In my third week teaching at the university, I was about to enter my classroom when a young man stopped me in the hallway. In his hand was a stack of flyers advertising a campus organization. He asked me if I was a student or a professor. I definitely wasn't a student, so it was all I could say: I'm a professor. At least by process of elimination. And as a professor, I'm allowed to call someone else a "young man".
In truth, my teaching experience so far is better described as giving a series of talks. It's a product of the structure of the course. Each week, we are three to six teachers tackling simultaneous classes by committee. We divvy up the topics and individually undertake the public speaking tasks of establishing credibility, knowing our audience, and earning their respect. But teaching is different because I feel more responsibility for my audience. It is literally my job that they learn.
I'm learning what I imagine are the first things that teachers learn—like the types of questions to ask to encourage participation. If it's an especially quiet day, I might start by asking "Who has heard of this?" or "Who has read this?" in the hope that someone will raise their hand out of pride. And from there I get my volunteers to start the discussion. It's a small, occasional victory.
I've found that preparing a lesson plan is similar to the process of writing these posts. I start by absorbing as much information as I can—from the outside world in the natural course of gaining experience, and by doing a lot of reading. It's pretty great. It takes advantage of the "work" I do anyway when I Ctrl+click a dozen articles at once and throw myself down Wikipedia holes. I'll take notes and move them around for quite a while. Eventually, there is a critical mass where a narrative starts to take form. It's usually different from what my original plan was. Sometimes it's broader to incorporate more topics, other times it's narrower and I remove content for the sake of focus. Either way, I end up learning way more context than I have time or space to convey. But that's the only way the story can come together.
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| Same preparation, different writing tools. |
I had always agreed with the adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it, but now I understand that more wholly. It's a two-step process: first, in the absorption stage, I feel an obsessive need to know everything about the topic in order to convince myself that I can teach it; second, in the act of actually saying it out loud for the first time, I realize all the logical steps I have to explain for the lesson to make sense.
That first run-through is crucial. It's like rehearsal for a play. When I'm writing a post, that rehearsal happens in the course of typing things out and going through the editing process. With teaching, what I put on paper is only a draft screenplay. The university becomes a theatre that puts me in four performances in a day, back to back to back to back.
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| With very brief intermissions. |
It might seem repetitive, but with each class, the students' reactions are different, and that changes the experience. Ideally, the narrative gets better and richer each time—another class, another trip to the editor.
The teaching, though, is just part of the experience. It's also about working in Spanish, which is probably the bigger, separate but inseparable part. That amplifies everything: the preparation required, the challenge of presenting effectively, the exhaustion. As much as I prepare, it is still hard to know for sure that I understood a student's question. That is something that can only be remedied by time and practice.
But the biggest challenge I run into happens between classes. It's in hanging out with the teachers when we're grabbing a snack or on our way home. We can do small talk fine, I know some of the slang, and we know each other's general interests and character. But it's much clearer to me now how language can limit the depth of possible understanding. To be able to pick up on the nuances of speech that go so far in weaving together who someone is—that takes years, decades, or more.
That makes me kind of sad. It's sad to think that there are limits to how close you can get to someone, just because of language. But there is a certain comfort in knowing what you can't know. It gives more benefit to doubt. Language is just a product of where you came from and how you grew up. By itself, it has nothing to do with ability. It is only because of circumstances, experiences, and culture that we say education instead of educación.
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| Building on what we've learned. |
We went to see a play a while ago. It was a comedy called El secreto de la vida. We understood maybe 70% of it, which I thought was decent considering we had only been here for a couple months. But we didn't get any of the jokes. Still, we knew when to laugh, because we heard laughter. And that became funny by itself. So we sat there, laughing for different reasons, but laughing nonetheless, just like everyone else.