TRAVELS WITH MY TEXT BOOKS

With the economic crisis draining countries of jobs, many people have opted to look further afield for employment. A popular solution is to teach abroad, something that is easily accessible to any native speaker of English. I moved abroad several months before the economic crisis struck and have now lived in Indonesia for seven months. My home is Bekasi, a suburb of the hectic, fast-paced capital Jakarta. I teach five days a week to students ranging from four to forty, in classrooms that are designed to sit up to fourteen.

My initial motives for coming to Indonesia were not the teaching. I wanted to live abroad and see as much of that country as possible while I was there. Indonesia appealed mostly because it held mystique; I didn’t know anyone who had been there before and the snatches of information I’d come across were compelling. Added to that, it offered the luxurious variety of volcanoes, beaches and jungles and I’d been informed it was easy to get a teaching job, so I was sold. Initially, teaching was a means to an end and I intended to get my claws into ‘the real Indonesia’ as soon as I could.

Still, armed with a linguistics degree and a CELTA qualification, I was unbelievably nervous. Being responsible for any number of children for an extended period of time was daunting, especially students at a beginner level; I anticipated lessons in sign language and frustration. In addition, my experiences in a classroom thus far had been limited. Teaching in an almost imitation environment to achieve an EFL qualification is very different to the real thing, especially in a country where they weren’t daily exposed to the language they were supposed to be learning. I was also horribly aware of the fact that I couldn’t spell – the F7 key had been essential to passing university essays. So it was with some trepidation that I entered my first classroom.

What surprised me was that the more time I spent teaching, the more I enjoyed it. Perhaps it was the linguistic geek coming out in me, but I was actually proud when they mastered something complex, like the passive or second conditional sentences. The students that wanted to learn were obviously much easier to motivate, but I felt a stab of sympathy for those whose parents had sent them against their will. I personally rebelled furiously against French lessons when I was younger. And these children – and teenagers – had been up since dawn for prayer call. Their English lesson was after school, sometimes three times a week, and probably one of several extra curricular activities. But they still came…usually, and humoured me with their enthusiasm for grammar and vocabulary based games.

The younger children, especially those at a beginner level, are the most interesting to teach. They are quick to learn, extremely intuitive, and find most things absolutely hilarious. It is in this environment that you truly see ‘sponges at work’. Their brains absorb everything and even form preferences concerning minute details like the British versus American pronunciation of ‘water’.

Teaching can still be terrifying, even after seven months. I’m also terrible at learning names; my brain is almost on a mission to forget them as soon as possible and when a five-year-old is attempting to right hook a fellow classmate, it’s pretty useful to know them straight off the mark. Fourteen screaming seven-year-olds will have even the most child-friendly individual quaking in their boots. The thing is, even when you’re tired, frustrated or bored, there’s no one else but you and them and you have to stand there and deal with it. Because it’s either that or sit down on the floor in a corner and cry, which doesn’t really get you anywhere. And here’s the rub; children know. Their intuition is second to none, so if you’re in a bad mood because your housemate stole your last hobnob and you’re sure there are rats living in your roof, then tough luck. Even more terrifying is the dreaded question ‘but why?’ Why? Because it just is. Because, quite often, the English language is just pretty stupid. And worst of all, sometimes they query the grammar points you knew you should have read up on before you walked into the classroom. Chances are there is always one astonishingly bright child that will ask you the question you were semi-debating yourself.

But with all the terror, the bruises from ripping apart a kung fu inspired fight, the forehead creases from trying to figure out a past perfect progressive, it is worth it, and unbelievably so. Because for just that, you get a hundred different things that are a thousand times more valuable. Smiles, laughter, pictures, posters, moments when you realise you’ve achieved the impossible and they all actually…get it. Times when they tell you funny things that happened at school, when they thank you, when they laugh, when they see you outside of a school environment and don’t pretend you don’t exist, when they take hundreds of photos in class to put up on Facebook, when they bring you presents from their holidays, and for class in-jokes.

What I realise now, is that to find the real Indonesia, you do not need to trek into remote jungles, unearth the most secret of beaches and explore untouched villages. Because it’s already right here, sitting in front of you. The real Indonesia is best represented by the people who live there, the people I interact with every day and who probably don’t realise I am learning far more than I am teaching them.