Behind the Classroom Door
26 March 2002
I’m actually not a journalist, and despite recent
evidence of correspondence, that’s not all too heart-stopping a claim to make.
Neither am I a war correspondent nor a cover-up-artist spokesman for
“the cause,” whatever that means. I’m
really just a teacher, though I resent the term “just” even though I just
used it. And in truth I’m also a
well-traveled volunteer for several concerned organizations in Palestine, but
that’s beside the current point.
In a cyclical natural phenomenon, I get a few articles and
commentaries published in this newspaper and that Internet magazine about the
political atmosphere in Israel and Palestine, and all of a sudden I turn into a
scratched record stuck on the lyric “end the occupation, end the occupation,
end the…” Indeed, this is a
more worthwhile beat to repeatedly stutter than a lot of others out there in the
mass media (see George W. Bush and the gratuitous use of the word “terror”).
But I digress.
Where was I? Oh
yes, I was a teacher. I am a
teacher. An English teacher by
afternoon and a broken record by morning and night!
Six days a week I stand in front of a class of early to middle aged
Palestinian men and women and expound in well-enunciated English the practical
intricacies of participles, prepositions, and passives, modals and gerunds, and
a whole lot of other terms I haven’t laid eyes on since the eighth grade.
It actually took a year of learning the basics of a new language to
remember that my native tongue really has a structure and a million breakable
rules therein. I survive by the mantra of always stay a step ahead of the
students so you don’t look like a baboon when one of them asks you to explain
the difference between the verbs ‘to make’ and ‘to do’ (which I still
haven’t figured out yet – why can’t you ‘make’ your homework and
‘do’ a pizza?).
One of the toughest jobs day in and day out is keeping the
English class from turning into an Arabic class. In one class for example, I have my own personal Arabic echo.
For each concept I teach in English, one of my many teacher’s pets
returns the favor by chiming “in Arabic we say…” and so on.
Then a few other students argue that there’s a better way to say it in
Arabic, and before I know I’m trying to shut up the very language I’ve been
trying to learn myself for the past year and a half.
I’m thinking of getting a personalized welcome mat for the classroom
that reads “leave your Arabic at the door.”
The most frightening student a language teacher can have is
the Einstein linguist who has studied six languages inside and out but just
hasn’t gotten around to English yet. I’m
not a big fan of theory to begin with, and there’s always at least one student
who has a clearer picture than I do (or make?).
Then there are the ultra-competitive students who have to
know their grade on the quiz as they’re actually handing it to me, and then
demand to know how many students beat them.
This is where I have to employ a bit of ad hoc teaching finesse because
these are the very students who won’t do the entire homework assignment if
they can’t figure out the first question – they’re just too afraid of
failure. But really, what do you
say to a student who is too nervous to sleep the night before a quiz on the
delicate concept of “the present continuous tense!?!”
How can it be present and continuous at the same time?
Through the thick and thin of enigmatic English grammar and
vocabulary which is all borrowed from Latin, Greek, German, Chinese, Ancient
Norse, and probably Malayalam, the one problem I don’t have as often as I
should is filling the classroom. Granted,
it’s a rare jewel when I have one hundred percent occupancy (my most populous
class has fifteen students), but given the circumstances of the occupation I
keep harping about I’m often stunned when a student from a remote West Bank
village shows up to class only ten minutes late.
The one thing I have on most other teachers in the world is the unique
character of the reasons for absence when they do occur.
“Mr. Richard, I’m sorry I missed class but you know the soldiers
closed the checkpoint and I had to go another way and then there was some
shooting so I walked through an olive field but then I couldn’t find a taxi so
I had to wait for a half hour by the road.”
Boy if I had a shekel for every time I’ve heard that run-on sentence!
Honestly I don’t completely know what to make of this
bizarre dedication to the study of the English language in such an inhospitable
learning environment. I once read
an account of a woman who had taught in a girls school in war-torn Bosnia; she
remarked that she was only one in the classroom who even noticed the rat-tat-tat
of gunfire permeating the room. Not
that I’m the only one in my classroom cognizant of the omnipresent strife of
life under occupation. But none of
my students (as far as I am aware) leaves the daily English lesson to go pick up
a gun and fight the intruders. They
don’t sit at their computers by night and type line after line of melodramatic
rhetoric about the terrible oppression of their people.
They have families and homes and gardens and (sometimes) jobs and lives
to live, and interspersed they have checkpoints to skirt and soldiers and
settlers to avoid and prayers to say.
This is the teacher’s lesson in Palestine.
Politics is for the chosen elite and fighting for the able-bodied and the
nothing-to-lose poorest walks of quasi-life.
Both war and politics are pervasive topics of conversation every second
of the day (even some of the seconds that pass in Mr. Richard’s English
class), but that’s as far as it goes for my students and the immense majority
of Palestinians. And why are half of my students learning English in the first
place? So they can get the heck out of this place, if only for a
while; perhaps to a new job in England or a Masters Degree in America.
Too many of those with great minds and a sock full of saved money are
itching to get out of a situation that they can realistically do nothing to
solve. Others know that a command
of the English language can get him or her a better job in Palestine (maybe the
Einstein linguist can take my job someday!).
And a handful of students come to class everyday simply to fill the voids
of creativity, expression, and knowledge in their lives.
Maybe that’s what the teacher is doing too.
Richard Johnson - Ramallah
Copyright (c) 2002 canadazone.com