The Magic in Teaching

I started this post back towards the end of September, and now, a month later, it feels like time to finish it…

Yesterday I got a glimpse into what must be something like the collective teachers’ psyche.  For all the times I’d heard teachers say it; and even though I had always believed them, I had never actually seen it myself: it is the magic of why teachers teach!  My classes have been going well; and overall teaching has been getting easier, but there’s only so much fun one can have and so much inspiration one can draw from teaching English grammar. Granted, I have been subjecting my classes on a regular basis to Billy Joel, Great Big Sea and Simon & Garfunkel, which always makes me smile.  But then there is always one student (usually a woman; I find many of the women to be more closed-minded than the men, perhaps because they are more accustomed to simply following orders.  This, of course, contributes heavily to the feminine angst that had been raging in me for the past month or so.  Many of you have watched me pass through a number of crazy stages on my journey towards the discovery of the female identity, but never has it been something so fierce!  I find here that maintaining my idea of what it is to be a woman is something that I can’t just parade around with in the streets.  It is something that I have to disguise and often even hide.  It is something subversive and something that often gets relegated to the privacy of my own home, in the company of my roommate who has been here a couple of weeks now.  It is morning yoga to Andean music (because it is the earthiest music we have found) just so that we can actually do the Lion’s Roar from our gut.  It is blasting Only the Good Die Young and head-banging to Green Day’s Minority (“I wanna be the minority, I don’t need your authority, so down with the moral majority ‘cause I wanna be the minority1”); GBS’s Consequence Free (“Wouldn't it be great, if no one ever got offended, Wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind, I have always said all the rules are made for bending, And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?”) and other various songs that recall the glorious angst of Friday afternoons in high school when “nonconformity” was more of a buzzword than anything else.  Now it is a way of life.  For anyone with our color skin, it is inevitable.  It is an anthem.   Why else would we play the angry Palestinian rock song on repeat just to shout the line “ANKLES ARE SEXY FOR YOUR BIG BEARD!” over and over again?  Why else would we dance scandalously to Madonna in the kitchen with the lights off and Tupperware containers for hats?  Why else would things that were once nothing more than a game for prepubescent boys --- shouting the word “vagina,” for example, --- suddenly become so liberating and occasionally even vital to our survival here?)

 

And now for the new part of the post… 

This term, I was lucky enough to get a ridiculous Level 11 class that consists of seven “twentysomething” guys and one female.  Luckily, the female student is not veiled and quite liberal, or else I’m pretty certain that she would have dropped out of the class.  Hell, that much testosterone in one room was certainly enough to make me want to bolt at times.  Luckily, there have been many a day when I have actually felt that my personal level of pent-up Egypt-style estrogen has just about balanced the testosterone of seven young men.  Peace!  Anyways, to further expand upon the “magical moment” to which I alluded when I began this post a month ago, my Level 11 class is pretty bright, and due to an administrative decision to swap textbooks, my whole class already knew all of the grammar that I was supposed to teach for 2.5 hours 3 days a week for 5 weeks.  At first, I was petrified.  What was I going to do with this class???  It didn’t take me long to figure out that as long as I managed to keep them interested, I could teach anything I wanted!  So I left the grammar book at home to collect dust and began bringing in linguistics articles, music and poetry!  We studied historical linguistics, sociolinguistics (I taught them all about Labov’s “r”) and linguistic politics (they have all joined the army anti-prescriptivists!).  We read the play “Harvey” and watched the movie (Can you believe there are a couple of them who actually make a show of holding the door open for Harvey every time they enter the classroom?) and discussed the concept of health.  What is sick and what is healthy?  Is it black and white or is there a spectrum?  What is mental health?  I feel like I gave them all a crash course on liberal arts education in 5 weeks! 

 

There have actually been a series of magical moments throughout the course of the past 5 weeks.  Take yesterday, for example, when I made them get into groups and perform “The Farmer in the Dell,” “The Ants Go Marching one by one” and “I’ve been working on the Railroad.”  We had so much fun with this that I decided to teach them “Three Blind Mice” and got the whole class to sing it in a round!  I swear to you, I have never seen a group of university-aged men so excited!  And over nursery rhymes!  Yay! 

 

The first of the magical was, as you may have guessed if you know me well enough, thanks to Billy Joel!  I made it a habit of dedicating the last 45 minutes or so of class to listening to a song and making them fill in the blanks on lyrics sheets.  Then, we discussed the songs and what they meant.  They seemed to enjoy “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Feelin’ Groovy” (which we did the day I taught them about slang) enough, so I decided to give Billy’s “Goodnight Saigon” a go.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the song, it’s about the soldiers in Vietnam.  It’s a beautiful piece and quite moving as well.  He talks first about the American soldiers and then about the Vietnamese, asking “Who was wrong?  And who was right?  It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight...” and weaves both stories together with the chorus, “We will all go down together…” This actually sparked quite an animated class discussion about enemies and how they’re envisioned as opposites really we’re all in the same boat, so what are we doing killing each other?  It turned into a beautiful deliberation on war and peace, and I left the class thinking, you know, why not just travel the world over teaching Billy Joel and peace? 

 

Since then, we have had some pretty cool discussion on some pretty awesome songs, including Boston’s “Peace of the Mind” and Don McLean’s “American Pie.”  For their final writing assignment, I printed out song lyrics to 9 different song and made them each pick one to analyze.  It was quite apparent that they’d never been asked to do anything even remotely like this, since they all freaked out a little bit.  I tried to explain that there was no correct answer, something I’m fairly certain they’ve never heard a teacher say.  Overall, they really got it, and I was so proud of them!  Tomorrow is their final exam (which I didn’t write and am obligated to give), so I played “We didn’t start the fire” for them; sent them home with the lyrics and said I’d give extra credit for any explanations they brought it about any of them events mentioned in the song.