We’re all just passing ships in the Teaching night (or sea?): Reflections on 10 years of teaching, Part III
When it comes to longing and nostalgia, few writers capture it better than Milan Kundera.
‘The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’ (Ignorance)
Rewind to this time 10 years ago and I was finishing
up my first stint as a teacher, at a summer school just outside of London.
After 6+ weeks of teaching, it was time to say goodbye. It wasn’t easy. I’m a
sentimental old fool. Growing up, constantly saying goodbye, you’d figure I’d
have got used to it. But a certain type never does.
For anyone involved in the teaching of English as a
foreign language lark, there is the summer school experience, where you and
some 10-30 other teachers from all walks of life, from all parts of the globe
are thrown together at either a quaint English public school out in the country
or at university halls of residence, where you’re expected to not only ‘teach’
English to a variety of kids and teenagers, but also to entertain them, play
games and do sport with them, sing karaoke with them at discos, tuck them into
bed, feed them and generally babysit them while they’re away from home for 2
weeks at a time. It’s tremendous fun – often in a sado-masochistic way – and
without doubt the greatest introduction to the Tefl career. I’d recommend it to
all teachers at some point.
You can read a more detailed examination of my
experience here: Wokingham and Uxbridge, 2010
Fresh off my Celta, I was full of beans and
chomping at the bit to get started. My Celta friend Gen and I arranged to teach
at the same school. And as soon as I arrived, I immediately fell in with a
splendid bunch of other teachers from all over the place: Poland, Germany, Britain
and India mainly.
You’ve got teachers and students coming and going
so quickly that you hardly know who’s who, it gets so hard to keep track.
You’re constantly saying hello and goodbye. You work, a lot: 6 days a week, 12
hour days. You’re constantly exhausted and the kids often drive you mad. But
there’s safety and comfort in numbers, and you’re all in this together.
If you’re new to the profession and enthusiastic,
it’s a blast. But right from the get-go, I noticed some of the older, more
jaded faces, the ones for whom the summer school is just a job, and a way to
get money in the summer months while their regular language schools in
Lithuania, Spain, Turkey, China and wherever else are closed. It was of course
money for me too, but I was eager to launch this part of a new adventure, the
first stop on my global peregrinations.
I imagine if I were to do it now, I’d be part of
that jaded older crowd. When you’re young and single (in the case of many
summer school teachers, whether you’re single or not hardly makes a difference
– what happens at summer school…), all sorts of shenanigans ensue. You work so
much that by the end of each night, the natural thing to do is have a drink or
two to wind down. Some of the most intense short-term friendships are formed.
Some of the deepest, most introspective philosophical conversations are had.
Secrets are revealed. Vulnerabilities and weaknesses are shared. So are dreams
and fantasies. People often share more in 2 weeks together than they would in 9
months. And there are fledging, ephemeral flings that arise out of nowhere.
There are Saturday late night ‘get-togethers’ involving lots of open-minded
teachers playing lots of ridiculous drink-fueled games (yes, spin the bottle
and truth or dare) that last into the wee hours. You stumble home at 7am, on
your way back to your room, only to be met by throngs of Spanish teenagers who
see you and proclaim ‘oh, Daniyel, you have fun, si? Oh Daniyel, are you coming
with us?’ Then you realise that the bus to Brighton is leaving in an hour and
you’re scheduled to chaperone these shits for the rest of the day.
You get to Brighton and the hangover starts to kick
in. You have to lead the kids on a pain-filled excursion or two before setting
them free for a few hours. You’re dying to get to that point so you can escape
to the beach to pass out or even head to a pub to have a bloody mary or two
while watching tennis or cricket. You finally get back on the bus to go home
and conk out while the kids threaten to put stuff in your hair.
It’s a blast. But it’s the kind of fun you’re not
sure you want to repeat again. It’s draining – and that’s the only physical
side.
After 2 weeks, the first group of Spanish and Italian
teenagers are leaving. And though the little turds have driven you up the wall,
you’re suddenly sad to see them go. They want pictures and endless hugs and you
realise how much fun you’ve had. When there’s the talent show or disco or the
certificate ceremony and the kids are chanting your name, you feel all warm and
bubbly inside. When you play football with them – or attempt to introduce them
to baseball – you’re running and diving and celebrating like mad, imagining
you’ve won the World Cup. You’re there with them in the canteen when they’re
breaking plates – accidentally at first, intentionally later on, goaded on by
me – standing on your chairs raucously cheering and applauding, getting
bollocked by the Centre Director for being such a lousy role model: you feel
like an immature kid all over again.
