As I slumped in my chair on Monday night, having just finished my first day of teaching, I wondered why I had even begun this ordeal. I was 70 hours in-country, still operating on jet-lag and sleep deficit (two separate items in this case), and I had been awake since 4:30 that morning. How, I thought, could I sum up this… phenomenon…in one word?
On the previous afternoon, several employees of the Bluth School were out eating & talking. I mentioned something about looking forward to observing classes during the next week, a throwaway comment meant to stimulate conversation with people with whom I lacked common experience. Jay, a Canadian, quipped, “What is this observation of which you speak?”
“Haha,” I said.
Blank stares replied.
The phrase “Thrown to the lions” came to mind.
Thus began a panicked twenty-four hour race against the clock: listening to tapes, reading textbooks, hurrying through classroom procedures, checking the wording of my contract. In the early evening, around 2 am Colorado time, Lucille, the head teacher, explained a stack of forms she had designed to help incoming teachers with lesson-planning. In the state I was in, each sheet struck my mind like an incoming shell, and by the end I felt like I was struggling through sleep-induced mustard-gas in a paper-pitted No-Man’s Land. Dulce et decorum non est.
I awoke tense and harried in the pre-dawn dark on Monday, and continued in this state into the afternoon, when my first class began at 3:30. The things I had written down the night before had to be re-interpreted in the light of morning and a bit more sleep, and the ramshackle plans I had rigged the previous night were in need of serious firming-up. Predictably, a final route-switch added the finishing touch to this grand debacle when someone in the secretarial staff changed most of the room numbers at the (literal) last minute. The chain of events which had been sloping downhill all day continued to gain speed.
I would like to say that while Benedick was my favorite role, Monday night was my most skilful; or that I performed with a rare grace borne of difficulty and necessity. These, alas, are the accomplishments of greater men.
I hacked and clod-hopped through class after class, misunderstanding words, finding I had left a critical sheet of information elsewhere, being that criminally boring teacher I had so often despised. I smiled, I was cheerful, I might have even been bubbly for a moment, but all to no avail. It passed, by turns, in a roller-coaster haze of adrenaline and shame. Finally, at 9:20 pm, it was finished. I staggered back to the teachers’ room.
Oddly, my most powerful feeling was of overwhelming grace: a youthful me was not in attendance. When I was thirteen, I veritably licked my chops at the scent of that creature at the front of the class plodding through the material with the intelligence and poise of a very stupid water buffalo. I had just experienced the upside of “Learn or be beaten/Respect your elders” Confucian culture: despite all my blunderings, the students were extremely polite and followed every foot-induced gag with oh-so-close attention. My karma may have hit my dogma, but my dogma gave at least as good as it got.
At 9:24, amidst the euphoria of a job done wretchedly but done all the same, I realized that one word was not sufficient to contain this experience. A compound word, however, might encapsulate it very nicely: train-wreck.
