First lessons

I went slightly deaf while working in Pavlos’ school. The classrooms were, as I have said, echoing and the children were, as I have implied, enthusiastic. And I was, as you know, learning. That’s not a good combination for someone with sensitive ears. Once I had got the hang of the tenses (and their uses) I would make up Tense Games (that is quite a good name for them), which might involve students running to the board and marking something or groups of children waving collective hands or cards in the air. And, of course, despite instructions to the contrary and much to the annoyance of the teachers in the adjoining classrooms, everyone would also be calling out their answers.

My makeshift games were always well intentioned; I wanted the children to learn some grammar, as their parents expected, but I also wanted them to be able to use the grammar, to see it as a living, vital part of language. But when you have twenty five kids yelling out ‘Miss! Miss!’ followed by a medley of right and wrong answers, it’s easy to get confused, lose control of the class and damage your hearing into the bargain. My ears have never fully recovered and, if you ever run into me, please look at me while you’re speaking. 

I worked at Pavlos’ school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays I was at Vasso’s neat school in a small suburb of Lamia. Vasso would pick me up in her car after lunch and we would kangaroo out of the town as she battled with the clutch, questioned me about my love life and put up with me trying out all my newly learnt Greek phrases. For a language teacher I have to say that she wasn’t very encouraging. ‘You remind me,’ she said as she stalled at yet another traffic light, ‘of my father.’

Sounds good, I thought, thinking that maybe she saw me as dependable.

 ‘Oh F Harry Stowe’ I said, meaning of course ‘Thank you’ in Greek.

‘No, no,’ said she, ‘I mean that you remind me of him when he had had a stroke. He spoke just like you when you’re speaking Greek.’

Vasso had a lot of equipment. She had chairs with swivelling, individual desk tops attached, a television, cassette players, headphones for each child, a roll down screen, a projector and reams of film. She had files for each child with marks and comments neatly penned in by her diligent secretary and detailed lesson plans.

‘The first five minutes is the dictation they were set for homework yesterday, then do the reading passage on page 17 followed by exercise one on page 18. Set exercises two and three for homework and revise spellings from page 16.’

Vasso wanted an ordered, disciplined lesson from me. Of course what she got was near chaos as the kids, sensing a floundering, amiable teacher would shower me with notes, drawings, tiny damp bunches of wild flowers and sticks of chewing gum and demand games, puzzles and quizzes; anything in fact which didn’t involve dictation, reading passages, exercises and spelling revision.

Every so often Vasso would come into my noisy classroom to ‘observe’. Then of course we would all be stricken with nerves. The children would sit in semi-paralysis at their green desk chairs, looking up at me seriously and I would attempt some sort of round the class drill of the verb To Be or something equally imaginative. Vasso would make notes, take me aside afterwards and tell me that I had been totally useless. She did have a point.

 

On Fridays I was up at Despina’s school on a hill leading out of the town. There I was to do composition writing with the children and Despina equipped me with all I apparently needed for this lesson; a slim volume of model compositions which we were to go through, one by one throughout the year. The essays had titles such as ‘A letter to my pen friend’, ‘An afternoon in the country,’ ‘My bedroom’ and ‘An invitation to a party.’ We were to read them aloud around the class, she explained, then go through the comprehension questions provided with each student taking a turn to answer starting with the girl in the first desk in the front row on the left and continuing around the class in a clockwise direction. I was to remember which student had been the last to answer at the end of each lesson so that the following Friday I could continue the answering circle. I was then to provide them with a short list of useful words which I would find supplied in the teacher’s notes; they would copy these, neatly please, into their notebooks and for homework they would write their own compositions on the same subject.

I could do that! We could all do that! And that is exactly what we did. Well, at least that is partly what we did. Despina had planned this perfectly apart from one thing; we would always finish reading, answering and copying neatly ten minutes earlier than the allotted 50-minute lesson time. And then I would be back on my own resources again with a class full of lively children. So there would be quizzes and games and calling out and singing and even occasionally dancing; everything in fact that was not what Despina had in mind.

And so I continued from October to May; trying to live up to my employers’ fairly reasonable expectations and failing most of the time while amassing a wall full of notes declaring adoration from the little girls and drawings of space ships, cars and footballers from the little boys.