Teaching In The Blood

I come from a long line of teachers. My mother, the daughter of two teachers herself, started teaching when she was sixteen, at a one-room school in the backwoods of Kentucky. Her students ranged from six years to seventeen, and I used to love her stories about unruly boys and girls who came to school with lice and malaria.

"Don't be a teacher," my mother often advised me, "it's a lot more than just teaching people things." Good teaching, she insisted, was all about the ability to read people; it was about classroom control, and more than anything else, the quality of natural authority. My mother claimed she lacked the last two of these. "Unlike your Aunt Anna Mae," she used to sigh. "Your Aunt Anna Mae is a born teacher."

My aunt Anna Mae was a great teacher. She could spend five minutes with someone and know what made them tick; she could walk into a room filled with noisy brats and in no time at all have them panting for her approval and attention; she could calm the nervous and cheer up the brokenhearted, and they never even knew she was doing it. My Aunt Anna Mae taught first grade in Kentucky for over fifty years and Sunday School at the local Baptist church for over sixty. She was remarkably grounded in the present, though still in touch with the past: at the age of eighty, she knew every book in the Bible -- and the names of all the Ninja Turtles.

Sadly, I am not related by blood to my Aunt Anna Mae. And if my mother had a problem with classroom control and natural authority, it was as nothing next to mine.

In my mother's case, the decision to become a teacher was made for her. There were two respectable job opportunities for women back then: marriage and teaching. My mother opted for the latter: it seemed less problematic. Besides, her teaching income was desperately needed and every penny she made was handed over to her family. "If the war hadn't started, I'd probably be there still," she used to say. The war created job opportunities in places my mother had only heard about -- places she had longed to visit, but had few hopes of ever seeing: New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles.

In the late thirties, my mother saw a job advertisement in the local paper. They needed secretaries in Washington D.C. A week later, she saw another advertisement: they needed secretaries in New York City. Then and there, my mother knew what she had to do. She saved every penny she could and signed up for a typing class, then shorthand. With her new skills, she quit her most recent teaching job -- in the backwoods of Georgia -- and left for a world of adventure, excitement and possibilities.

Typing took my mother away from her humdrum life and let her experience the thrill of living in Manhattan, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Of visiting museums and galleries and concert halls and strolling through parks bigger than her own hometown. Thanks to the war, my mother learned that there was more to life than marriage by age 22, church three times a week, and a life of endless and predictable toil.

When I asked her if she liked secretarial work, my mother would invariably shrug. "I don't suppose anyone really likes it, but it's a means to an end. And the people I worked with were always so interesting."

"Didn't you miss teaching?"

"Not much. I'm good at explaining things, but I had terrible classroom control. And teaching never took me any place interesting."

I was determined to follow my mother's adventurous lifestyle, but in my case, teaching funded my travels. After graduating from college, I saved up my money from a series of secretarial jobs and flew to Japan, where I got my first job teaching English.

"How's your classroom control?" my mother asked me when I got back from my first year in Japan and announced my intentions of pursuing a teaching career. "I can't see you as a teacher somehow; you're too much like me."

My mother was right: to this day, I have terrible classroom control. But I'm good enough at explaining things. Plus, teaching has taken me to all sorts of interesting places: the Near East, the Far East, and Europe. No one-room school for me, though; I've taught in banks, hospitals, factories, junior colleges and even shopping malls. I've seen my share of unruly kids, but I've also taught housewives, retired university professors, bar hostesses, college students, businessmen, and doctors. My students have been Chinese, Hispanic, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Italian, German, Turkish, West African, and Kazakh.

I can't say I always love teaching, but I definitely find it more interesting than typing letters, and far more challenging. My duties change all the time, too. I've taught janitorial skills to Indochinese refugees, beginning Japanese to Welsh violinists and German white collar workers, and English songs to Japanese bar hostesses.

And that is why I teach: I get to go to interesting places and the people I work with are always so interesting.