i’m a real fake teacher now

Even though today was the first day of real teaching, I didn’t start till 3:25, so without any serious obligation to wake up early I slept in. This did not work so well when the loudspeakers started blaring.

An announcer’s strong voice boomed throughout the school, followed shortly by martial music. I reluctantly got up and headed to the shower. The bathroom has a door that faces directly to the patio, however, so even with the patio curtain closed for privacy, I could still hear the Chinese national anthem as the flag was raised in the field behind the school, watched by lined up columns of uniformed children. I was naked, brushing my teeth and showering and reflecting on how the sounds I was hearing must have been what my mother and father grew up with as they went to school in Hong Kong and Beijing. They were once kids in those columns too, smartly dressed and proper, while their offspring years later would be insolently late and furthermore nude as the ceremony occurred in his time. I slinked into a dress shirt and tie and thought of how strange the discrepancy was between the authority it seemed to give me and the confused individual I really am here.

That authority would throw me for a bit of a loop as soon as I walked down the stairs of my dormitory and stepped onto the school grounds. Children running past me would stop, look at me, pause and bow or say “老师好“ (hello teacher). It was so damn eerie. I would smile and nod and hope to God that a real teacher at the school didn’t see it. The last time it happened was with a girl who was running full tilt across the skybridge I was on. In the middle she threw a quick salute that almost looked like a heil. I smiled at her and muttered to myself in English about how strange this whole business felt.

I often think about the last lesson that Sarah, my lab postdoc, gave me before I quit the lab. “You’ll always feel like an impostor in whatever new situation you find yourself, at first, but that is normal and it goes away,” she told me. I think I’ve put myself into new situations so many times that I always kind of feel this – first I was a musician, then a literary critic, and before I become a doctor, I’m doing this stint as a teacher. Perhaps the only thing that has constantly stayed the same is my writing.

In any case, I made it to the office. The English Department won the custody battle, so I wandered in there (feeling much like an impostor still) and greeted everyone, then sat down at the desk I had at the front. This led my to having my back turned to the entire rest of the office (all the desks are arranged in columns), so I swiveled around to the front and started to pretend to write my lesson plan, although I’d already typed it out the day before. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, as there were six hours to kill before I taught my first class. But I ended up chatting with three of the teachers there in English; most of the other 3rd year English teachers are quite proficient at it, and they seem to enjoy the practice and are quite nice to me. The first one talked of her daughter in Canada studying to be a lawyer and she reminded me of you, Julia, if only because I know her as 王老师. Another teacher, who was on maternity leave in her third trimester of pregnancy but had wandered in to chat with her colleagues, talked with me about healthcare policy in the States and in China, and let me have lunch with her and introduced me to her Chinese teacher friends. All in all, I’m glad to be with the English department.

When I finally stepped towards the entranceway to Class 3 hours later, I saw the mayhem inside – kids everywhere, throwing things and jumping up and down the stage. I felt a slight apprehension – some nervousness? but walked on towards the front anyway and began to set things in place without speaking to anyone. As the class bell rang, I said to the sixty students “Hello class” and caught myself.

A long time ago, my childhood friend Daniel had once accused me of using a different kind of voice whenever I wanted to impress somebody. I think he meant a more resonant one. I used it to good effect while I was a drum major in the high school band, yelling out orders without actually seeming to strain. It used to make my friends jump if I did it close to them, as they’d never expect my usual soft-spokenness to be capable of making such loud noises. I haven’t had the need to use this voice since drum majoring, and I haven’t (except for a few ridiculous moments with ACA in college, like Study Nights – where it would always shock/titillate/dismay my colleagues.) So I was surprised to hear it come instinctively from me in front of this class. Perhaps it just gets triggered by rowdy crowds.

Class 3 immediately jumped into their desks, quieted down and went “oooooooh.” Then they even started applauding.

The rest of the lesson went very well – I’ve been lucky to get third year junior students, who are about 15 to 16 years old and have decently good English skills. I introduced myself, and then played games with them in English to get them to introduce each other to me. Among the 50-odd students in Class 3, I have one Jackson, one Happy, one Lucky, and one Harry Potter, and even more unusual English names will probably crop up as the week goes by. I left the classroom to applause again. I don’t know if this is how all Chinese teachers get treated, but it makes me feel like a Drew Casper, the USC film professor infamous for his brilliantly narcissistic speech-lectures and allegations that he wrote his own Wikipedia page (a big no-no on the Internet). Still, I at least feel useful and a little bit more worthy of all the special treatment I am receiving, and a little less like an impostor.

The kids did not really ask about my ethnicity, save for two who came up later and asked me if I was Japanese.