Melanie (London)

 

[Melanie: not her real name]

I was given a few teaching hours on the full-time degree programme.

One year, I was given Year Two to teach.  This was the year before the students went away for their Year Abroad.

Two years later, I ran into Melanie in the corridor, waiting to see the head of the section.  As the head was nowhere to be seen and Melanie had been hanging around for a while, I thought I’d keep her company, asking how her Year Abroad had been.  Somehow, at some stage of the conversation (the head never put in an appearance), Melanie said she thought I didn’t like her.

Melanie was the best student in her class when I taught them, so how did she get that impression?  

From my experience, it’s usually the struggling students who (more often wrongly than not) think the teacher is picking on them to show them up publicly.  I’d said to them, “The teacher must be very sick to want to shame the students publicly.  What’s the point of it?  The teacher already knows more than the student [in the subject anyway], so there’s no need to show off.”

Melanie said she’d got that impression because “every time I gave you a translation in class, you’d come up with another version.  You were never satisfied with my rendition.”

I said to her, “Poor you, spending a whole year thinking the teacher disliked you!  If the student were really not up to more than just the one version, the teacher would be less demanding and accept what the student offers.  It is precisely because your brain is capable of absorbing synonyms and alternative ways of expressing something that I did it.”

To this day, I still remember the look on her face: not only of enlightenment (“Oh, I see, the teacher didn’t hate me after all!”) but also of great joy that the teacher had actually held her in such high regard.

After she graduated and found a job that dealt with trade with China, she asked me to be her tutor/mentor for the first few months of her new job, to guide her through Business Chinese.

(London, late 80s?)