Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven.

           Ten Months as A Teacher:  Part Seven


     Although I'd left behind me the career of regular teacher in a regular school, I still had some contact with Powell River and did do some teaching long after I left this coastal town.
       I revisited Powell River twice after I left it in 1970. I visited it for a couple of days in 1972 and then again for a day in 1987. On the second time I found that the town had indeed changed for the better. Now there was a mall there. Also the town had a regular bus service as well as a community centre and a library. Still, as said before I found Powell River to be isolated and hard to reach except by plane.
      In the 1980's I started to teach ESL or English as A Second Language. I did this as a volunteer and never got paid for doing it. Still, there were rewards. In this volunteer job the students were mostly from east Asia and Eastern Europe. No Chinese Leanna Leakeys or Slavic Rick Malimas showed up to disrupt my classes. Nor was I teaching sometimes rowdy students crammed into classes with 30 desks or more.
      Instead I taught one student at a time and the students were grateful to see me and learn from me. I gave them lessons in speaking English in the students' living rooms and they said nice things to me. "You are one of the best teachers I've ever had," a thirtyish Chinese mother of a very young son said after I'd taught her for about three months. "I've learned so much from you."
       A blind Russian man welcomed me every time I came to teach him. "We are always glad you come, here," his wife told me. What a difference this was from the way some of the students in Powell River had talked to me. Of course not everything went smoothly. A young Vietnamese who'd been imprisoned by the communist government in Vietnam, pushed another young man off his apartment balcony breaking a few of the victim's bones. This young Vietnamese fled his apartment and came to me to ask for help. I referred him to a lawyer.
     Another one of my students frightened his wife, who confessed her problem to my supervisor. Yet despite these events I always felt gratitude from my students. As time went by I started to pick up skills and one of them was learning to write as a journalist. I also discovered the world of phonics. Now I realized that I could have used this knowledge of journalism and phonics to teach my English classes in Powell River. Yet it was too late. The opportunity to do this had long passed.
     So as I aged I was learning to regret what I had and hadn't done in the past. Yet as time went by, my ten months in Powell River shrank in significance. New events filled my life as time  and overshadowed my earlier life Still I call my time in this mill town ' a growth experience'. Or as young people say today about something positive, "It was all good."
 And so  despite my complaints, in the end I did learn many things from my ten months as a classroom teacher.