Mai Samih expounds on the trials and tribulations of teaching and admits being bowled over by its potentials When I wholeheartedly took journalism up as a career, I never imagined that the teaching profession was in the cards for me. It was when I was working on a story that I was asked the impromptu question, "What about teaching at university?" To be honest it took me a month of consideration, then I decided to give it a try. I vividly remember my first day. I had a flood of questions for everyone who came my way. I was running around in every direction trying to find my way around the huge identical buildings that make up the Faculty of Dentistry at the university where I was assigned to teach English. The ground floors of both the Theoretical and Scientific Buildings of the faculty were like mazes. If you got lost on the ground floor of the Scientific Building, you had to live with the smell of formaline lurking in your nostrils for the rest of the day. When I asked my colleagues or the floor attendants the way to an entrance that would lead me straight to my lecture hall without passing by the anatomy labs, I was invariably met with a wide grin. I could almost hear them say to themselves, "there we go again; another new teaching assistant who can't find her way around." I felt like a five-year-old on her first day at nursery school. I would ask questions like when does teaching begin? Which bus am I supposed to take to go home? Where can I register? When will I get the timetable? And I got it after it was changed half a dozen times. If there was an advantage to shifting timetables it was that it gives you the feeling that you have been teaching for years, in addition to some know-how to the workings of the university administrative system. I got to know so many students that I didn't end up teaching that it became difficult to remember the names. One colleague had once warned me against forgetting the names of my students and the members of staff. It felt like I had a long way to go. One of my students sympathised with me and wrote the name of his colleague that I kept mispronouncing on a piece of A4 paper and held it up over the head of his colleague so that I would remember it. The whole class burst out laughing. Only the outstanding students were the ones whose names managed to stick to my memory. The disadvantage of changing timetables is that one gets attached to some students and then winds up submitting their course to someone else. One of my drama professors once told me that it was advisable for a teacher to take acting lessons before teaching. This is because, he said, a teacher is like an actor; the platform is like a stage; the students like spotlights. This is exactly how it felt when I began my first lecture. I had always been the kind of girl who sits at the back or corner of a classroom; the shy girl whose face turns crimson if she is asked to answer a question and ends up giving only part of the answer and forgetting the rest of it out of fear of getting it wrong. For the first five minutes, there were 120 eyes focussing on me like spotlights. After managing to get a hold of myself, I threw the ball in their court by asking them their names and general questions about their lives. The atmosphere soon changed. It was like I had focussed the spotlight on each and every one of them. Within minutes, the ice melted and we all had a good laugh. I became aware that the more you try to bridge the gap between a student and yourself, the more you gain his or her attention. In order to be a successful teacher, you have to establish a personal rapport with your students; you have to forget that you are the teacher and that they are the students. In order to be a good teacher, you have to be a good student first; never the other way round. Think how you would like to be taught and that is usually the best method of teaching a certain subject. The onus is on the teacher to understand the logic by which the student's mind operates, thus adapting the teaching technique to suit that logic. The ultimate warning sign for a teacher is when a student falls asleep during class. After the long hours of revision, writing examination questions, meetings, more meetings and marking stacks of exam papers, it was time to look at the results. I was more worried as a teacher than I ever was as a student about the results. I was always the one in my family with the nerves to check the score boards for the grades of almost everyone in my extended family. "You've got the nerves of a surgeon. I don't know why you chose to go to the literature department. You should have gone to medical school," relatives used to comment. But I had always wanted to study English and reading English literature was my hobby. With all due respect to surgeons and doctors, I don't think I would have been comfortable in a white coat. I always had the picture in my mind that a university professor would typically be clad in a suit and smoking a pipe. But such an image concocted from films and embedded in my thoughts vanished when I was introduced to my colleagues, both male and female, who were quite casual in dress on campus. What a great relief that was! I was never able to concentrate on elegant gear and high heels anyway. Teaching turned out to be a breeze after all, with most of my students passing the exam with high scores. The best feeling of all was the one I got when I met one of my students who had aced the exam. I felt that this was my humble contribution to the building of a sound society; forming the minds of a new generation. Learning to give as a teacher has made my life complete.
