Teaching & Learning

April has brought along some much needed sunshine and green blossoms around Bordeaux.  When I came home from vacation on Friday, I felt like the city had broken out of its cocoon and started to stretch under long spring evenings and newly found heat.  People have started coming out of every crevice of the city, lounging along the river in sundresses and shorts, thirsty for the warmth of the sun—I feel thoroughly at home.

But this month has also marked the end of teaching and because of that, I’ve spent some good time reflecting.  Thinking back to September when I first stood at the front of a classroom, I am reminded of how much there is to learn in this life.  My students and my job have pulled and stretched me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined.

Those first few weeks, I remember trying to calm the shake of my hands at the front of the room, constantly dropping my chalk and stumbling over chairs, walls and desks.  In my nervousness, everything solid posed a real threat.

Somehow, in my brain, if my students were going to respect me, I needed to be graceful and as some of you know, graceful is not necessarily my strongest trait.  I also convinced myself that in order to gain their respect, my students needed to be clueless about my age.  Standing before the mirror in my room, I’d pin my hair in different ways, trying to find a style that added on a few years.

Looking back, I chuckle realizing that I thought those things mattered so much.  And perhaps they did matter though not nearly as much as spirit, dedication, and genuine care for the students.

There were so many surprises that would unfold throughout the year.  I smile because the classes that literally drove fear through my soul would become some of my favorites. 

Unlike my other courses that revolved around English Studies majors, I taught one evening class a week that was open to the public.  There was such a range of people in that room.  I had university students, retired teachers, current professors, a landscaper, an architect, doctoral candidates, a nurse, some mothers, fathers and a grandfather in the room.  They collectively had so much more life experience and education than I do, and to make things worse, I had no instruction on what to teach them.  I was petrified.

My panic only increased in those first few weeks as I learned that because the group’s language level was so low, I would be instructing in French.

"Well, you’re going to have to be patient with me and I’ll be patient with you."

If only I had known on that first evening that my classroom full of diverse adults would laugh alongside me while I stumbled over their language and they timidly began to learn mine. 

I wish I could have told myself in that moment that they would make me keel over in laughter when they told stories of their different homes and sigh when they made poetic grammar mistakes.

“No, in English we do not call inanimate objects he and she, but yes, it does sound quite lovely when you say: The river is falling and she winds between the mountains.”

I wish I could have known that they would break my stereotypes, that they would show genuine interest and care in my life. If only in those first weeks I could’ve known how it would feel to give each of those students a bisou at the end of the semester and hear them say that they could finally understand the lyrics to their favorite English songs.

Once I was able to forget my own fear and inadequacies to truly see the faces sitting in my room become human—when I was able to see the stories, love, dreams and fear in their expressions—then the teaching could begin. 

That moment of humanity, of truth, is what I have learned to love in this year of teaching.  I grew to love the moments when the students would take me by surprise.

One came to me on the last day of the first semester with no form of excuse for why he had missed half of our classes and a major part of his exam. He seemed like just a lazy student.  He sat in the back with poor posture and a blank expression, and when he came to ask me to arrange a time for him to redo his missing content, I was thoroughly annoyed.

He proved to be quite persistent, so I decided to give him the chance to redo the work, which ended up being fairly strong.  The following semester, his attendance became regular and I began to count on his constant yet slow hand, ready to answer any question I posed.  His homework became increasingly consistent, insightful and precise, and by the end of the year, he was one of my best students. It brought me pure joy to be proven so utterly wrong.

Equally stunning, I loved hearing my old Angolan student’s woody voice fall slowly and perfectly over a piece of poetry in one of our last classes. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”  Coming from a man who stumbled over every English word in week one, I was floored.  

I wish I could have seen Langston Hughes dancing in heaven over the sound of his words reverberating in that classroom.  Oh, how he would've been proud.

These were  moments to remember, but it would be a lie to pretend they were all triumphant.  There were classes where I failed to enliven the material, where I spewed my own opinion a bit too much, and there were certainly students that I failed to reach.

I also know that I let others words and cynicism taint my own teaching.  My list of wishes and suggestions for my university could fill a book.  I could outline every way that I wish the students were better encouraged and challenged, but if I'm honest with myself, I’m less than impressed with my own steps to better their situation.

“You watch yourself about complaining.  What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it.  If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” – Maya Angelou

A dear friend included this quote in a letter a few months back, but Ms. Maya's words have felt so prevalent these last few days.

Whoo boy do I wish I had done more to change the issues I saw.  I know that my call on this Earth is to increase love and compassion, and that doesn’t happen when we shrug our shoulders because things are out of our hands.  I hope that in the future, when I teach again, that I’ll remember to fight for change in the places that need it, thus loving my students as best I can.

For now, I’m grateful to sit back, take notes for the future, and giggle over the moments I shared with my students at Bordeaux Montaigne.  There is so much left to learn.