The Voice of English

Ever since I have taken the path towards being an educator, the oath of writing an essay a day and the willingness to teach English, I have been criticised. People question my motives. People wonder why I sacrifice so much time. Some people wonder why I even bother, especially considering that it is English that I adore.

Today, I have answered all of those questions in one simple gesture: the act of kindness and understanding. Today, I have liberated myself from self-labelling as a 'future educator'. Today, despite needing one more year of essay writing and group work, I have granted myself the label 'educator'. 

Today, I witnessed yet another student who has fallen into the cracks of our education system, and that student is one of a Chinese descent. Chan* has been in Australia for around two months now. She is not at all fluent in English, and she had always been sitting around doing nothing when I taught her class. Two lessons ago, I found out about her origins and took her onto my wing. Ever since I found out, I have been describing instructions to her in a simplistic manner so as to ensure her understanding.

There was something special about today, though. Having set homework tasks based on Romeo and Juliet in the last class, I had not expected Fiona to even comprehend any of the task choices. I was proven wrong. Upon asking the students as a whole in today's class if anyone had completed their homework, not one person had responded. They all either looked down, looked up or looked sideways. "Well," I said, "that's very interesting because Chan, who knows hardly any words in English, managed to write an alternate ending for Romeo and Juliet with the help of a translator." the entire class was dumbfounded.

Having volunteered to help Chan fix up her internet account in the IT department, whilst waiting for the IT people to return to their workstations, I stood with Chan in the hallway and spoke to her about her life in China compared to life in Australia. "I have so many options here," she told me. "In China we have boring subjects. We don't have cooking classes even." It occurred to me that we take our education system for granted here. We indeed do have many options. After that brief discussion, Chan said, "homework?" and proceeded to open up her English folder. She pulled out a tidy sheet with handwriting on it, which was the alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet. 

I asked if she could read it to me just so that I could check whether or not she had written it, at least f she could read it out she would have some sort of understanding of it. And she did. She even laughed at all of the funny parts, marvelling at how humorous her writing was. She was glowing. I asked her if she wanted to read it to the rest of the class when before we finished from the IT department. She looked down, and said "maybe they laugh. Maybe they make me embarrassed." I told her "if anything, they should feel embarrassed that you can write something in another language!" 

She did not end up reading it. But I did guilt trip the rest of the students by mentioning her completion of a task. And in the entire delivery of my lesson, she was smiling. She was fully attentive, trying everything that I asked of the class. All it takes is consideration. I imagined myself in another country, that speaks a language foreign to me and I cringed. Chan is so brave. It is not fair for those who are not familiar with English to be left behind. English is an important means of communication, and students born here that are fluent in it should grant themselves lucky, because out there, there are students who have no idea about what is going on, and they are looking for somebody, anybody, to assist them in learning.

It just takes that extra effort. Not at all strenuous, and all the while extremely rewarding. For the rest of my stay at my placement school, I will continue to ensure that Chan is receiving every bit of help that I can offer because she is one of the students who has a care for what I have to say - why would I not want to hear what she has to say as well?



*name changed to protect privacy of the student

The Death of a Poetic Era

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As an English major, I am struggling to find the perfect link to sustain the nourishing feeling English provides in the teaching of it to students with an abbreviated speech lifestyle. I feel that everything is too fast nowadays due to this verbal and textual abbreviation - life, our emotions and our very experiences are too abbreviated. And it is becoming all too common, all too fast.

As part of my placement experience at a high school, I have been assigned by my university to bring forth a project which I see as beneficial to the school and its students, particularly one that harnesses my majors. So I decided to focus on English and its very art, in particular, poetry. I decided this because I wanted to give a voice to the outsiders, to those who feel that they cannot express themselves - you will be surprised at how many students have no personal opinion about things!

So I ran a poetry workshop. I made it appealing for all sorts of learners - the visual, the kinaesthetic, the musical, the linguistic, the logical, the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, the musical, all of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theories. And I thought it extraordinary the lengths I went through. I made attractive posters, and made a plan to collate all of the varied poetic techniques I would have taught students into a final slam poem that they would perform at the end of my two-week block, boosting their oral and performance skills as well, all vital in order to thrive academically. 

