exam

As a teacher, you get to know myriads of different types and kinds of people. It is your job to understand them, adjust to them, and learn to handle them. This, however, doesn't mean that you are not challenged, or occasionally even shocked, by them. A couple of months ago I told you about a major cultural shock I had with one of my students. Remember, the Chinese invasion. Besides the shocking behavioral culture, they surprised me with the expected outcome of the tutoring. The parents had set their minds to put the child in an English-speaking school from September, so he was supposed to master English, to pass an entrance exam, from zero, in two months. I occasionally think of the kid and wonder how he might be doing. I really liked him, but more emphatically I felt sorry for him for the domineering parents. After such cases I find myself concluding that it is so much harder to teach kids than adults, for two apparent reasons. On the one hand, with children, it is the parents who order and evaluate your service -- without being present and being realistic about the needs and abilities of the child. This can lead to false expectations and conflicts between the teacher and the parent, the teacher and the child, and maybe even between the child and the parent. On the other hand, when teaching kids -- who tend to be much more open and much less shielded than adults -- you get a very intimate insight into the family picture. More often than not, you notice deficiencies in that picture, but you have little space and limited rights to interfere. You may ask, you may comment, you may advise, but there is no recipe whether and how much you should involve yourself or accept; fight or leave; or something inbetween.

But then, I often realize adults are not much simpler either. I recently started to teach a young woman in her 30s who wanted to pass an exam in order to get a raise in her workplace. She came to me when she already had failed two exams. When I got into the picture, she had 1-2 months left till the last exam of the year. On the first occasion, I learned that she was planning to take a specialized exam for medical staff. While this made sense in theory (she being a nurse), when confronted with the specific exam tasks, I firmly believed it was a no-go. Although it was supposed to be intermediate, let's say B1, the reading was so difficult that even I had to check some of the vocabulary to comprehend the message. As for her, she practically didn't get anything out of it. At the end of the session, I tried to convince her to rethink her schedule, in order to spare herself another disappointment. She said she would think about it. For two weeks we were practicing these horribly complicated medical texts. She was progressing, getting more and more confident, but the goal was still way too far. 

After two weeks she informed me that she had changed her mind about the exam. She wouldn't take the one we were practicing for, because she didn't feel confident. She would try another one, a regular, which had an exam date one month later than we had calculated. I supported her decision. We started to practice more "real-life" English, not just the vocabulary drilling the previous exam required, and it was also a pleasant change that we had much more time to digest the material. I started to see some light at the end of the tunnel. 

But then came another twist. Next time we met, she told me she had third thoughts. She went back to believing that the medical exam would be more useful, so we needed to return to that. Four weeks were left. And then she had some family trip so we didn't have classes. And then we had classes but she started to panic so that's why we couldn't progress. And then... and then...

...and then came the exam.

The dilemma is the same in both cases. How much you care. You have to be a parent, a guide, a friend, a police officer, a therapist, an encyclopedia, Google Translate, and, at the same time, yourself. Finding the balance between connection and distance is the exam we, teachers, have to learn to pass.