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.
6 comments:
A great read, really touching.
Thank you, Annette :)
I've really enjoyed reading both parts. Hope we can get more of it.Really lovely
I've really enjoyed reading both parts. Hope we can get more of it.Really lovely
Loved the read! You could start thinking about writing a book...?
Thank you so much, Jezicka and Aphro. I think it is almost a book but probably best left as blog posts :)
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