WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? [CHINA ]
by Jeff Booth
It was the end of the semester and I had each of my English major students at Chongqing University in western China prepare a ten-minute presentation for their final oral exam. One-on-one, I could ask any question, but they had their choice of topic. Oliver, a.k.a Wu Ye, chose war.

“The United States and China will go to war in the future,” he said, “and I would like to join the army to fight for the motherland.” I was impressed with his correct use of the conditional tense, and terrified by his nationalistic fervor.

“But Oliver,” I asked, “what if we had to meet on the battlefield? Although I never would want that to happen, what would you do?” He was 20 years old, barely younger than me, wearing a cheap suit to impress me for the final exam, and sitting in his chair with a soldier’s perfect posture.

“You are a great teacher, and I like you Mr. Jeff, but I would . . . “ I don’t know if he was searching for the vocabulary, or stumbling over intent, but he continued, “I’d kill you.”

What could I do? Ugly nationalism from a good student and friend turned me upside down. But his English was flawless, at least; I understood that part. He got an A.

HOW TO TEACH WITH GUNSHOTS OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
[THE WEST BANK]
by Adam Schreck
“Where are the soldiers now?” I asked my students at the Arab American University in the West Bank. Popopopopop came the dull sound of machine-gun fire a couple hundred yards away.

“They are on the hill, next to the university wall.”

“And the Humvees?”

“There are two by the gate.”

Teaching English abroad is not exactly glamorous work. The pay can be bad and the hours long. But it can be exciting, especially when you find yourself, as I did, teaching in what most of us consider a war zone. On a whim, I had applied to be a university instructor near the West Bank city of Jenin. Now, a month into the job, it felt like the school itself was under attack. Gunshots were going off outside. The acrid tear gas wafting in was making my nose itch. I was scared. And I had a grammar lesson to teach.

Popopopop. I tried to keep my students focused on that day’s preposition review, but the view at the window was winning. I managed to teach a few new vocabulary words, like gunshots, infantry, and concentrate as in “It’s really hard to concentrate with all these gunshots!” before ditching the lesson plan altogether.

We began one of many discussions I would have with students about how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was affecting their lives. “Maybe you are scared; this is unusual for you,” a student said to me, “but this is normal for us.” In spite of the chaos, they were always eager to learn. Some spent several hours every day slogging through checkpoints just to make it to class.

A nervous excitement fell over the campus. The main gate of the university, usually left open, remained locked all day. As students walked to and from their classes, Israeli soldiers combed the surrounding hills searching for a suspect in the numerous caves. Occasionally, they would throw a tear-gas canister into one. If that didn’t work, they’d fire a few machine-gun rounds into the ground. The university’s security guards were busy with crowd control; they tried earnestly to prevent students from throwing stones at the soldiers outside.

The next day, things were back to "normal”or what passed for normal. There were no more gunshots, but I continued to receive students’ “absence excused” forms from the dean’s office with a box checked for one of five reasons: illness, death of a relative, curfew, in prison, or “other.” I eventually stopped falling for the “I’m late because there was a checkpoint” excuse from perennially tardy students. Fatah and Hamas rallies went from being events of passing mention on CNN to the realities of university life. Once, late in the semester, a student began sobbing in the middle of class his brother had been shot and killed that morning.

My experience in the West Bank left me full of questions, frustration, and sadness, and reminded me of how easy it is to take comfort and security for granted. I learned much more from my students than I ever could have taught them: that education can achieve something positive even in the most desperate situation, that machine guns sound just like Fourth of July firecrackers, and that in this troubled land, the elusive dream salaam, shalom, peace will not come easily.

PROFESSOR AND CONFESSOR
[CZECH REPUBLIC]
by Beth Green
English teachers are part professor, part confessor. My students tell me about their plans to elope, to quit their jobs. They reveal hatred for their colleagues and nearly cry over abusive ex-lovers. And it’s all done in English.

When I moved to Prague last year to teach business English, I quickly discovered that all teachers, if they have a good rapport with their students, learn more about their pupils than just their names and test scores. One student comes to mind: We were in perhaps our third one-on-one session together when he confided that he and his girlfriend planned to elope because there was too much pressure to have a big wedding. After we finished a spur-of-the-moment vocabulary-building session sparked by the verb “to elope” and including figures of speech like “getting hitched” and “shacked-up”, he shyly told me I was the first person he had shared this information with.

Sometimes these confidences are revealed by accident, like when, during a lesson on “successful people” and the adjectives to describe them, I thoughtlessly asked a student if she considered herself a success. She cried on my shoulder for the rest of the 90-minute class.

With another student, I was the first of her professional contacts to know when she got an offer for a better job, as the marketing director for a mall I had to know, since I helped sculpt her exit interview and anticipate her boss’s questions when she quit. I helped her get over her nervousness by staging a role-play and hamming it up as her male, middle-aged, rough-voiced British supervisor. In our next lesson, I was nearly as pleased as she when she told me he had approved her severance requests and wished her well in her new position.

Of course, this unburdening often works both ways. I try not to spill too many personal details of my life, but I do give away (and get) plenty by twisting it into a teaching tool. When the American expat community (including me) got homesick around Thanksgiving, my students contributed recipes for dishes I could take to potlucks and learned how to give instructions using “first,” “next step,” and “then.” Teaching “in my opinion” and “you should” landed me dozens of recommendations for restaurants and weekend trips. Invariably, though, the students want to know when I’m going and with whom.

