One of my favourite things to do was quit my job.
On one occasion, my boss asked me what I was going to do next. I told him I planned to tutor kids, which was true, but I had really only thought it up the night before.
In what was possibly the most gracious boss move I've ever witnessed, he told me his son needed an English tutor. Then he lowballed me with my rates.
So I showed up at work again, but this time to tutor his kid, and then breezed out when I'd had enough of talking to a 15-year-old about Macbeth.
That boss handed me my first student, and I've amassed a number over the years. Clichéd as it sounds, all of the elementary and high-school students I've worked with have been my equivalent of ersatz, poor-man's teacher's college. All have been brilliant in what they've taught me and the ways they framed their lessons. They are all incredibly hard markers.
Jahnice is 7 and small enough to fit in your back pocket. She has taught me time.
Jahnice takes her time when she does her schoolwork. She reads each word in front of her as though there isn't a string of words to read next. She once told me she woke up an hour early so she could have time to eat her cereal before school started.
With her, I have learned the only way to make it to the end is to abandon any fiction of movement. When I work with Jahnice, I try to be as slow and as calm and as hilarious as she is, because I know she doesn't like to read at all. Despite her Zen approach, she'd rather be skateboarding, which I figure she does fast.
But because she is willing to sit down next to me and slowly try her best, you just want to slowly fold her up and put her in your back pocket and take her home. The long way.
Darius is a Grade 4 student who is shy in class because he doesn't want to give his teacher the wrong answer. He wants to be in the NHL.
I take a few classes with Darius: He's my professor of "don't tell me how to do it", "just tell me how to do it", "this is actually more fun than playing video games", "never feed kids sugar" and "your job is to tell me how to spell things."
He is a boy who knows what he's about and knows what he should be able to get away with as a nine-year-old. Sometimes I have to rationalize with him why he needs to put more adjectives into his writing so it doesn't look like a baby wrote his story. I used to find myself arguing with him as though we were both the same age - his, mine, didn't really matter.
Darius showed me that every person knows exactly what it is that he or she needs. My way means he should learn to use the dictionary by himself; his way is that the big-picture landscape always means more than any silent letter. Besides, he already knows how to spell NHL.
I passed my classes with Darius when we were labouring over improper fractions after he'd had too many sugary drinks and was on the verge of stabbing me because it seemed to him like I didn't understand that kids don't care about denominators.
So I was dragging him kicking and screaming though the mire of improbable divisions when all of a sudden something clicked.
In a moment the fog lifted, he dropped his shank and his confusion turned on itself. In an incredibly rare instance, solving improper fractions became "more fun than playing video games." It was a palpable glimpse at how awesome that moment feels when you are not confused about anything, at all, any more.
Jamal is my teacher of "when am I going to ever use this?"
In relation to Grade 10 math, my answer to him was, "Never. Except tomorrow in math class."
As I've worked with Jamal over the years, I've witnessed the mettle that is built when you put your shoulder into it, focus and just plow through.
Although we often couldn't see much of the forest for the trees, he found a way to make Grade 10 math make sense to him and passed his class.
So while he doesn't ever have to love doing word problems, getting through something he didn't think he was going to be able to do allowed him to grow into his gangly limbs and self-confidence in a way that adults forget they also managed to do.
Turns out that while I was incredibly rusty with trigonometry, my own Grade 10 math class did, indeed, come in handy 15 years later. Go figure.
Like all of the kids I am lucky enough to work with, Jamal is bright, funny, disarmingly sensitive and self-aware. I know for these kids, and the others I see, school can be a mountain they are forced to climb alone first thing every morning. More than likely, their teachers see other aspects of their characters than what I get to see.
But if my little army of climbers has taught me anything, it's that I'm not going to be able to quit this job just yet. If I do, it'll have to be an incredibly slow process, without the use of calculators or dictionaries.
Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto.
