Inspiration

Today I read Lőrincz Tamas's entry My five reasons for leaving the UAE – reason 3 which made me think about inspiration.


I learned the meaning of the word “inspiration” about 3 years ago, when I divorced. In those days one of my students asked me if I was afraid of the change. She asked who I would get the inspiration from now that I was alone.

What? Inspiration? I’d thought inspiration had nothing to do with the presence or absence of a hubby. I thought she’d been a bit on the pathetic side.
Some months later I knew what she meant. After quitting a fruitless marriage I was there with no one to pull me back, no one to criticize and make me just fling my ideas.I understood what inspiration was. When in the presence of certain students of mine I had really good solutions in mind whilst other people just blocked me from thinking.

Inspiration comes from everywhere and everyone around if you don’t cheat yourself and it is you who is in control of the ’everywhere and everyone around’. Now I think anytime when I changed or fled forward I changed my ’everywhere and everyone around’. That’s a good thing. Yeah, if you can’t find the inspiration you need you have got to move on. Or is it just an excuse? But I’ve never felt so fine so the idea must be okay. Or no? Yes? Yes. No? Yes.

As a schoolteacher I used to be a walking failure. I worked just for a short while at the beginning of my teaching career for a year and for some months as a substitute teacher. I was a nice teacher but not tough enough. Being tough was just simply excluded from my teacher toolbox. I don’t think there was anything wrong with my teaching skills. Just that time many of those kids had no respect.

By respect I mean a deposit of trust in a stranger. That I invest my attention in her and trust the teacher will be fun. Nowadays it is very difficult to gain that kind of anticipated respect. (Having been a private teacher for long years now I think the money I charge for the classes replaces this trust.)

So I left institutional education and considered the whole business a failure of my personality as a teacher.
Now I see this was triumph, as since then I have been teaching on the other side, in the “shadow”. I teach people outside school, mostly one-to-one. This requires a range of skills and attitudes different from those demanded in public education. Lessons are less frequent and the trainer must be more flexible. Very flexible. And you cannot motivate through marks, forget about rewarding in the traditional sense. Consequently I have developed a set of principles.

• I have very few lessons to teach my students English (many times it is restricted to one class a week), so I have to make them devote much of their free time on learning, it can be done through engaging them in authentic, relevant and enjoyable activities. I struggle every day to produce individual solutions for everyone out of my pocket; they just have to find their own ways to English.
• I am not good at rewarding “good” behaviour, so I can just rely on their inner motivation.
• As each lesson is different and my students usually come with unexpected demands (they want to learn this and that—out of the blue) I must be flexible and thus the material/content is flexible and negotiable (without the internet I wouldn’t be able to do it). But on the other hand it must be finely tuned, input-wise comprehensible. It requires routine and also offers a great deal of enjoyment through challenge.
• As for my definition of the role of a teacher, I believe a teacher is a window-opener. I help someone open a window, actually it is a joint-venture, WE open it. They look out of this window and see other windows. These new windows are often invisible for my eyes. They are their own windows. My aim is to enable them to go there to those new windows and open them, just as I have already shown them in the case of the first window we opened together.

Funny, sometimes I read thoughts similar to these queer ideas of mine. Therefore I suppose my existence as a teacher is not altogether a failure. Or is it?