Teaching

I teach French at the high school I graduated from, thirteen years after I left it. The teacher I replaced is the one who taught it to me. She wrote one of the recommendation letters that got me the job; she spent her last spring in the building showing me where everything is. I keep looking for a way to tell this that doesn’t sound like the last scene of a movie, and there isn’t one. Some facts are sentimental whether you consent or not.

Before this, I taught in universities. In graduate school I designed and ran my own courses—colonialism and empire, the historical roots of the present, global cities—and I led Friday discussion sections for a large lecture course in global history. I believed, in the way you believe things you have never once examined, that teaching was transmission. I had spent years acquiring the material. The students had not. The job, as I understood it, was to move it from my side of the room to theirs.

My students refuted this from two directions. Like most true things people tell you about yourself, I read it at the time and understood it only years later. In the courses where the lectures were mine, one evaluation noted that I “sometimes had difficulty engaging the class during long lectures.” In the course where the lectures belonged to a professor and I only ran the discussions, a student wrote that you didn’t really need to go to lecture at all if you came to discussion. Two roles, one verdict: the transmission was the part everyone could do without. What students kept was the hour when nobody was transmitting anything, when we sat in a circle with a difficult text and tried to figure out what we actually thought.

What a teacher gives is slower and stranger than transmission, and I can prove it, because the proof is my own life. What my French teacher gave me was real from the start. I left her classroom with French I could actually use, and I kept using it: a French minor in university, then graduate work on the history of the French empire, which meant years in archives in France and Tunisia reading what this language had been used to do. Then it stopped being a subject at all. For three and a half years in Tunis, French was the language of my working days and most of my friendships. It has been with me for more than half my life now, and all of it stands on what she built in four years of class periods. Transmission happens at the speed of speech. Teaching is slower, and the teacher almost never gets to see how far it travels.

My apprenticeship was a year of substitute teaching across the district: choir, piano, math, Spanish, English, personal finance, whatever needed an adult in the room by 7:30. I recommend it to anyone who wants to teach. You see the school in cross-section, one classroom at a time, with no authority except whatever you can earn in fifty minutes. A junior told me she was torn between history and neuroscience; ten minutes of questions later it was obvious she wanted to be an archaeologist, and nobody had ever told her anthropology exists. A classroom of athletes I had quietly braced myself for turned out to be the gentlest group I taught all spring. Most days I drove home tired in the way that means something happened.

Then there is the subject itself. French in America has a reputation—Paris, berets, a certain kind of aspirational dinner party—and the reputation is wrong. Most of the world’s French speakers are African. The French my students learn is the French of Dakar and Kinshasa and Tunis as much as of Paris, and for many of them, French class is the only sustained encounter with Africa that an American education ever offers. The students who choose it are a particular, slightly strange bunch—I can say this; I was one—and what they are choosing, whether they know it or not, is a bigger world than the one they were going to get. The traffic runs in both directions, too: once a week I tutor a West African immigrant who is mastering the registers of American professional life, and French is the language we meet in. Same subject, pointed the other way.

My teacher could not have seen any of this from where she stood: not the archives, not Tunisia, not the Arabic that followed the French, not her own student walking back into the building carrying all of it. None of it was visible in 2013. I will not see what my students do with this either; that is the deal, and it is a worse deal than people admit, and I’ve taken it anyway.