An Embarrassment Of Experiences

"I once taught for a whole thirty minutes with my blouse unbuttoned," my friend Karen groaned.

Karen is a retired teacher. We'd gotten to talking about teaching and how fraught our classroom experiences were with embarrassing situations. We were vying with each other to find the most blush-inducing, cringe-worthy teaching incident we could recall. "A girl in the first row finally caught my eye and told me," Karen added, wincing. "Naturally the buttons were in the worst possible place."

"The same thing happened to me, but it was my skirt," I said. "And the student who pointed it out was a boy."

Maybe my long-term memory is exceptionally keen, but after Karen had shared more embarrassing experiences -- knocking over a metal wastebasket with half a bottle of Coke in it, forgetting names while being observed, tripping over a student's bag -- I was still going strong. Embarrassment, we both agreed, was one of the occupational hazards of teaching.

For instance: one of my American colleagues in Japan had learned how important it was to teach culturally related body language, especially things like hand shaking. So on her very first day as a teaching assistant in a large high school English class, she asked all her students to introduce themselves and shake her hand. One by one, the students blurted out their names and thrust out their hands for her to shake. As she made her way through the classroom, she became aware of a strange vibe. A few of the girls were trading nervous looks; boys were giggling and beginning to wriggle in their seats. When she approached the last student, she understood why. The boy mumbled his name and, after a bit of good-natured prodding, reluctantly put his hand out. Which is when she noticed that he was missing several fingers. "All that time, the poor kid was dreading having to stick his hand out," she wailed, wiping her eyes. "I felt horrible, putting him through that!"

When I was teaching at a large preparatory school in Tokyo, our classrooms were so large that we had to use microphones. My colleague and team-teacher, Mr. Ito, clipped his to his shirt. One day after a break, we came back to the classroom to find everybody laughing. "Sensei," one of the girls gasped, "you did it again!" Mr. Ito look down at his shirt -- and blanched. He had forgotten to turn off his microphone. He had treated the entire class to the highly amplified sounds of what transpired in the faculty men's toilet.

The very worst thing that happened to me, though, involved Ahmet, a shy Turkish boy who disappeared for a whole month. When Ahmet finally came to class, I asked him to explain his long absence. "Teacher," he said, looking away, "my mother is die."

Now, this sounds hard-hearted, but the horrible truth is, I'd heard this one before. Two boys had already tried the dead/deathly ill mother excuse before, and on both occasions, I found out they were lying. Several colleagues assured me they had fallen for the same trick. The first two times, I heard this, I'd almost burst into tears. This time, I'd gotten savvier: I wasn't buying it.

"I'll need a letter from your mother's doctor," I told him coolly.

"Okay," Ahmet almost whispered, looking ashen. "Next time, I bring."

I stared at him. Was he feeling guilty? He ought to be! How dare anybody tempt fate by using such an excuse? What if something actually happened to his mother? Would he ever be able to forgive himself?

But as I left the classroom, I had a horrible thought. What if Ahmet's mother really had died? It had happened to me. When I was in graduate school, my own mother died, and I'd gone to my Japanese drama teacher to ask if I could retake the final. "You're the fourth person who managed to miss it!" she'd muttered crossly. "Well, what's your excuse?" When I burst into tears, I don't know which one of us felt worse. Had I just done the same thing to Ahmet?

"I've got a student whose mother died," I told our head teacher. He laughed and shook his head. "Not another dead mother! He's lying, I guarantee you."

"All the same, would you mind checking? I'd feel awful if he were telling the truth."

The head teacher gave me an indulgent look, but he went off to check. He came back white-faced and sober. "He's telling the truth. His father says his mother had a heart attack. She was only 40."

The next time I saw Ahmet, I told him he wouldn't need the letter from his mother's doctor. He pressed his lips together and tried to nod, but I saw that his eyes were wet. I promptly burst into tears.

Like I said, embarrassment is one of the occupational hazards of teaching.