Adjacent
I used to teach English in South Korea. I taught in a medium sized town called Sejong. I worked there for a year until my contract ended and I learned a lot about teaching and handling my kids. Now, I was in a cram school where it was expected of the kids, as the name implies, cram as much English words into their heads before a test. Once they did that, which happened first thing in our class, we would then go into the meat of English learning which is reading stories and exposing them to new words to be used for the next exam.
I wouldn’t say I’m a qualified person to teach English much less teach in general. I got this job at the height of the pandemic and looked at it as a way out of a country not treating Covid-19 with respect to a country that did. I applied, got an interview because I had a bachelor’s degree and since I spoke English well enough I got the job. It wasn’t until after I started teaching that it became apparent how unprepared I was. I was thrusted into a classroom after 2 weeks of observing how the teachers there taught. Lesson planning was done by the materials we had and that dictated what was to be taught. The more I learned about that system, the more it became clear that it called the shots.
After months trying to keep up I noticed something with my kids. They were trying to keep up too. Now I was the teacher expected to learn all of this before and I did. I read the stories in advance, tried to incorporate the words they learned for the lesson into my lecture so they can hear how its used and made sure to keep things light because…well they were kids. And yet I failed at learning at how my students learned. I kept up with the schedule and making sure I lived up to what was expected of me was a priority until it wasn’t. I was a teacher and it was my job to teach. Not just about what to learn but how to learn things and used teaching English as the medium for that. Once I started focusing on that I saw a marked difference on how my kids learned.
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The rowdy kids kept being rowdy because that was just how they were. But instead of speaking Korean they were rowdy but speaking in English. The quiet kids started speaking their minds and weren’t quiet anymore and made friends in my classes. The talkative ones with a lot of questions still asked questions but started explaining the answers to their peers like they discovered something new. Doing homework was lackluster. Grades in their daily tests didn’t show any trend in improvement. The kids who studied still kept on studying and the ones that didn’t didn’t. I saw this as a trade I had to make: a bargain that needed to happen to deliver what I thought at the time was a learning mindset they had to learn.
This chapter of my life was all about discovering the peripheries: finding the adjacencies. Once I started looking around depending on where I was in my path was when I had agency. This agency allowed me to reach meaningful choices that I made because they mattered to me. It was selfish of me to have constantly taught my kids how to learn than what to learn. I attribute that choice to the freedom I had when I taught. They left me alone as long as I finished teaching their lessons. And I did yet I wanted my kids to see how it was to like doing something. That if they learned to like learning just as much as I do they would now have the option to apply this to their lives. And this, in my opinion, was a much more important lesson I needed to teach.
Wisdom is caught not taught.