The number of students that attended went from six to two in four sessions. Then one. I could not believe it - what was I missing? I made it engaging. I placed bulletin notices that rhymed. I incorporated varied interests, even catering for those interesting in writing rap music. I touched on all elements. I asked several students to attend - their responses varied from "I can't write poetry" to "no thanks" to "maybe". 

Poetry is so beautiful. It is everything a soul could ask for. It is everything students could ask for in the middle of a bust day. But it was something rejected. Even those two who attended towards the end were bored halfway and began to doodle all over things instead of sticking to the poetic task. So I did the thing I feared the most about this project: I gave up.

I revised it entirely. I now run origami workshops. Students come in, fold pieces of paper to their amusement, trash the area in which they are folding paper, and leave. I cannot believe that language, the most beautiful communicative tool since the uttering of cavemen and cavewomen, is being trashed like this.

Paper Murder: A Homicide Story

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The paper made its way through varied amounts of savage hands. The hands tore through it and sliced its corners and ripped right to its core. They lathered a sticky substance all over its back and tied it down onto other pieces of its kind, performing a strange chant of sorts throughout the tortuous ritual. 

The paper presented itself idly. It did not want to go through any more of this. It had been through more torment prior to this ritual, wherein it went through a rather touchy felt technological ordeal, whirling around through a plastic and metallic enclosure that buzzed and whirred as it sent the paper through it's many twists and turns, rolling it through its mechanical depths, stamping it with conforming ink and sending it flying out into an open enclosure where it awaited the human initiating this process. The human then continued to pick it and its duplicates up and dispersed the entire lot to the savages, for their strange ritual. 

"I just killed all the trees in the forest," my art teacher said before she handed out the fourth pile of worksheets to her students. I stared at the piles in horror, envisaging forests being torn down for these people, most of which care not for its availability nor its origins, nor the task that has been printed all over it and projected out into the room. The information enters the students' ears and leaves almost as fast as it entered. 

I think that as of late, people have not been mindful about our surroundings. We have to be aware that every action has a counteraction, that every decision makes an impact. We need to aware that our future generations might consider trees a thing of the past. That has happened before, but with animals. The fact that there are extinct animals and endangered ones alone should show us that we have not been considering anything but ourselves.

And thus the paper was murdered. The hands tore through it and sliced its corners and ripped right into its core. The savages laughed and carried on and the paper soon will love on no longer.

The Seat in the Front Corner

Quite recently, I have acquired enough confidence to sit in front of the classroom whether it be in a tutorial or in a lecture, only in the absence of air conditioning. Because of this, today I arrived in a certain class where this is constant and was surprised.

I was surprised to find my seat empty. I now deem it my seat because today proved that in that particular cohort of future English teachers, which is generally full to the extent where some students have to sit on the floor or place a spare chair on the side of a packed table, the seat where I normally sit was waiting for me. It was as though I was the Moses of the classroom, parting rows of students to get to my long-awaited chair, situated in the perfect position of the classroom where the computer is accessible considering I am my teacher's personal technician, and situated at an acute angle from the main board, allowing a pleasurable viewing experience.

It came as a shock to me. I normally arrive fifteen minutes early in order to reserve myself that seat, though I did not quite imagine that seat to be waiting for me in a packed room filled with students. Today, having been late for the first time, it came as a shock to my teacher, and I suppose it came as a shock to my peers. Nobody touched that chair. No, it is not because I have some form of germ that descends from my rear and spreads all over the chair, I think it is because my memory is to be preserved in hopes of my return, as uncanny as that sounds. The entire thing was uncanny. 

I suppose it is a good thing to have a reserved seat. It made me feel somewhat superior, that my presence is expected and that I am worthy of a seat and table space. Three girls were seated on the floor at the back, before I had arrived. Why had not one of them taken the seat I normally sit at? I wonder now, had I been terribly sick and not attended, would everyone in the room simply stay out of my chair? Have I unknowingly claimed ownership over it? Is my teacher that frightening that people prefer to hide on the floor at the back of the room? 

