by Jake Hollingsworth // Seoul, South Korea // www.JakeHollingsworth.net
To travel is to move. To transport one’s self from point A to point B, whether by airplane, taxi, bus, motorbike, boat, camel, or my personal favorite: a good pair of walking shoes. New York to Berlin. Delhi to Shanghai. Seoul to Tokyo. Paris to Cairo.
To travel is to be in a constant state of motion. A traveler does not stay in one place for an extended period of time. To sit still, to become comfortable, is counter productive to his calling.
But the other truth of travel is that, more often that I care for, I am forced to wait. To sit. To count the hours. Perhaps a bus only runs every hour and a half. Or maybe a flight itinerary includes a 4 hour layover in Beijing. As a traveler living in a foreign country, I am at the mercy of public transportation. I am forced to adapt to a schedule that is not my own.
Aboard a train in India, fog stretched the haul from Calcutta to Agra from its scheduled 24 hours to 40. The three journeys I have made across the Pacific have taken a full day of time. I can’t make the plane go faster. All I can do is sit and wait.
To travel is to move…slowly. Patience is forced upon the traveler. In most cases, there is no choice but to wait.
Patience is indeed a virtue. As an ESL teacher, patience has become my friend. My ally. When teaching a student a new form of communication, more often than not, I am forced to wait, to repeat myself, and then wait a little longer. Like traveling, the acquiring of a new language is a slow and deliberate process. It can’t be rushed. It can’t be forced. It must happen in its on time, on its own schedule.
The worst thing we can do as ESL teachers is to choose to be impatient with our students. As I’ve mentioned several times before, we must identify with our students. This includes their culture as well as their struggle to learn English. Being patient communicates that we understand this is difficult, awkward, and unnatural. It tells our students that we get it. It tells them that the difficulty they are experiencing makes sense to us. As a result, our students will learn to relax, to take their time, to think. Patience with our students breaks down the barriers of nervousness and shame when they don’t understand immediately.
In the end, the decision is ours. We can choose impatience. If so, we will communicate the false ideas that learning a language is easy, our students are useless and inadequate, and they would do well to give up. Or, we can choose to show our students patience, thus teaching them that we understand this is difficult, we believe in them, and that they are fully capable.
The results will be as different as night and day.
What about you? What are your actions teaching your students about themselves?
Go to the next:
Lessons From A Few Years Spent in the World (3 of 5)