And then the teachers start leaving and you
suddenly realise that in all likelihood you’re never going to see these people
again. Of course everyone says ‘let’s keep in touch’, but most of the time you
never do, and you’re probably never meant to: it’s best left in the past,
experiences to be lodged in the memory, slowing fading over time. The passage
of time intensifies the pangs of nostalgia and you start to distort or
mis-remember things. You cringe at some of the stuff you did and hope that
everyone will forget about it. At times you can hardly believe what transpired
and you wonder whether you’ll experience anything like this ever again. And you
wonder whether you’d even want to.
It was at the end of my first two weeks when a
fellow teacher Joe said that we’re all ‘just passing ships in the Tefl night’.
Get used to it, he said. It doesn’t get any easier.
Even in the short-term, it doesn’t. The next week
passes and it’s more of the same. Your heart is constantly heavy with emotion.
Out of nowhere, there are the most unexpected encounters and romances. You want
to start making plans but then you realise the futility of it all. You quickly
start to regret, asking yourself ‘why couldn’t this have happened earlier?’ And
then you quickly realise that it’s better this way, that it wouldn’t be so
special if it were any longer and expected.
When it’s all over, the 6, 7, 8 weeks, and it’s
time for final goodbyes, you can hardly digest everything that’s happened. It
quickly starts to blur and memories and people fade into each other. The
intensity of it all is mind-boggling.
Is it like this for everyone? God, no. For some,
yes – you’re surrounded by like-minded souls, and you have these types of
conversations ad infinitum. These summer schools do attract a lot of
sentimental old fools like me, but once you do your second, third, fourth gig,
things change. Some of the same things happen, but it’s less intense, and you
haven’t got the same levels of enthusiasm and energy. You meet some great
people and there’s all the other stuff, but there’s nothing like the first
time. And there’s nothing like having a summer school be your introduction to
the Tefl life.
With your full-time jobs and the start of 9-month
contracts, you get some of the same emotions, but it’s more drawn-out, and the
job itself is far more serious: it’s all teaching. No games, no babysitting, no
karaoke, no discos, no excursions…though you can of course engage in
shenanigans with your students now. (!)
Fast forward to the present: a few weeks ago, I said
goodbye to a colleague. A few weeks before that, another one. I was sad to see
them both go. You wonder if you spent enough time together. You lament the
things left unsaid. While having a drink with one of them, we both beat
ourselves up for not having done this sooner – in over two years of knowing
each other, we’d said, at least 10 times, ‘we really ought to get together’.
And then we finally did - two days before he left.
Ten years down the line, you remember your closest
friends, but there are many other people who have come and gone and you can
hardly believe that it was 4 years ago that you last saw someone. Or was it 6
years ago? Does it even matter?
This is one of the hardest parts of the job. Some
of my dearest friends I’ve made over the past 10 years. Many of them I barely
keep in touch with. Many of them are faithful and loyal readers of this blog.
Every now and then you do cross paths. Going back to my Celta, where I met Gen,
we then worked together that summer of 2005, then we met again the following
summer in Germany for the World Cup, and then I saw her again in the summer of
2010 while I was working at summer school – the same one, in Uxbridge, from
2005. And that same summer, in 2010, I bumped into one of those fledging
romances from 2005 and it was all a bit surreal and anti-climactic. We could
barely look each other in the eye.
That’s summer school in the Tefl world.
Alas, it’s time for Pedzo to become a mature, wise
old man
It’s time for what Gabriel Garcia Marquez called
the ‘conjugal conspiracy’: I’m just mere days away from saying goodbye to the
single life and entering into wedded bliss. I’m days away from family and
friends descending upon Kyiv to usher me into the next stage of my life. This
will be my last post as an unmarried man.
Samuel Johnson said that marriage is ‘yet very
often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom
forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance
or caution has withheld from it’. (The Rambler, No. 18, Saturday, May 19, 1750,
Marriage (I))
Ten years ago I would have agreed with Johnson. And
as much as he has been one of my literary inspirations for as long as I can
remember, for once I’ll have to disagree with him. Not for me, game over. For
me, game on. I can hardly wait.
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