
This is about the fun and glum of the teaching profession, which is made sky-blue clear when you are a newbie.
When you´re new, you have no idea of how much responsibility you might be taking on, but you want to embrace the world and get on the boss's good side. There is so much to learn, so much to begin with, yet so little time to take it all in. As a teacher, you know your job is to teach, but you desperately hope you get on the students' good side as well. Not that you desperately want them to like you but you want them to be enchanted by the experience of discovering meaning through an unfamiliar instrument that is a foreign language. And your job, as you most probably discovered a long time back, is to make sure that happens. So you plan, sometimes overdoing it, but the fact is it has to go well, for you and for them.
As a teacher, responsibility renews every time you sit down and think of what you expect to happen in that learning encounter of an hour, an hour and fifteen or an hour and thirty; it renews every time you step into the classroom and every time you leave it to retire to your lair to count your spoils, lick your wounds (hopefully very few) and devise new strategies.
As I step a little out of the daily responsibilities of the classroom and into the world of training the professionals that have to face them every day, I come to the realization that nothing is new when it comes to responsibility. In fact, more of it has just been heaped upon my shoulders. But I (k)new it would b(i)e like that, knowing it doesn’t lessen the load nor does it encumber it even more. It means I have to deliver the goods that were so eagerly promised.
STEPHAN ARTHUR SOLOMON HUGHES
stephan.hughes@culturainglesa.net
Stephan was a teacher and mentor in our ADULT CENTRE. He has just been promoted to the position of Academic Coordinator.