I like that chair now, more than ever. I like that space, that acute position, that technician position. I like that it is recognised as an area for myself, that without being told, people respect that area in respect of me. This happening is similar to that of my contemporary fiction lecture experience. The first lecture had all the students sitting on the corner chairs, none of which willing to let others pass into the middle seating areas because their things were sprawled all over the little tables that fold out in front of them. So, instead of asking, the people that came in later on began to sit on the floor besides those seated. It was not until the lecturer told the people seated on the corners to move towards the middle, that they did. Anyway, I occupied a spare table and chair on the stage and that is where I have been seated for the past six lectures. It is probably now officially my spot, too. Every week that I attend, that spare desk and chair await me. My lecturer strokes my hand as she asks me questions to ensure my comfort, and I am very sure that because I was absent from that lecture today, it was felt.

Perhaps my lecturers even respect me as much as I respect them. I acknowledge them as human beings. One lecturer was away for a week. When he returned, I was the only one to ask him if everything was okay, and it was not - his father had passed away. He smiled at me after he had answered, respecting that I had taken the liberty to ask him about himself. He is, after all a human being, and as am I, and he has a voice and opinions which I take into account for my opinions and future voice projection during my lectures, as I am an aspiring lecturer. This sense of respect, though, should be passed around from every student to every teacher, vice versa. It is a level of respect that goes without saying. We are all humans, we all have purposes.

Now, when I sit on chairs and use tables that are invisibly labeled as 'mine', I will smile and sink into the chair and sink into the feeling that I too am respected, and that my presence is felt. It is an important thing to feel seeing as we are all temporary beings.

The Power of Procrastination

Procrastination is more powerful than we humans expect it to be. We deem it a phase, a phase of rest, of reflection, of evaluation. However what we do not associate with procrastination is disaster.

Right at this very moment, I have a week to complete two Powerpoint presentations. Having completed more than half of each, my brain automatically has assumed, despite my large amount of reading material consisting of around twelve books and seven research essays, that it is time for a long break, and it has thus decided to write this essay in the duration of its break, so I am now unsure that 'break' is the appropriate word.

Unbeknownst to mankind, procrastination is a powerful force that is feeding on us. We are its bait, its food, its very nutrients and it keeps growing and growing because we are simply allowing it to. We brush it off like it is a normal aspect of university study, like saying "I'll do it later" or "it can wait!" are very non-lazy things to say, like not washing the car when it is dirty because the thought of the process tires the owner out is normal. Like having reading material but choosing to write something fairly relevant yet irrelevant at the same time is a good idea.

Procrastination is quite deviant. It waits for us, lurking in the shadows, until we tire of whatever important activity it is that we are occupied in. All of the sudden, we feel ourselves drawing away, being sucked out of our worries, and into a silent utopia where thinking about our worries as distant things and being unproductive are two vital aspects. And we allow procrastination to do this to us because, to be quite frank, being lazy is rather exciting. At least you do not have to spend any of your energy, well built up from all the nasty food consumed due to lengthy study periods and not enough time to eat a proper meal. No, with procrastination, all one does is sits and thinks.

Thoughts are dangerous. They veer one away from actions, and that is the very epitome of procrastination - it does not want you to think. It wants to rid you of all cognition so that it may grow even more powerful yet. It plans to one day rule our world, and it is already doing so by attacking each one of us individually at varied times. It is quite intelligent, for when it strikes it does not remain long enough to make itself seem problematic, otherwise humans would begin to look for a cure to fight it with. Procrastination simply calls your body its quick destination, invades your mode of thinking, and momentarily pauses any importance that is situated in your life in order for it to thrive for that moment, then it moves on to its other victim.

Sometimes, procrastination gangs up on groups of people at the same time, particularly groups working on a group project that becomes seemingly difficult to complete. It strikes, and none of the members have to, for around an hour or so, worry about the group work at all. In fact, most of the time they are happy laughing at useless nothings while procrastination is at work, so again, procrastination is not seen as problematic. 

We must win this battle against procrastination. We must stand up for our energy and use it within us, rather than let a strange source in to invade and conquer our hard-earned energy supply and use it for its own merits. We must use our energy to accomplish things waiting on our to-do lists, or even bucket lists. We need to fight for our right to be. Procrastination no longer should hold a place in the finest minds of our nation. With that said, though, I am procrastinating right this very minute...