A few years ago, I was asked by my former professor to apply for a teaching job at The Creative School at TMU. He has been following my career and at that time, he had just read something I published in The Walrus. He appreciated that I often covered the topics of mental health in my writing—which he thought possibly meant I could be sensitive to my future students’ challenges—and unlike some other profs at TMU he had always supported my ambition to be a published writer. (Back when I was his student, there was another professor there who in her end-of-the-year assessment suggested I reconsider being a writer and she made a joke about me switching my stream to television broadcasting because as she said, “at least” I was “pretty on-camera.”) When he contacted me about the position, I felt a lot less self-conscious about my use of English but I certainly didn’t feel I could be a good teacher. This is not because I had nothing to say—no, my biggest struggle was the actual saying, as in speaking, as in speaking in front of a class of mostly native English speakers. What I was worried about the most was that once I opened my mouth, my only mildly noticeable accent would get a lot stronger, the way it tends to get when I’m nervous. At that point, I’ve done a lot of public speaking, including media appearances on live TV—where, for example, I talked about many stressful things, such as my addiction—and I’ve done countless public readings… still, the idea of me having the nerve to teach people how to communicate in the language I had only mastered in my mid-20s (as in spoke fluently) was preposterous to me. But I had a lot of supportive people around me, including my former prof who encouraged me to give it a try.
And so I did.
That first year teaching, I was reminded of my first year attending high school (in Canada) when I didn’t know the language and would spend hours studying for tests by memorizing definitions word for word, often visually, and without actually understanding what it was that I was saying. I did that to save time; I didn’t want to fall behind in my education and I figured that, as I would go along, I would not only know how the words were spelled and how they went together but also what they meant.
I caught up eventually, although it took years for me to feel confident: enough to have the sort of conversation I could easily have in my native Polish. (All of my oral presentations, they were also just me reciting whatever I memorized. I had lots of little tricks for speaking publicly, such as writing out words phonetically in Polish first.)
My first year of teaching, I suddenly found myself doing a similar thing: writing little cues, memorizing, sometimes even reciting without thinking (or reading off of a page)—but this time around, it was important that I did this with the least accented English because I told myself that the students would complain about having an instructor who has no business teaching them anything about their native language. In other words, I gave myself a brand new shame when it came to how I thought people were perceiving me. This was not founded in anything; I’ve never had a complaint and I had even already done a bit of teaching (writing) here and there, I’d ran workshops at libraries, and small mentorship classes. I’d even published a few more books in English—one under my name and two other ones as a ghostwriter.
Yet, still, there I was: absolutely terrified I was going to be exposed for being a fraud. This is what my, totally self-imposed shame was telling me.
Not surprisingly, the stress I felt made things a bit worse. I’d stand in front of the class sometimes, drawing a blank and forgetting what it was that I wanted to say, especially if I had to improvise or freestyle my lectures or answer questions. I’d hear my own voice cracking, I’d hear myself speaking ungrammatically, stuttering, laughing nervously to cover up my fuck-ups… every little mistake amplified and deafening in my internal ears. This probably looked a lot less dramatic than what I’m describing here—again, all of that, all that shame, was in my head, not based on anything.
Eventually, it just got to be too exhausting. Also, simply I got too busy. As our assignments piled up—and with them, hundreds of questions I needed to answer right then and there—I had to give up my little controlling schemes and just talk how I talked, however I talked. Pronouncing things funny or not, composing elucidate sentences or not, etc. That first year, I wanted to quit teaching badly but I also wanted to see it through, mainly because I’m stubborn and I like to finish what I start, whether it’s breakfast or a 350-page book or whatever. And I did see it through. And then… I found it incredibly rewarding and exciting and the benefits outweighed the stresses—the benefits being students genuinely learning something and writing and improving their skills and even, shockingly, thanking me for helping them.
The second year was equally hard but by year three, I would start my first class by introducing myself and instantly throwing in that English was not my first language—I thought by getting it out of the way, I wouldn’t have to obsess over it, and if they had a complaint about me, well, at least they knew what they were in for because I told them right away. No one ever complained, and as every other teaching story goes, I’ve had some amazing students, I’ve had some terrible ones, some of it was boring, some of it was overwhelming and many, many mistakes were made.
This year, when I introduced myself with my ESL caveat, I had a few students disclose that they too were non-native speakers and one student told me later that it was cool to have me as an instructor to see that despite that little obstacle of not knowing the language I still managed to make it as a writer.
And last night I started to watch a cheesy (but compulsively watchable) series called "Tell Me Lies” where the creative-writing teacher is not a native speaker of English—she's got an accent and all—and I now have an experience of finally seeing an on-screen character I can relate to.
And this is the part where I should tell you how this is a story about turning our vulnerabilities into strengths but I’m hoping the moral of the story is obvious.
(But yeah. That.)