The Chronicles of Teaching English to Five Grown Men
Sunday rolled in inevitably, June 10, 2012, today would be my first day working in a proper office. I had woken up feeling prepared, the job ahead was as ideal as it could get. Being an English course instructor seemed, at the time, a career path I was confident I could undertake.
Upon arriving at my office, after two hours of gruelling traffic, I found myself still energised by the thought that today was my first day. As I waited, I thought about how it would be smooth sailing for me in this job.
Looking back on it now, I had clearly underestimated the challenge that was ahead.
My students began shuffling in half an hour after our allotted time had passed, setting precedence for continuous reoccurrences of this same incident over the next few months. While I was disappointed by their tardiness, I was much too eager to being working to reprimand them immediately off the bat; maybe that was my mistake.
I had a total of five students, two of whom were company chauffeurs. The other two consisted of the private chef and housekeeper of the company's boss. The last one was the secretary of the aforementioned boss.
The task at hand was simple; help them improve their fluency in English so as to make it easier for them to communicate with all the employees who had come from Europe. And so our journey began.
Every Sunday, I would show up by 10 o'clock, ready with my lesson materials and enthusiasm. What I was met by, however, was constant lateness, reluctance to learn and subordination from one of the five. They would not take the lessons as seriously at first because to them, this was just another pointless training.
I slowly started to feel that I was encountering my worst nightmare. I was dealing with the casual "I do not care" attitude of a teenager trapped in the body of an adult I had no power over, at least at first.
I decided my only way of approaching such a group of individuals was through a showcase of harsh authority. I consulted with the boss, who accepted my proposal to suspend workers from overtime pay if they were not giving their full effort in my classes. The result was that by the next Sunday I turned up, everyone was already present with their copies at hand.
While there was still a lot of work ahead, it was on that sixth class that I realised I was making some headway towards completing the work required of me. The next 18 classes or so all involved rigorous work on part of both me and my students, but by the end of the six months of classes, tests and orientations we had finally made it.
All of my five students were speaking more proficiently than before, being able to proactively speak with their foreign co-workers. That was my first proper working experience, and I learned that work wasn't supposed to be fun. But neither did it have to be the time I dreaded the most. In the end it was gratifying–for all of us.
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