Starting to teach

I came to Lamia to teach English to children in three separate, private language schools. I had seen a note advertising the job on the notice board of International House and having tossed up between that one and another in Portugal, I rang the number, was offered the job and here I was, a few miles from the coast in a small town in central Greece which was hardly mentioned in any guide books apart from apparently having roast meat restaurants and storks on the roof tops. That sounded okay to me. It was an adventure, a dare to myself. Having graduated with an English Literature degree I had no work plan, no career objectives, no idea about how I wanted to earn a living or spend my life from then on. All I knew was that I wanted to Do Something Interesting. I’d done the usual post-university working in pubs, restaurants, shops and temping in offices, I had friends and family who I loved, I had a small rented flat in east London, I had jobs which provided me with enough money to go out, have fun. But I wanted to enlarge my life, widen my boundaries and what better place, I thought, than Greece to spend a year discovering more about life. 

I had three sets of employers, all with their own schools in Lamia. Pavlos Mavrikas*, an intellectual with a goatee beard; Vasso Polyzos; short, flamboyant and expressive, and Despina Foustaneli, young, tall, organized, pregnant and about to get divorced. They were all, quite reasonably, expecting to get a native speaker teacher who knew, at least a little, what she was doing in the classroom. But, poor things, they got me. 

I had a little teaching experience. Years before I had helped out as a classroom assistant at the primary school my mother taught in. I’d picked up a lot from watching my mother help seven year olds to learn and, my dad also being a master at a huge all-boys inner London comprehensive school, I felt that teaching was a sphere that I could be comfortable in. And of course I’d done this one-month preparatory TEFL course at International House. But really all I had was a lot of theory, enthusiasm and trust and no experience at all of standing before a class of young Greek children with little or no English. 

I didn’t even look like a teacher to Greek eyes. Then, as now, teachers had a good standing in Greek society. If you thought of a teacher, you thought of someone slightly restrained, very respectable, serious and focused. You didn’t think of someone in bright pink pedal pushers and a skinny T-shirt with dark, wild long hair and one Brighton junk shop glittery leaf earring. So I think I was a bit of a surprise for my employers. But their schools were a surprise for me too.

 

Pavlos’ school was on the second floor of a large building in the centre of town. There were three echoing classrooms with narrow formica desks and benches, whiteboards and a few tatty posters on the wall, and a large study filled with cases of well–thumbed books, two huge desks for him and his secretary and a couple of ancient, thirsty rubber plants. Pavlos had a lot of theories about teaching and they were all excellent.

‘You need to build up communication with the children’, he would explain. ‘They do not need grammar rules; they need to get into the feel of the language and you need to recognize individual learning styles…’ Then there would be a kafuffle from the corridor as a bundle of boys tussled and he would whip outside to sort them out. Seconds later you would see him chasing the main offender down and out of the school, impressively simultaneously hopping, running and kicking butt and yelling; ‘Get out of here, you scoundrel and don’t come back until you’ve learnt some manners.’ Then he would realize that he had overshot the ten minutes allotted for break, pop his head round the study door, hand me an unfathomable text book and say, ‘Class C, page 23, revise all the tenses, would you?’

Well, I would of course try, but did I know what all the tenses were? I had Thomson and Martinet’s Grammar and thank god for that old book. I had come to Greece armed with several official pieces of paper which declared that I had A’s in O, A and S level English and a BA Honours degree in English Literature. But tenses? Had we done them at school or had I been away that day? Learners of English all over the world know that they have names and uses; Simple Present, Present Perfect, Past Continuous; these are terms which all students of English are familiar with apart from those who really should know them; native English speakers.

So, with one nanosecond of preparation, I would walk into a class of rowdy thirteen year-olds whose parents had paid for them to have this lesson, die quietly inside and have them read aloud while I flicked through my grammar book trying to find out what on earth I was supposed to be teaching them. What did they learn? Nothing much from me, I guess. What did I learn? A lot. No, not grammar. In the end the tenses and their uses were there in my head; all I had to do was learn their names. What I learnt was something far more profound; that young, Greek children are not trying to make your life difficult; they are not interested in making fun of you or trying to get the better of you. They want some order, they want some authority, they want to know what they are doing and to know you know what you are doing and, above all, they want some knowledge.

I think I let those children down. I didn’t know then what they needed to learn and I certainly didn’t know how to convey the little knowledge that I did have to share. But their kindness and patience with me, their struggling, inexperienced instructor, helped me to understand what being a teacher was all about.

 

* Names have been changed.