Learning is a funny thing...

Today, I was the teacher.

That's really weird to write and repeat in my head. Today, I was the teacher.

I was the teacher.

I have been in school for as long as I can remember and a couple years more. It has defined my life to this point. When people asked; what do you do? I chuckled, brushed the question off and responded, without belief and devoid of any seriousness, "I'm a student". In forms filled out at the doctor’s office, DMV, or the bank I have been a ‘Student”. My whole life I have been a student. In preschool, when I was four years old and moved to France with my brother and mother, I was placed in a public school where I learned to be thief, and became quite good at it. When I was in kindergarten, at the age of five I learned that being a thief didn’t feel good and wasn’t right for me. In fifth grade, I struggled to learn what a theme in literature was, and in eighth grade, I learned what it was like to really kiss a girls lips. Highschool and college were periods of learning so vast and fathomless I am too young still to see its true bottom. There were moments full of joys and heartaches, insight and confusion, ruin and reconstruction.

I was always that kid. That bastard of kid that teachers often loathed to see, but at the same time smiled slightly when I would saunter through the door. I am positive, more so than most other things in my life, that I have caused not one, but a multitude of gray hairs in most every teach that has ever come into contact with me. I have been called ‘cavalier!’, a kid with so much unutilized ‘potential’. Those words permeate through most of my youth’s report cards. ‘Potential’, it still makes me smirk. I was a punk, a leader, an opinionated (often wrong, but never in doubt) little shit that somehow got anyway with murder while the other kids seemed to get blamed for it. This kid sounds egocentric, and he was. The world was about him, what child’s world isn’t?

Suddenly, today I found myself teaching my first English class to five eight-year-old French children. I was no longer the one giving the gray hairs, but stepping into the world of receiving them.

I am in a small, crowded, makeshift classroom on a glorified farm outside the town of Plélauff, France. Its mid-August and it is a complete ghost town. There isn’t even a bakery and the church is locked up. A French town without a bakery or a church is something I will not speak of further because mentioning it seems blasphemous to me. I am looking down at Camille, Manuel, Stacy, Mathieu, and Sophie looking up at me with curious, semi-prudent eyes. I introduce myself and try to explain we will be learning about the weather and appropriate clothes to wear in said weather. This seems elementary, and it was, it had to be. Thirty minutes into it the lesson, after I had gone through serious doubts as to why I had even considered a path that placed me in the same shoes of so many adults I had cursed under my breath countless nights before a major due date, we had a moment. It was sweet and short, like most things beautiful in the world. The lesson finally clicked with the kids and a spark came out of their eyes. They became excited about the weather being ‘hot’ and wearing ‘shorts’ because of the heat. I couldn’t stop smiling, I was teaching someone something as insignificant as what hot and cold were, but that felt like a triumph. I finally realized why my childhood teachers were willing to put up with my friends and my bullshit. It was for moments like these. Those sparks, those mental clicks where a students finally understands derivatives, throws a beautiful pot on the wheel, or understands the symbolism behind Rose’s breast feeding at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. It gives teachers something special. I felt that today for the first time and it taught me something. I was the teacher today, but I never want to stop learning, regardless of subject matter.