Unprompted

Photo by Michael Maasen on Unsplash

It was Spring 1994 and I was wrapping up my first year of college and my mind was already making a thousand different plans for the summer. I felt that I had to make up for time I had “wasted away” taking a bunch of science classes and being way too busy with school work and missing out on all the fun things my friends back home were doing without me.

When you think about the fact that my entire life had been uprooted during the summer of 1991 when I arrived in the States speaking no English and having to start from scratch learning a new language, culture, and making friends while trying to survive the last two years of high school. After finally building a nice group of friends and having a more sane social life, I was dropped once again in the deep end of the pool when I went to college in Upstate New York. Saying that I was homesick and suffering third-degree FOMO wouldn’t do justice to how I really felt.

So I went home most weekends, cramming as much reading and studying as I could possibly handle during the week and freeing up the weekend to hang out with my friends and maxing out every minute I was back in Cliffside Park with them until I had to drive back to school Monday mornings. Most of these people were a few years older than me and none of them had gone on to college, choosing to work as pizza delivery drivers or taking other manual jobs like pumping gas or cleaning offices, but they got to come home every day and sleep in their own rooms.

For that summer I wanted to have enough money to afford gas and going out to the lake and maybe start buying my own clothes without having to depend so much financially on my parents. When I heard that some of my mom’s friends were looking for someone to teach them English, I jumped at the opportunity and in no time had four or five women signing up for my weekly course.

Back in the old country I had mentored and taught friends and family, mostly in chemistry, but it was always one-on-one. This was the first time I’d be taking on multiple people at the same time, and since I was still learning the language myself, it felt a whole lot like trying to build a plane while you’re also flying it. But that never really stopped me before, so I put together a study plan and got started with the weekly lessons.

Every Saturday afternoon these women of varying ages would show up at our house and we’d sit in the living room for one solid hour of English, where I attempted to teach them the same things I had learned only three years earlier. We covered pronouns, verbs, vocabulary words and started working on their self-confidence to speak publicly. In my experience, when learning a new language, comprehension comes first but not performing some pre-translation processing and being able to speak with confidence was the last and hardest step to complete.

One day I felt that we could all use something new and fun to steer us away from the routine lessons and decided that we’d all learn a song instead. The idea being that we’d pick something popular and catchy playing on the radio—Z100 was one of the stations that you heard being played everywhere—and expose everyone to the lyrics and this way learn new words as well as give everyone a good excuse to practice speaking them by singing whenever the song came up. At least that was the idea.

For our lesson I chose Big Mountain’s reggae cover of “Baby, I Love Your Way,” an old Peter Frampton tune that got popular again when the movie “Reality Bites” came out earlier that year. The day before I made copies of the lyrics and when my students arrived I told them to put away their notebooks, cleared the table and set my boombox on top much to their dismay. Whatever feelings of apprehension I had about their reaction to my crazy idea soon evaporated when the look of bewilderment on their faces turned to smiles and even some shades of embarrassment as they learned that we were going to learn to sing in English.

We started slowly, going line by line and turning to a dictionary to look up the meaning of the words that were new to them, taking the time to ensure everyone was comfortable moving on to the next line. We also only used English-English dictionaries, which was my way to get everyone less attached to doing translations and more reliant on learning new words and deriving meaning from the sentences and context in which they were found.

After 40 minutes or so of much laughter and friendly conversations, there came the time to finally see how the lesson had panned out. I moved the boombox to the middle of the table, put the soundtrack CD in, pressed play and told everyone to only listen and follow along with their copies. I could tell that some of them were nervous about singing in front of everyone, so the idea was that we’d listen to it at least once as a group.

As the song played on, I looked around the table and gave everyone a friendly nod or a smile to show them that there was nothing scary about it. Heads started swaying, feet quietly tapping, and before I could even suggest we should try to sing it out loud together, the song reached the catchy chorus and the entire group started without any prompt required from me:

Ooh baby, I love your way everyday

I wanna tell you I love your way, ooh

I wanna be with you night and day, yay, yeah

To this day, that was one of the proudest moments I’ve had as an amateur teacher.

Written between meetings, edited between cups of coffee.

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