TR # 13 - Teecha

With Rui it was love at first sight. No matter that he's engaged, and to a polyglot too. Yes because she speaks "another European language". Really? What? Italian? No. English? Obviously she speaks English, we're in Canada! No, another one. OK, so French? Spanish? German? Russian? No, no. I got it! Taiwanese!

Yes, because Rui is six years old, he's been in Canada for not even a year and doesn't have a very clear idea of geography. It's hard to make him understand where Europe is and even more that Canada does not border with Africa. Rui has come as a surprise, at the very last moment his mother decided to enroll him to the summer camp where I volunteer as a teacher -Teecha as they call me here- of English to recently immigrated Chinese children. They know me as "the Italian, the one who can make pizza" which is now an inevitable association. The supervisor immediately puts her confidence in me and considers me the group leader, which doesn't make me feel calm at all. Then I ask Rui if he wants to play something. Yes, Teecha! Let's play Tic-Tac-Toe! Which if I was brought up in Canada I would know is what we call "tris" but this is not the case. And how do you play it? "Eeeehhhhmm it's a game.... That is it's easy. It's just a game. With paper and pencil. And you draw the lines so and so and then you put the ball and then you win." Then we play other games and children often re-create the rules themselves. Ste in particular, only to lose anyway... "Sure I made the rules myself, but I must also respect them!" Then we study Canada and it's assumed that I know how many provinces and territories there are or how many points the maple leaf has. But I know the official languages, and also Rui: "English and....... Chinese!" no honey, it's French! "But I know many people who speak Chinese and no one speaks French! And then you know that they do everything in China? Also this case is made in China because there they do everything and then they sell all over the world!" Rui likes to exercise, therefore every day he wakes up at 6 am to go jogging do tai-chi and then have breakfast before going to school or to us. What sports do you like? "Baseball, hockey... football, soccer..." and here we have to write your favorite sport, what is it? Badminton! How do you spell it? " Sure you don't want to write baseball hockey or any other sport that I KNOW the spelling of?! "No, I like badminton!" gulp.

At the summer camp it's important to do many different activities. Manual activities such as origami (Rui says that I'm doing pretty well), projects such as "my home in Canada," baking cookies and playing outdoors. On his project Rui is doing the highway and the river and the bridge over the river. Why don't we also draw the wooden planks on the bridge? "Eeeehhhh. Eh. Because then if the car goes on the wood it falls into the river." Yeah. It's true. But maybe there's the asphalt under the wood? "Eeeeehhh. Yes then I color gray underneath so you see it." What's that, a plane? "Eeeehhhh no. It 's a rocket in the rocket-station which is close to the river." And why are you doing people on horses? Who are they? "They are soldiers then there's the king here and that is the tower of the soldiers and the great one for the king." But why are you doing the soldiers? What are they for? "Eeeehhh. Because they are the ones who protect us from evil and so we are sure that Canada is free, right?" Self-evident. Meanwhile, I make a car "very good, put it on the highway, Teecha!" Now write the words you learned "...eeehhh car? King?" Are you sure they're new words? "Hihihihi eeehhhh eeehhhh not really?"

Before cooking you should learn the words related -it would be even better that I knew them but never mind: break the eggs, you know what that means? "Eeeehhhh break like when you break stuff?" exactly, precisely. But what do you like to eat? "Ooooohhh I eat a lot of rice!" Really? And do you cook it? "Eeehhhh no, grandma cooks it for breakfast. Ohhh but at lunch yes, I cook! Do you know how to do it?!" no, tell me! "You take the rice Teecha you put it on a plate, open the microwave, press the button, wait for the third beep and then it's ready!" Better than Chef Ramsay. Then we make cookies and I pretend to be able to measure in cups and teaspoons because the other teecha's afraid of the dough. And fortunately she's not there the following time, when we eat half the dough raw... she would've fainted. The supervisor then asks me to teach good manners... but why so much confidence in my native culture?! Rui loves his parents, rightly so. But "they just arrived from China and sleep all the time, they don't work!" tells me the first time, so they can follow him in the garden ("like eeeehhh you bury the seeds, water, and after a while the plant comes up... but a couple have been eaten by the raccoons!") or take him to swim ("yes, because here I go to the swimming pool but in China instead my mother took me to a cold cooold river which is big like a sea! "). Then his father gets a job and what does he do? "Oh, a Chinese job. He like... sells. Sells Chinese fruit." So Rui stays with his mother and asks me: "But do you believe in God?" eeehhhmmmm... you? "Nooo, hahahahaha. How could a God exist who doesn't have a mother? I think my mom is always there, but God has no mother!" His logic is flawless. We also go on field trips. In which the supervisor gives me again the role of leader. And asks me at inopportune moments, "how many kids do you have?" just when I've not counted them for at least two hours. But in the end everyone arrives safe and sound. At the science center I don't know whether to keep an eye on the children or the teenage tutors who play more than them, then we visit the oldest theater in Toronto but Rui only remembers the ghost upstairs Sam the trombonist: "We have visited the haunted house!" ehm not really. At the amusement park Rui is too short for almost everything but the next day "eeehhhmmm can I tell you something, Teecha? eeehhmmm just wanted to say thank you for giving me the money to shoot even if I didn't win the toy." You're very welcome darling. Rui always wants me to play with him "eeeehhhmmm Teecha, would you mind playing with me?" And at Taboo and Apples to Apples we make an awesome team together. And even with the sand castles we aren't bad at all. Rui perhaps didn't learn a lot from me during these weeks but has an excellent memory: he perfectly remembers the first thing I taught him and he tells it to me while we say goodbye the last day.

