Sunday, January 29, 2012

Rogue Students

I have never, ever regretted having chosen teaching for a career. I love what I do with a fervent and sincere passion, and firmly believe that this is my calling and the classroom is exactly where I'm meant to be. I have had a generally smooth ride down the road and feel gratified to have shared my love for the English language and its literature with the countless number of students who have passed through my classroom. And when students from a long time ago reach out to me through social media like Facebook, and recall in particular a text that I taught them and that left an indelible impression on their minds, my joy knows no bounds, needless to say. In all honesty, my days at Lady Doak College, Madurai, India, were the best of the best, and the students in those undergraduate and graduate classes that I taught, occupy a very special place in my heart indeed.

In contrast, I must admit that my experiences in North America teaching international students haven't all been pleasant after all. Take, for instance, the time I was collecting the students' assignments for this particular university course, and asked the students to come up and leave their work on my table. One might think that students would be responsible at this stage of their education, so I was quite baffled when I counted all the assignments after class and found that I was short of one. It took me a while to go over the class list and figure out whose was missing, and when I questioned the student in the next class about his missing assignment, he swore that he had left it on my table. Since there was no way the assignment could have just walked off my desk, I knew the student was blatantly lying and took him to task for his behavior. The result was that the student wrote a nasty review about me, one that I took with a pinch of salt, and one that I didn't bother to worry about since I had informed the Dean about the incident anyways, and had learned from the other professors that he was a problem student after all.

Or consider the time when the Asian student in my TESL class openly asked me if I could fudge the numbers regarding her observation and teaching hours, that is, she wanted me to log in her required number of hours without actually having done any observation or teaching whatsoever. She seemed to have had the assumption that I was a corrupt Indian who would just go along with her hare-brained scheme of earning her degree without working for it at all. And then there was the student who flew into a rage and flung his paper on the desk in anger because he was unable to do the task given in class, unlike all his other classmates. There was also this older student who thought females ought to stay at home taking care of the husband and children and had no business teaching an English class! Trust me, they come in all shapes and sizes and ages from different countries, and are a stark contrast to those students whose adulation I revel in. It is this latter category of students who make me love my profession, and help me wake up with a smile each morning as I head for work everyday. Need I say more about why I have no regrets at all about my chosen career?!?

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