A Button

Sometimes I get glimpses of good teaching days. Like today. Today was a decent teaching day. For most of the day, I was upbeat. There were fleeting moments when I was on the verge of frustration, but I never crossed the line into actual frustration. Today I found myself standing in front of a class, and this unfamilier, exaggerated teacher voice is coming out of my mouth, and I’m trying so hard to make this story about a man who gets an elephant delivered to him sound like the most interesting story in the world, so hard that I actually start believing that it is.

A thought popped into my head as I walked home from work – ‘What if I actually enjoyed teaching?’ What if? I’d be in heaven right now since teaching is about all I do here. I thought about people who do jobs they hate for years, decades (not that I hate teaching). Does that actually happen? How could it? I wish there was a button I could push, an “I love teaching” button, where pushing it would actually make it true. My life would be so easy.

For the last period of the day, instead of clubs, all the class teachers were supposed to monitor their classes. Since no one told me this until seconds before what I thought was club time, I didn’t have anything prepared for my class. But they have English homework due tomorrow and some were working on Dzongkha, so I just allowed them to work on their own as I did my own work. And it was really nice. Students came up to me periodically to ask me the simple past tense of a verb (what their homework is on) or the spelling of a word. Some turned in their homework early. One of the students, who’s also in my newspaper club, wanted to start working on the next issue of the newspaper. I love this student. So we discussed what he should work on and off he went, with a camera in hand and a piece of paper in his gho to take notes on. It felt comfortable to just be in the company of my class, easy, simple, as if we’ve been together for years.