How I Fell into Teaching (and In and Out of Love)

He looked familiar.

Of course, that sort of thing happens to me all of the time. Once, in Kingston, working the counter of the LCBO I greeted a woman from the cafe I used to work in Orangeville like an old friend.

It turned out I didn’t know her at all.

I knew her face like a Kingston street.  I do this. (Do you?) I see the same people over and over in my days at work, on the way to work.  I make up stories about them.

Currently on the bridge over the Yarra I pass a man each day whom I call The Hanger.  In his freshly knotted ties and creaseless clothing he looks like he was pressed into his dry-cleaning.

But I had never been here, in this classroom, in this school. I hadn’t been “home” to this part of Ontario in well over two years. I didn’t think I knew anyone anymore.

His Italian brick-shaped, nail-bitten, dry wall countenance was not unlike the staged character of Joey Tribbiani.

A box I opened when asked to clean out my room before moving to uni was filled with love letters featuring Sonic the Hedgehog among bum-shaped figures as we couldn’t all draw hearts scewn across the margin.  The scattered words now emphasized the spelling errors we didn’t notice at thirteen. How easily we threw around words like “love” and then promptly forgot each other when I moved house!

It was very difficult to begin a class this way.  I decided six years, two moves and three schools were enough to change someone physically. He wouldn’t recognize me. Besides, I had glasses now. Julia Roberts uses less to conceal herself.

I gave them their homework, introduced myself by my last name only, wrote some things on the board and decided not to wander the room this period; sat myself at the teacher’s desk.

 I had been enjoying the month. I was playing a part I’d resisted. A teacher for money. My whole life, there’d been a voice like Sir Thomas More to Rich in A Man for All Seasons, advising me to “be a teacher” (not because I was “deteriorating”) after years of denial, I realised, I did have something I didn’t mind offering. Teaching was becoming appealing.

The financial crisis of the time,  having enjoyed high school and the unqualified supply teaching job connection offered, I’d already completed a month and discovered it felt quite good to be walking the hallways of any high school.

Now I was 21 and returning to a school most of my friends attended before we left for university to find out not all of us left.

 The unexpectedness of this moment nearly undid all previous. A typical aspect of teaching I’ve learned years into my career: you plan and control hours that kids cut through in seconds! (We seriously have to start according them more respect in schools.)

There was a question from a part of the class that looked safe. I approached but was boarded with the topic I didn’t feel I could answer: “is your first name Alysha?” He’d gotten his friend to ask.

The moment was again cliched. It took every rational sensation to not respond to the question with the British accent of that 90s Noxeema commercial depicting this exact phenemonon. Teacher meets student one-on-one in the adult world.

Except, this was the reverse.

The desks, classrooms and seventeen-year-olds prevented us going much past recognition. I learned later about some of the ways he’d been held back. His years hadn’t passed easily.

 I had been silly enough to think this was embarrassing for me, but he had been courageous enough to get over it.

You cried when you were different because difference is isolating (and rarely noticed by the majority group outside of profound moments).

Surprisingly, the experience made me more interested in teaching. In two years, I would love it.

When you are the one marking the papers, you realise not everyone is the same like you believed from the playground of conformity.  Some people didn’t like school. And those who don’t do their homework often have a reason, like they can’t. This is just one of the many things that you don’t notice as a kid, and that you have to consciously notice to be of real assistance as a teacher.

It’s not the kind of thing you learn at university.

But it is the kind of thing you can fall in love with.

Tags: teacher love, Teaching, teaching skills, teaching story