The language gap also makes students feel safe asking questions they wouldn’t dare pose in another setting. I spent my second lesson with one student reviewing basic questions: “Where are you from?” that sort of thing. After class, my student held the door for me and inquired: “And how many years you have?” Innocent enough, but at the next lesson he asked, “Have you boyfriend?”

6 WEEKS TURNS INTO 6 YEARS [SPAIN]
by Krisna Raynor
I have always been fascinated by the sun and by the number 6. So I suppose it wasn’t a huge surprise to my mother when I casually mentioned to her on our deck overlooking the Atlantic that I was moving to the Mediterranean. I was 6 years old.

Sure, it took a few years, but my dream began to come true one night several years ago when I spotted a newspaper ad from Global TESOL (globaltesol.com) to teach English at a summer camp. Six weeks of warm Spanish evenings sipping Rioja! Within fourteen days, I was on a life-changing flight to the country of my dreams.

A TESOL training course and the Barcelona nightlife introduced me to the classroom and Spanish culture, but my destiny lay with 150 kids in the peaks of Alt Emporda in the Pyrenees, discovering the adventures and revelations common to summer-campers the world over. Some of which, I hoped, would be in English.

I learned how to grit my teeth and turn a frown into a smile when they sang “I’m a Little Teapot” at for the hundredth time (repetition is the key to learning a new language). I learned that stitches, bruises, missing teeth, and greasing the doorknobs with Vaseline are universal aspects of hanging out with children, and it’s fun to get paid for being a foreign-language clown.

Six weeks blended into six years of sun and teaching. The Spanish husband and two Catalan cats are pleasant additions to my original dream!

CLUELESS IN CAMEROON
by Brian Johnson
“Stand! Greet! Good morning, sir!” The chorus of polite welcomes, led by the class prefect, came out in a mixture of British, French, and African-accented English. Looking out at more than 70 Cameroonian high school students, I knew that jetlag was now the least of my problems. It had seemed simple, really: Spend a college semester teaching 14-to-16-year-olds at Baptist High School, a well-respected boarding school in Buea, Cameroon. Things always seem simpler on paper. I arrived in Cameroon in the middle of a West African downpour, and soon found that my $500 worth of outdoor gear was stuck somewhere between Brussels and Lagos. I never saw it again.

Being a semi-intrepid traveler, I soldiered on. The school program said something about my being an “assistant English teacher” and that I was supposed to “assist” the local teacher in class. This would include helping with curriculum, sharing “expertise,” and teaching a lesson maybe once or twice a week. When you go on your own overseas program, by all means, read the informational brochure. Read it—but don’t throw it away. You’ll want to look at when you’re actually doing the job, because at some point you’ll need a laugh or two.

In other words, I found myself in charge of multiple classes. My Cameroonian collaborator’s presence (and overall control) of the class was supposedly part of the deal, but she soon decided I could do a splendid job on my own. I wasn’t so sure. I liked my students, but there were a few obstacles. Overhead projectors did not exist in Cameroon, and neither did other luxuries, like photocopiers, a resource room, and those things with pages and words and lessons in them. You know, books. The textbooks, I was assured, were due to arrive any month now. Until then, my students would have to learn to read without actually having anything to read.

The absence of their textbooks was neither disconcerting nor extraordinary to my students. For the majority of my three-month stint, I took every lesson from my handy college grammar book and wrote them on the blackboard. There was no way to give them anything else. I longed for textbooks, daydreamed about them, prayed for them to fall from the sky like the monsoon, but they would not arrive. I turned to theater: While I improvised a Jackie Chan routine, the kids called out the actions and verb tense: “Punching!” “Has Punched!” “Kicking!” “Jumping!” “Has jumped!” No books, no problem.

ADVENTURE IN THE AMAZON FRENCH GUIANA
by Lisa Konczal
“The next word is beach,” I told my students. “Spell beach.”

Of course, I was asking for trouble. Kids always know enough English homonyms to find the most appropriate four-letter word. When I turned around, someone had scribbled ***** on the blackboard with the correct beach just beneath. They were a little testy that day.

Five months earlier, I had arrived in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, an overseas department of France just north of Brazil. The public middle school where I would be teaching was in a slum lined with illegally built sheet-metal shacks, comparable to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or Tijuana. As I was driven down the narrow, potholed road that led to the school, I saw my future students, all in uniform, making the long trek to class. At the school itself, I found classrooms that opened to the outdoors, inviting the cooling breeze from the Atlantic. I looked around and discovered a meager library, along with nine computers just three, after thieves struck for over 1,000 students.

Lush rain forest covers 94 percent of French Guiana, but that uniformity belies the territory’s diversity: Immigrants from countries as far-flung as Haiti and China import traditions and languages that have formed a culture that is not quite French, not quite Latin, and not at all like anything I’d experienced before.

One of the most interesting classes consisted only of recent immigrants, for whom English was usually a third language. This means I was not only correcting a Haitian student’s conjugation of the basic French verb avoir but also debating British versus American English with students from neighboring (British) Guyana. Want a TEFL challenge? Try teaching English in French to a student just arrived from Guangdong.

Even teaching native-born Guianese can be tough. After the beach incident, I called out, “Spell the United States.”

“C’est quoi Ãsa?” a student asked. “What’s that?”

Five months into my class, and they knew ***** but not the United States? No one ever said teaching English was a day at the beach.