"Eeeehmmmmm can I tell you something?" Of course, anything you want. "Now when I see the Moon in the night sky you know you know you know what I think? I think of my Teecha because Luna means Moon in Italian!" I hug Rui and maybe watching the Moon I'll think about his round face too and the wonderful person he's destined to become.

CELTified

"In looking for ways to move forward as a teacher,

you will also find ways to grow as a person.

Good luck. I hope you enjoy it all."

Jim Scrivener

My story begins more than one year ago, when my English teacher said: "You really don't need these lessons anymore. You should actually do the CELTA and teach English, not learn it. And you're also a foreigner, therefore you know the grammar, which we don't. Think about it."

As weird as the idea might sound at first, I started thinking about it and almost one year later I sent my application for the CELTA course in Toronto. From that moment on, my experience is similar to that of 9 other people who were applying for the same session and who went through pre-course assignments, interviews, pre-course tasks and so on, and who were asked the same question at one point: "Are you sure you can do it?!" The answer we gave was almost the same: "Hell, yes!! Who do you think you're talking to?!" Little did we know...

The first day wasn't so bad, I thought I would have had a tough month but I wasn't worried at all; I started defining "tough" from day 2, and consequently started crying and never stopped for the next 4 weeks. Because I wasn't prepared for the work load the course required, nor to be in front of a class while my peers and tutor were observing me, and pretend I know what the hell I'm doing here. I learned how to manage a class while teaching something useful (and feeling like an idiot when asking ICQs...), I learned how to write on the board, I learned how to plan a lesson in English and how to try to meet the criteria to pass a teaching practice... and I also decided not to give a damn about the criteria sometimes, and teach the people to try and see how real life works.

During these weeks I questioned everything about myself: am I a good teacher? Am I a teacher at all or should I change career?? Why should somebody pay ME to learn English, rather than a native speaker? Do I have the real-life-knowledge that I need to teach English culture? At this point, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then I started staging my breakfast: "toast the bread - 3 mins; spread the Nutella - 20 secs; feedback: is the Nutella evenly spread?" and after that, listening to Eros Ramazzotti sing "life sometimes cheats you, because it tests you before teaching you the lesson" I thought it was a perfect example of TTT... yes, I was on the verge of a nervous AND emotional breakdown.

But I'm alive, quite healthy and proud of what I achieved. And if I were to answer that question again "are you sure you can do it?" I would know exactly what to say. I'd say no. Unless you give me back those wonderful people who made this possible. I could write about a million things, about the unfair judgements and the incomprehensible standards, about the tutors, about the feedback, about the resource room and the printer that never worked... but I won't. I will write about the amazing Half-Italian girl whose laughter I already miss; I will write about the Aussie girl who speaks a mysterious language of her own that I pretend to understand; I'll write about my Tiny-Beautie that's always overanalyzing everything and never realizes what a beautiful person she is, and an amazing teacher as well; I'll write about the two Mothers in the class, that the students love because they're calm and confident and make you feel as if nothing could possibly go wrong; about the Half-Finnish guy that rehearses his lessons in front of the mirror, and everybody could tell how much he's improving; about the Clownish guy, who's the most entertaining teacher ever and spent time correcting my assignments and asking me why I put commas everywhere -because, I'm, Italian, of, course; and about the Actor-Teacher, who's not at the board - he's on stage performing his lesson, and the students love it. In this group I've been called the "Native-Italian-Positive-Vibe-Grammar-Book" and yes, as my teacher told me, I knew grammar better than anybody else. But they were all there when I was falling apart, and in their special way they gave me the strength to go on and never give up... and this is not something that you can learn from a book. So in the end, I learned a lot during this month, especially about myself. I learned that I can teach English as well as Italian, that students like me and don't give a shit if I'm Italian or not, that it's worth trying challenging myself because I never know how much I can achieve, that I'm generous and love to help other people... and I learned about friendship in the English-speaking world, where there's no distinction between love and affection, there's no "ti amo" vs. "ti voglio bene", there's only "I love you" and the idea that you will cherish a person for life.

I also learned a phrasal verb. It's a very special one indeed, because it's the only phrasal verb we used every day throughout the course and the only phrasal verb I definitely like. Whenever something went wrong or someone had a bad day, we would say to each other: "Hey come here, let's hug it out." And whenever I'll have a bad day and start questioning myself, I'll know I can just call a friend and hug it all out.