Thursday, August 20, 2009

Most English majors, it seems, devise the same backup plan if all their other dreams don't come true.  The safety net?  We can all teach English.
I resisted teaching for many years, mostly because I didn't believe I had the patience to be a teacher.  But four years ago, I volunteered to oversee an international student program at my children's Christian school.  The school, over the course of two years, hosted nearly twenty high school boys from several different countries.   What they had in common was that they were all very, very tall, and they all played basketball.  
My boys came from Poland, France, Nigeria, Lithuania, Ivory Coast, Canada, and the Canary Islands.  A few did not even speak English when they came to the school.  The English teacher, a nice enough woman who had her hands full with the school's regular kids, put her foot down one day and refused to give extra help to the international students.
I was frantic.  Without a sympathetic English teacher, these boys would flounder.  And really, they needed a high-speed course focused on helping them pass the SAT and preparing them for freshman English -- assuming they actually made it to college.
The school administrator said to me, "You're so concerned about their English.  Why don't you teach it?"
And I responded, "I will."  
And then he said, "Oh, and we have a young lady from South Korea who is an exchange student with one of our school families.  She'll be in your class, too."
It's one thing to teach English.  But teaching English as a second language to ten young men and one girl, all from different countries and cultures, when I'd never taught before?  
I was scared.

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