The view from here

Shortly before 1700 today, local time, the course was officially declared to be over.

My printer fell silent at around 2130 on Sunday evening.  Drafts still litter the rented room.  My final assessed lesson ended at 1230 on Monday, my last written assignment was submitted shortly after.  Since then I’ve been observing and supporting those still teaching and absorbing the last of the accumulated wisdom of the course faculty.  This evening, our cohort walked out of the school with provisional passes.

It will be four weeks tomorrow since we looked around the room at each other for the first time and acquiesced to our first team-building activity.  I won’t spoil the secret for anyone who might follow.

Some of the group had taught English before, most of us hadn’t.  I’d come straight from running a large business change programme for two years and dismantling eighteen years of shared living to be sold, scrapped or stored for an unknown period of time.

The raw material that walked into the language school on 3 September 2015 has been shaken, stretched and crafted into a functioning version of English teaching in four weeks straight – a credit to the school, the faculty and the diverse group who sat and stared wide-eyed into the syllabus that first morning.

We were told that we were admitted because we stood a fighting chance of passing the course, but a foregone conclusion this was not.  At the two week point, several of us were flagging.  There’s a difficult planning reality around the timing of teaching practice and assessed work that hits hard around that time: teaching practice and assignments have to be delivered and submitted, but there’s a whole load of new knowledge to be learned and assimilated first.  Things get hectic.  Sleep becomes scarce.  Lessons are being planned at six a.m. and over breakfast by nervous rookie teachers, desperate to do right by students and avoid embarrassment during feedback.  Then the first assignment is handed back for re-submission.

A light stomach-bug did the rounds between weeks one and two.  Sneezing, coughing, streaming eyes and noses appeared like daisies in a May meadow.  Tempers occasionally frayed and the team, built so lovingly, began to crumble a little at the edges – but it never fell apart.

Friday evenings were reached by hauling ourselves and each other up a steep and slippery incline, missing our footing in mid-week and trying again to reach level ground.  We realised quickly that the students we were teaching were not making up the numbers – they were the reason we were there.

There’s that point when you’re learning to ride a bicycle when your dad or older brother lets go of the saddle and you don’t really notice when it was they let go.  That was probably somewhere at the end of week three, or early week four.  To be honest, I was too busy surviving to be able to tell you.  Suddenly, we were teaching. 

I think most of us became aware only a few days ago that we might just succeed.  Again, it was no foregone conclusion, just a ray of optimism lighting up the Whatsapp community.  The realisation that almost the whole syllabus is behind you.

And now it’s over - a couple of hours of admin, an exit interview and a post-course meal, which I missed.  I plead exhaustion and the burden of years – and a heavy cold.

I remember rolling the motorbike off a ferry at Calais in 2002 with three weeks to play with and the whole of Europe spread before me.  Sitting on my bed in this small rented room with the sound of life breezing through the open window, I have that feeling tonight.  This time, it's the whole world.