So, und morgen ist es nun soweit und ich beginne mit einer nagelneuen Alphaklasse. Ich habe mich vorbereitet und gelesen und ausgeschnitten und gezeichnet und laminiert und gute Vorsätze gefasst, als ob es Neujahr wär. Dieses Mal werde ich die beste Lehrerin sein. Alles wird großartig werden und alle meine Schüler werden in 18 Monaten den Test bestehen.
Und jetzt werde ich das Gefühl nicht los, dass wenn ich morgen besser sein werde – war ich dann gestern schlecht? War ich in den letzten zwei Jahren nicht gut genug für sie? Wenn ich sie mehr angetrieben hätte, hätte ich damit ein paar langsamere ganz verloren, aber vielleicht den besseren eine Chance verschafft? Und werden sie jetzt wegen mir scheitern?
Ich will, dass sie es schaffen. Ich will, dass sie von hier weggehen und Erfolg haben in ihrem neuen Leben in diesem Land, das so anders ist als ihr eigenes, das sie nicht freiwillig verlassen haben.
Ich muss meine Grenzen als Lehrer akzeptieren. Ich muss die Grenzen von Schreib- und Sprachunterricht im Allgemeinen akzeptieren. Das ist schwer.
So, tomorrow I am starting a brand-new alpha class. I’ve been preparing and reading and cutting and drawing and laminating and making resolutions as if it were New Year’s. This time I’m gonna be the best teacher. Everything will be great and all my students will pass the test in 18 months’ time.
Which leads me with this nagging feeling that if I will be better tomorrow – was I bad yesterday? Was I good enough during the last two years? If I had pushed them more – lost a few slow ones along the way but perhaps given the better ones a fighting chance? Are they now going to fail because of me?
I want them to succeed. I want them to go on from here and make a success of their new life in this country that is so different to theirs that they didn’t leave voluntarily.
I have to accept my limitations as a teacher. I have to accept the limitations of writing and language classes in general. This is hard.
eklastic 
Don’t beat yourself up, Elke….not all students want to learn
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Oh, they all wanted to learn. It is just that they often didn’t have the skills to learn, and in some cases the capacities.
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Tricky, when they don’t have the capacity…
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For many of them it is not easy, they are older (younger than me, but older), have little – if any – educational background, lived in a almost exclusively oral environment, and often never had any contact with another language (this last one is not true for all of them).
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Living in an almost exclusively oral environment…..truly restricting for learning, I see
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Not necessarily. But our culture is very script based.
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Maybe somebody can help me: I was about to answer to a comment on this page when Henry (the cat) walked over my keyboard. And the comment was trashed. — I used to be able to un-trash comments but I don’t seem to find the function anymore. Any ideas what I could do?
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Get a dog! 🙂
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I enjoyed this post, Elke.
Learning anything can be difficult – questions of experience, confidence, openness, ability (though I usually put that lower than the other elements). I love learning languages, but I can still feel overwhelmed at the beginning, especially with something very different to English (e.g. Korean), but my experience tells me that eventually the light will switch on. I’m sure many of your students don’t have that element to give the hope, and must be stressed my many other elements in there life.
That said, I think teaching is harder! So well done – keep up the good job
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Thank you
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