Those Who Can't Teach

The idiom goes "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Coming from a family of teachers, I assure you the phrase is quite insulting. Take for example my sister, the Latin teacher. She is certified to teach both Latin and Spanish. She spent six months in Salamanca Spain studying abroad and worked in an inner-city subway store, half as sandwich "artist", half as translator. She has done numerous professional translating jobs and has spent well over five years studying both Spanish and Latin. After graduating with high honors from the Millersville University, a university renown for producing excellent teachers, she now passes her enthusiasm for the these languages on to her students in a large and growing program. Though not a native speaker of Spanish, Shannon is qualified to teach at a high school level after years of study and experience. However, whether it be the overwhelming influence and thus a need for English or the surplus of fresh from university jobless and clueless twenty-somethings that the English-speaking countries churn out, teaching English is, well, precisely that sort of thing that those who can't speak, write, understand, or comprehend the nuisances and complexity of English flood the third world supposedly ready and able to teach.

Last week, I signed up to voluntarily teach English, because that is one thing I came to Cambodia to do. The next day, I was handed a schedule which informed me that I would begin today. No word of instruction, save the title of a book, no location, no one to ask questions. This morning, the day of my first go at teaching, I receive the textbook-still no word on who, what, or where. I asked some of the other students who had already done it where to go. No one seemed to have more details than those I was given.

So six o'clock Monday night rolls around. There I am with my over-confident partner wandering around the complex for the classroom we ought to be in. We run into a teacher whose class just let out. She's a perfectly nice Brit, but clueless. She signed up with an organization called Interweave to volunteer to teach English. Training? No. She hadn't time before the program began to get any sort of certification. She was told her degree would do just fine. Her degree? English Literature? No. Linguistics? No. Physics? Ah, yes; that'll do. She showed up one day and the next was handed a text book and a classroom and a room full of students. She reassured us, however, that she was not the sole teacher, there was a math teacher as well who she just sort of helped. (Save that particular day which she was alone giving the kids an exam and trying to keep them from cheating in vain.) Her advisor I had actually met a few days earlier. Again, another fairly decent Brit, who had come to Cambodia after pissing around after uni and had been in Cambodia teaching English a few weeks longer than the woman I met today. Her quote says it all: "Nah, I didn't have any previous training. I came because I hadn't anything else to do and wanted to get out of the country. You should see it, though, the Cambodians know more grammar than I do. Participles and gerunds. Fuck, i haven't a clue, I just speak English."

In my linguistics courses, learning a second language or techniques for teaching a second language are of much discussion. The capacity to learn at different ages, the best styles, the use of phonetic description or syntactic theory are debated over and over again in the classroom. One thing that all linguists overwhelmingly can agree upon: simply speaking the language lends no magical ability to explain the phenomenon of one's language; moreover, teaching one's native language is more difficult as most we know by intuition and are unaware of. In smaller words, those not trained in teaching English as a second language are not conscience of all the details and characteristics of English necessary to even teach English at a basic level. For example, try teach the alphabet to someone who asks "So when is "a" pronounced "cat" or "tape" or "father" From a linguistic standpoint, you can't make a rule to describe the difference. They are simply three different vowels. Someone who just speaks English can't account for this--most aren't even aware of it.

After circling the compound, we came back to the building we started at. Turns out that the class I had textbooks for and had slightly prepared for by reviewing the lessons, already had volunteers there. We instead were moved to a different class where the volunteer was a no show due to illness. My over-confident partner, who didn't understand my qualms about teaching at all, decided to just wing it. First, he started off by haphazardly asking questions hoping to strike something worthy of teaching. The kids obviously already knew all the vocabulary he was writing on the board. So finally, at the supervising monk's insistence i switched gears to paragraph development. (The supervising monk, clad in vibrant orange, sat in the corner text messaging most of the class). I wrote a few sentences on the board about coming to class to demonstrate paragraph organization. I hadn't the foggiest what I was doing and lamented my very existence at the moment. My partner decided to jump in and "save the day." He began attempting to teach about sentence structure: Subject Verb and Object..sometimes. He wrote out some examples. First "I like" "See: subject verb. thats all you need. that's a sentence. but it's better if you an object" next examples "I saw" and "I have". all perfectly good sentences, right?

Except any high school English teacher or linguistics student can tell you that words such as "like" "have" and "see" must have objects. One needn't go off about transitive verses intransitive or valency to the second language learners, but for goodness sake, the students ought learn that they aren't sentences without objects when the words are these verbs. Lack of time and general chaos and my own utter revoltion at what was unfolding in front of me kept me from correcting him. After class, i mentioned the error to my partner. "Whatever. It doesn't matter. Just so that they hear correct English helps. That's all they need." I searched myself for something to hang myself with. I felt like a vegetarian working as a butcher--elbow deep in the very blood I had in every way wanted to avoid spilling.

So, if you can't write grammaically or understand the components of spoken English, by all means teach them. No other field quite exemplifies this idiom more than Teaching English as a Second Language. All underqualified and bored, sign up, go abroad, and spread the mutilation of the Linga Franca. For you, my dear volunteer and even paid English teachers, bear the White Man's Burden to do away with the ignorance of the world's masses who look to you to bestow upon them the glorious gift of English, to imporve their otherwise miserable existence, let them earn a decent wage, and make a better life for themselves as your tour-guides, tuk-tuk drivers, and hotel receptionists. Go forth and proclaim: ENGLISH!

Needless to be added, I am now highly doubting my desire to teach English.