Apart from babysitting a few times, I have never had much to do with kids. As soon as I stopped being one, my association with them lay dormant. When choosing to become a teacher in China, at the bottom of my list of reasons was spending time with children. They were the hurdle I had to navigate to support my new life.
My teaching life began with the reasonable aim of just trying to get through an hour of teaching free of incidents. I walked into my first ever class, feeling ready after psychopathically studying my very short lesson plan to ensure I had it locked into my head. I stepped into the classroom and immediately felt the ineptitude shower over me as I gazed into the terrified and confused gaze of a gaggle of 4-year-olds from their tiny plastic chairs. Feeling like one myself, I stammered my way through a disastrous debut hour.
The first few months were survival. The students were, for a long time, the one thing standing in my way of a care free life. There was the challenge of trying to get the things to stay in their seat, not cry, not piss themselves (inevitably they did) and decode their problems when they started blabbering away in Chinese. It was tough, I was a bad teacher.
Then I got better. It took time, many awful hours of noise and tears, but slowly I whittled down my formula until I could teach young kids with my eyes closed. Then I taught some older kids and the cycle started once again with fewer tears and bodily fluids. Then I taught even older kids, teenagers, and once again the cycle began.
I slowly worked up the age ladder until I could confidently walk into any level of students and deliver a successful class with minimum fuss. Then I could truly start to appreciate the small people I was trying to teach. Teaching became easier and I was able to relax and enjoy what I was doing more. Very quickly, that became easy.
They can be a joy. They can also be unpredictable, horrific harbingers of misery. The distance between the two dichotomies became less and less over time and I came to appreciate the perks of each age level.
The biggest surprise came from the youngest students, 3-6s. Though lacking the underrated gift of control over body functions, whether it be coughing square in your eyes, vomiting through their surgical masks and various other nefarious evacuations, discovering that young children are not in fact just an organic mess of cells, but in fact have clear and distinct personalities blew my mind and made me rethink the nature and nurture conclusions I had formed.
Progressing from crying when I walked into a room to, in a matter of weeks, running up to me and hugging me before class was a micro insight into the world of children. The fear and the joy that dictates their lives. How they grow and grow from experience, a phenomenon that is still evident in adults.
I was staggered at how I could build some kind of relationship with these kids who could barely communicate with me yet instinctively smiled when I walked into the room, babbled in Chinese about things that happened to them that day or excitedly flashed their new watch or insisted on sharing their neon-coloured snacks with me.
Then came the 7-10 age bracket. The kids have already become engulfed by the suffocating, Chinese education system and are already beginning to exhibit symptoms of chronic fatigue after ungodly school and homework hours and then coming to see me on their weekend for more English classes. They somehow manage to remain energetic, fragile and fun. Aware of the burrowing eyes of their peers, they’re learning to socialise and cultivate their own personalities. I found it fascinating, like I was examining ants in a colony. An insight into the complex systems that bring about an average person and how inept we still are even after all our practise.
Then came the pre/already teenagers. Their spirits compared to the little ones are of a different planet. The reality of middle school and the culture of studying until their brains have been mercilessly saturated to breaking point and it will remain so on the long, harrowing road until they reach university. Their English is often good enough that you can converse with them, they are people. People that haven’t quite been spoilt by those weird adult customs of in-genuine social interactions, small talk and a sense of overwhelming self-importance. They are curious, interested and interesting things whose world and happiness are simple and yet so difficult to achieve.
I have gone from seeing kids for an hour a week at a training institution to a private school where I see the same students every single day. Outside the classroom I can relate to them as humans that are figuring out their role in the world but who are more real than most adults I come across. Their daily struggles are etched upon their faces and unknowingly transparent to my adult eyes. It transports me back to being that age myself and occasionally I feel I can understand the up and down world that they live in and have little control over.
I feel fortunate that with the novelty of being a foreign teacher and possessing a small bundle of Chinese linguistic ability, I’ve found a lot of students have a curiosity to know more about me. They delight in my lacking Chinese ability and take equal joy in teaching me more. They want to know as much about me as they can before enthusiastically telling me all about their own lives.
I think there is a biological drive within us to teach. It’s why collective learning has been so vital to us as a species. There is something that happens when you explain something to a person who is genuinely curious and willing to listen. There is a thrilling dopamine pump brought by explaining something to bright, engaged eyes. I feel the same when being taught myself. Hearing a Chinese teenager describe their life, there are differences but the truths resonate and remind me of what it was to be at school.
Students are the single best part about teaching. They elevate this profession from a job to a wonderful opportunity to engage with a side of humanity that is within all of us yet lies long forgotten in adolescence. To any teacher that disagrees I genuinely feel sorry that they have not been blessed with the students that I have spent the last few years of teaching with. Many I will never forget, it’s been an honest and true pleasure knowing them.
