Tag Archives: Teaching

More Than Words

By: Jenni Taylor

I in no way have a gift for learning languages. Heck, I minored in Spanish in college, lived in Peru for two years, and was still being corrected on my grammar the day of my flight home.

After my time in South America, I was suddenly given the opportunity to live and work in Shanghai last April.The decision was quick, and the extent of my research was looking China up on Wikipedia. My Mandarin? I learned “ni hao” in the airport.

The first three months flew by, in a flurry of re-learning the basics that come with moving to a new country: how to buy groceries, how to take taxis, how to say “wrong number” to a misplaced telephone call. My Chinese classes were limited to once a week due to my work situation, and I spent much of my time hiding behind the other foreigners when I couldn’t communicate. Soon, I found myself faced with summer break, no job, and no Chinese. I made the leap to take a job at a two week long summer camp in a nearby city called Yangzhou. Not the best gig, to be sure, but it was money, experience and a free tan, right? My job was to teach young students English-speaking skills they would use in the fall when they returned to school.

The kids LOVED when I tried to learn Chinese. One particular day, I spent about two hours going over the same two lines of a song. Couldn’t get it if my life depended on it. But just as I was about to bang my head against the wall, the third graders I worked with surrounded my teacher’s desk and started to help me. First they laughed, of course. But then they said the words slowly and carefully, with the patience of saints.

My Chinese is never going to be perfect. I will be happy if it is even close to conversationally functional one day. But the connection between my students and me that day was totally worth all the pain and flashcards. Their eyes lit up when they heard me trying. They were only ten years old or so, struggling over their own English workbooks, and there was some sort of recognition when they saw me struggling just as hard at my own desk. It’s about seven months later now, and while I still struggle, their help that day helped me to keep going. I even have the whole song memorized now, and catch myself singing it when no one is looking.

There is beauty in learning a language, in being able to communicate with others. But there’s something even better, when you can share a smile, a laugh, a hug- -even pain. It goes beyond where words can reach. My kids reached me that day when the frustration was driving me crazy. I just hope I was able to reach back, just a bit, and let them know how truly fantastic they are.

January Wisdom Round-Up

Dear Searching Sophia’s Pockets Community,

As we come to the end of our month of beginnings, we wanted to round-up some of the high points of the month and offer all of you a chance to share your high points as well. Check out any of the posts below that you missed from Searching Sophia’s Pockets in January. Here’s to beginnings, and of course wisdom, love ..and lint!

We hope you enjoyed the wisdom we shared this month and feel free to add important posts, news articles, photos, or just joys from your world in the comments section.

With Wisdom, Love …and Lint,

Autumn and Jenni

P.S. We also look forward to hearing what you have to say about next month’s theme, Love, so get your submissions in now!

Teaching and Beginnings: The Jägermeister and his Sidekick

Today we are honored to share another guest post from Laura Beth Eschbacher, a freelance English teacher and translator living in Kleinbottwar, Germany.  While recounting the beginning of her work as an English teacher, she gives us wisdom about friendship, life, and the ways we can celebrate beginnings and endings.

Just over a year ago, I began my first corporate teaching assignment at an automotive garage supply company near Stuttgart. I remember I dressed very professionally that morning and nervously made my first 1.5 hour commute by bus, train, and then by foot through the snow and gray sludge to their office building. There were two students in the group: a round-bellied, jolly German sales director with kind eyes and grown children; and a handsome, thirty-something jokester sales manager from Macedonia with a 5-year-old son and a wife who likes to shop.

Over time, I would discover that they were coworkers and best friends – the Black Forest Jägermeister and his comedic, fast-talking sidekick, both very professional and both very bad at English.

As we wrestled with grammar over the next year, my own teaching skills improved and I got to know them better. We fought the never ending battle of simple past versus present perfect: “Did you go hunting in Sweden, or have you gone?” In the Marketing chapter, I walked them downstairs to the storefront and we discussed the underlying messages of cardboard cut-out pinup girls holding radiator fluid and showcasing the latest windshield wipers. In the Sales chapter, they taught me about gross and net profits while I corrected their if-clauses: “If we hadn’t met this year’s target turnover, we wouldn’t have had such a big Christmas party.”

I learned that both are devoted family men. I learned that they look out for each other; if the sidekick forgets a name at a company event, the hunter comes to his rescue. If they go out to dinner with a customer, the hunter tries the food first to make sure it is pork-free for his Muslim buddy. If a coworker is chatting aimlessly away to one of them, the other walks past and says, “Don’t forget our important meeting in five minutes,” offering a perfectly rational excuse to interrupt the conversation.

Last Friday, on our one year anniversary as teacher and students, the sidekick broke the news to me that he was promoted within the company and is moving up to Düsseldorf in two weeks. “We have one more class, and you can say to me goodbye.” I asked them who will finish each other’s sentences in the future. The hunter replied gracefully that the promotion was a good opportunity and that he was happy for his sidekick, but he would now need a new colleague… and a new friend.

After a year of this group refusing to see any teacher other than me, we are now unsure whether they will continue the course.

I’ve heard from other teachers that you never forget your first students. These two fun-loving salesmen were my first corporate class. They were the providers of many a humorous Tweet quoting non-native speaker mistakes. They were an inseparable pair of best friends who thought I was a great teacher before I even thought I was a teacher. If they are starting new chapters now, perhaps it’s time I began one, too.

Transitions

By: Jenni Taylor

I skipped out of my last semester of college in order to teach in Peru. I loved my college. We had hookah club and quidditch club, interpretive dancers with ribbons waving their arms in the trees, and you could talk about vagina power over cigarettes and imported beer every weekend if you wanted. Leaving sucked. I took my first grown up job in South America, took out my piercings, and even stopped dying my hair- huge sacrifices for a girl like me. I had to let go of this whole image of myself I had built up and put on a uniform instead.

While it wasn’t easy, I entered this amazing jungle world with cold showers, pit stains, and kids throwing markers at you or hugging your neck alternately. I loved it and hated it in turns probably every day. Sometimes I would just curl up and cry in my big empty bed, and sometimes I would sit in a rocking chair talking Spanish with grandmothers and feel like I never wanted to leave.

I say all that because growth is slow. I always felt a little jipped because of leaving college early, and yet I find myself in a pretty similar environment now. I find myself wanting to get weird piercings and dye my hair all over again, because I don’t know who I am in this kind of world without those things.

Peru was straightforward. Poverty was straight forward. Kids throwing up on you was pretty straightforward, too. I miss the simplicity, the latin bass thumping from down the street and the stars speckled over the mango trees outside my window. Now I’m a city girl, a Shanghai girl, where the taxi lights and the high rises stretch on forever and everyone you see has crazy shoes and looks a little bit lonely. I’m finding my place still, where the jungle part of me can put on heels, be sophisticated, and be real about it. That’s the key, really, to not getting lost. Being real. Being you.

The funny part about that is it only happens when you stop trying. I can stand on a street in a city of 20 odd million people and feel lonely or lost and wonder who the hell I am, or I can look at the people surrounding me and see their place in the world, see their connectedness, their loneliness, their joys, their heartaches. When I stop being me, I can become them. I can see myself reflected in the humanity around me and realize it’s not about me at all, it’s about us, all of us, all of us together.

Then things don’t feel so lonely after all.