The program that I am teaching here is a basic English program that is supposed to take 6 months. As a consequnece, this week, two of the classes I have been teaching for the past 6 months have finished the program and will be graduating. Part of me goes: Yeyyy! We’ve made it! The other part goes: Nooo!!! I like you guys! You’re nice and fun! What will I do without seeing you every day???

The more I do this job, the more I admire and respect teachers all over (and yes, mother, now I understand you better than ever). And it’s not just the work itself. Sure, it’s quite difficult, requires you to be full speed and full energy on a constant basis, to be there 100% all the time (even when you’d rather be under a blanket sleeping your misery away), requires you to be flexible, pay attention to everything and everyone, and it’s just literally exhausting. But it’s also the emotional part of it. You seriously get attached to these students (and I am really not just referring to the children). I’ve come to realize that the only reason why you could go through all the above motions is because the students give you so much at the same time. So it feels truly heart breaking to sort of “break up” with them 🙂

Then there’s the whole responsibility part that I had never felt so intensely before. I proably should have felt something similar in my previous job – you know, big corporation, big money, big impact etc. But I didn’t. Not the way I do now. And that stems from various causes. See, I’m not a professional English teacher. I thank the Heavens for Mrs. Ambrosie (my highschool English teacher) whom I am utterly and shamelessly copying many times. She actually explained grammar in a way that makes me able to transfer the knowledge. But even so…I’m seriously playing this by the ear. People say that I’m doing a good job but there’s no real way of knowing. There’s no proper evaluation of the work you’re doing (or at least not one that is worth while) apart from the degree of understanding of your students. Which is all very relative, volatile and that also depends Beverly on how good of a day that person’s had.

But I guess what gets at me mostly is just the simple status you are given. In Malaysia, the mere fact of being a foreigner gives you some sort of “special” (and by that I do mean superior) status. When

You add the “teacher” word to it you’re basically unbeatable. The word seems to have supreme power and it generally means that “teacher” can never be wrong. One of my teenage girls waited for 2 months before telling me that I had been pronouncing her name wrong. When I asked her why she didn’t tell me earlier, she just went quiet and shy and mumbled something about “being afraid…teacher wrong…teacher never wrong…”.

Last Saturday I came back on the train from KL and two little Indian Malaysian girls started talking to me. They were super cute and talkative and when in the end I told them I teach kids like them, they went “uaaaaaaa”, then went to their mother and said in a very reverent tone of voice “Mummy, she’s a teacher!!!”

All of the above gives you power. Power you don’t sometimes realise you have. Only when students start sounding like you, or talking like you, or feeding back to you things that you’ve been saying, do you realise how much power you actually have. And it’s sometimes scary to think that maybe sometime they will not understand you well, or will take out really the wrong thing from what you’ve been saying or even that you’ll be teaching them crap. And you might never realised how you’ve impacted someone’s life.

PS: As a thank you, we got traditional Malaysian clothes from our students – baju kebaya 🙂