16 May 2020.
It was January 2008. I had just finished reading out a speech in front of an audience, for the first time ever in my life. I was still quaking in its aftermath, when a lady walked up to me. Pushing her 11 year old daughter in front of me, she simply said, “Would you teach her English?”
They say there’s no age for a teacher and each person you meet always has something to teach you. But in that instant, a lot of confusion and mistrust flooded my mind. ‘Why was she asking me this? How would I possibly teach anyone? I was barely out of school myself, how could I become someone’s teacher?’
While the mother looked at me eagerly and the daughter tried to burn me down with her glare, I took a moment before I answered…..”Sure, why not?”
Thus began my foray into the land of teaching; a land of opportunities, as I was to realise much later. The first day of our so – called class, brought a surly her to my doorstep and a nervous me, eager to break the ice. The first thing she spoke to me that day : “I liked you so I agreed to come. But I hate English, so can we stop already?”
My heart sank in that instant. I should have been glad she liked me, but all I could think was – she hates the language I love! It was in that instant that I made a decision. If I couldn’t teach her anything at all, the least I could do was to change her opinion about English.
I began to hit the library far more often, more for her than me. I went through a number of books that taught me how to introduce the language and create activities that sustained interest and imbibed concepts. I dived into my own bookshelves to find books that would get her intrigued. No book was off – limits, so out came the picture books, comic books and everything I had personally devoured as a child.
Then began the arduous task of making all that appealing to her. So I studied her interests, listened closely to what made her eyes sparkle, and began moulding everything around it. I wanted to make the language a part of her routine, and these little modifications would go a long way, as I soon began to see.
We pored over grammar rules, but took frequent breaks to gossip too. The only rule – not a word of our mother tongue while she was with me. Her surly looks told me she would probably like me a little less each time she came over, but soon the ice was entirely broken between us. Everyday she came bursting with some news, and soon conveying all that in English began to seem like a small price to pay.
As we patiently worked through her errors, she opened up more. There were now grammar sentences that sneaked in her latest crush’s name, essays that revolved around her favourite sports and hobbies, homework that began to be regularly done and a library card that was finally being put to use.
As an experiment, I introduced her to one of my favourite books. An abridged biography of Helen Keller. It was a tattered, precious possession (and still is!) with yellowing pages but holding narratives of a life I read about in awe. Very reluctantly, she read exactly 5 sentences before she shut the book with an impatient look upon her face! But perhaps the same things that fascinated me, appealed to her. Maybe she saw MY sparkling eyes, as I narrated what came next but always left off an important detail, the condition always being that she’d have to read it herself to find out!
By the time we had got through that book, we had also designed crosswords and word searches on our own, designed a vocabulary board game for ourselves and as a result, had begun to score very well in exams!
Eventually, that surly 11 year old tomboy turned into a smart and confident 15 year old in front of my eyes, and her mother once again came up to me. “She is now in Std. 10. She has really enjoyed all these years with you, but it is now time for her to join a professional class. All her peers already have, you know!” Getting her to fall in love with a language was one thing, but preparing her to score in an important exam was something I wasn’t prepared for. Although I mutely accepted her mother’s decision, there was something inside me that pushed me to give it a shot – for my budding student’s sake.
It seems funny, in retrospect, how my only thought was how much I would miss her despite the fact that for 4 years she had done everything possible to test my patience, challenge my love for the language, waste a lot of my time by not turning up as per schedule. There were so many nights I spent tossing around restlessly, wondering how to deal with this unruly child, and so many days when I decided I was going to stop teaching her altogether.
Weird then, that when the same option was offered by her mother, I felt the urge to prove myself once again. Out came the textbooks, old exam papers were collected and fervently gone through, notes were taken down as I tried to crack the exam pattern. Yet I didn’t know how to convince her mother, since I had no prior success to boast about except my own performance in the same exam years ago, which didn’t really count in this context.
So caught up was I with working out a strategy, that I forgot my student actually “liked me”. She threw a tantrum at home and refused to attend any other class but the only one she’d known. The pressure really began to build then, as her mother gave in to her demand rather reluctantly. I saw this fear constantly in her mother’s eyes – What if I turned out to be a bad decision?
The clock ticked closer to the exam date as my student and I worked harder than ever, determined not to let each other down. While I taught her, I had begun to realise I enjoyed every aspect of the journey. It thrilled me to simplify the complexities of grammar, I could throw various ideas at her pretty effortlessly to make her ‘creative’ writing assignments truly so, I could even explain the most complicated processes in the simplest of manners.
It seemed like while I was busy teaching her, I was actually learning from her….
- How to convey the love I had for a language to someone who hated it.
- How to design activities that subtly taught the rules and structures of the language.
- How to keep up the interest of someone who was determined to remain disinterested.
- How to remain patient when someone sets out to test every ounce of it.
- How to value the time you have given a person and never let them take it for granted.
- How to sometimes stop sugarcoating the truth and give it as it is. They respect you all the more for it!
- How it is okay to scream, yell and cry with frustration sometimes.
- How it is never okay to quit, just because you feel like you cannot do it today.
- How reading about the lives of others sometimes brings clarity to your own
- How research never goes waste…
And how learning never ends!
This girl was the first of the many students that followed. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of children who liked me but hated the language. It only lead to pouring more oil into my fire.
With each student, I read a little more and research a lot more. With each new hater that comes my way, a new challenge keeps me on my toes. And with each small milestone that we achieve, I come out stronger. Having learnt to be a little more patient, a lot more creative and extremely rich with new learning.
To that first student of mine, whose innocent faith in me all these years, showed me…
That as you start to teach, you begin to learn!