From ages 17 to 27 I was a full-time teacher. Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned in life were when I was in a classroom. I loved it, and if all teacher time was spent in a classroom, I would've been a teacher forever.
This student, M, I met her a handful of years ago, when I taught at an English Academy. Her group was the last of my Monday-Wednesday groups, right after a group of nearly thirty seven-year-olds who made me see stars. I always felt like a cartoon character that was hit in the head with an anvil after these classes with the little ones: I don't know what happened then. Maybe it's because there were too many of them? I never had any problem with my groups of five- and six-year-olds, but the seven-year-olds, wow. I had a fifteen minute break where I ate a quick snack and then I was walking into a new classroom. M's classroom.
M's group was much more my style. I had always been partial to teenagers. Her group was small, too, perhaps because it was the last of the day: only five brilliant kids, all ranging from thirteen to fifteen. Think of the most random assortment of teens you could possibly get. A judgmental workaholic in the making, a baby emo queer, a football star in the rising who didn't believe in studying, a shy picture-perfect prom queen who secretly struggled, and… M. Listen, these kids did not see eye-to-eye. They didn't even look each other in the eye. They were perfectly civil to each other, but you could tell the only thing they had in common was their level of English. Now, me personally? I loved all of them. They were delightful. I loved every little thing about each of them. I found a way to crack the code with each of them: I loved the snarky humor of my judgmental princess, gave validation and acceptance to a fellow baby queer, made fun of myself with the athlete who was afraid of trying, and offered support and hand-holding through the breakup the picture-perfect prom queen obviously needed so bad. There was just M left, and she didn't let me in.
I told jokes that made each of them bend over in laughter, and M would at most offer me a toothless polite smile. She constantly challenged me — never in a way that was rude, but that got me thinking she perhaps didn't trust I had enough grammar knowledge to be a teacher. It was a little awkward to me. I was a people pleaser, and however you looked at it, M wasn't pleased.
My greatest joy was that over time, each of them seemed to actually have fun in class and look forward to being there. They began to create a weird little friendship, a sense of community that I always prided myself in facilitating in my classrooms. Even M, though she wouldn't include me in it. I figured it was okay she disliked me if she was getting along with her peers.
A lot of the way I go about life was defined in classrooms. In classrooms, I found out that unless I wanted a cold relationship where my students would be afraid of asking questions and being wrong, I had to make myself vulnerable first. If they knew me to be just human, and not some incredible Holder of Knowledge(TM), they would learn more, and make mistakes without shame. As any teacher can tell you, there's no learning process without mistakes.
So I never started any school year by telling them about my accolades. Parents may care where I went to school or how many certificates I've earned, but kids will be more interested in knowing that I'm not that different from them. With this group specifically, I introduced myself in the first day with something along the lines of: “Hi, I'm Teacher Gabhi. My current obsession is Steven Universe, and my favorite character is Garnet. But that might change! I love loving things!” That prompted a lot of questions about cartoons, Netflix shows, and we started getting to know each other. Cool. Steven Universe or Garnet was never mentioned in class again.
Fast forward to the end of the semester. There had been a Comic Con-esque event in town, and half the group had been. I had been working that day, so I couldn't come, and wanted to know all about it. As they shared their experiences, M asked if she could talk to me after class. I said yes, of course. I thought it was something about grammar. She always had a lot of questions about grammar.
When we were alone in the classroom, she took a little box out of her backpack. Inside was a framed Garnet poster, and two small toys of the two gems that make Garnet.
“Is this for me?” I asked, confused.
She nodded. “You said you liked Garnet. On the first day.”
I nearly cried. I was so moved she remembered! I hugged my gifts, and asked if I could hug her too. She seemed a little embarrassed but hugged me back. I was ridiculously happy. Cannot tell you how happy I was. Still hella confused, because why would she give me gifts if she didn't even like me?! But then again, maybe she did.
When I commented about it with my boss, she told me that a few weeks prior, M's mother had requested a meeting with my boss to talk about me. Boss had forgotten to tell me about it (… I know), but M's mom wanted to thank me formally (!) for how I treated the kids. Apparently, M came to really love her time at the school, and came home rambling about me and my stories every Monday and Wednesday.
I sat with that for a very long time. The fact that this girl liked me enough to remember what I'd said, to give me a gift, to have her mom come and compliment me to my boss. It was kind of difficult to understand how that had come to happen, when I could've sworn she didn't like me.
The thing is: we're horrid at reading other people. We may believe we know others, especially those close to us, with precision. But we're shit at it. We can only guess how others feel based on how we feel.
I'm an extrovert and very physical about love. I hug, I smile, I tell people they're important to me. I was never a shy child, and timidness perplexes me. I have an honest-to-God confusing time imagining what it would be like to want to fly under the radar. For me, love that isn't spoken out loud is very difficult to perceive. When I dislike someone, I become as physically distant as possible to the person, so that had been my assessment of M's feelings towards me.
I came to see her differently then. Understand that her incessant questions were a statement of her hunger for knowledge and her curiosity, not her distrust of me as a teacher. Perhaps, paradoxically, she only felt safe enough to ask so much because she trusted my answers. But that wasn't how I'd been raised. I just read her wrong.
Whenever I meet someone whose behavior is different from mine, I try to remember M. Remember that while I was stressing over ways to make her feel like she belonged to the group, she was already certain that she did. That we are just different. That we all are fundamentally different. And we're all fundamentally shit at predicting how someone else is feeling. Hell, most of the time we don't even know what we ourselves are feeling.
Before we tell ourselves the story that ABC doesn't like us or that XYZ judges us, perhaps we can think first of M and me, and how we were more than okay, all while I thought she hated my guts.
Maybe it's alright to just ask each other how they feel, what they need, instead of assuming. Maybe it's alright to tell each other too, what we feel and what we need, instead of anticipating a mind-read. We're not very good at that.
Until tomorrow,
Gabhi