach morning classes. All I have to do is observe four students teaching an English lesson. But at the end of every Thursday I'm wrung out from the emotional energy expended as I wince at wrong pronunciation, or cringe at strange understandings of English grammar, or agonise over an inadequately constructed lesson. It’s a stressful, painful experience observing a non-native speaker teach your mother tongue. It's an ordeal for us all but it’s the only way that the student teachers will be able to translate the theory into practice.

Three down and one to go. We have a break of an hour before the final lesson (performance? journey?) of the morning. The staff room of this school is very small and we are eight students and one supervisor. My house is a three-minute walk away. So we repair to the house for refreshments and feedback: How do you feel your lesson went? What have you learned? What did the pupils learn? What comments have the other students to make? The students are critical of the transgressions and omissions of their fellow students, but they're also kind in their encouragement of the other members of their teaching team.

"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love." Ephesians 4: 2

Blessings,
Bridget