By Ryan Evans of Ryan in Chile

A student calls me over to his desk and I’m expecting to help him with the problem but he points out the window and says something about the plants so I humor him and look out the window and down the four stories to the street and don’t see what he is pointing at and he directs me in choppy English to look past the fence, to the right of the big tree, next to the house and I see it: a large, healthy marijuana plant. We mime a cutting motion and laugh.

She says my name so I pivot at the hip away from the board with the marker uncapped and dangerous and she asks me to explain a grammar concept that she won’t learn in a lesson until next year but she is the most advanced student in the class and the only one paying attention so I take the time to explain it and she thanks me and goes back to her book to rush ahead of the other students, outpacing them with ease.

On the board it reads, “Simple present: My students talk in class. Present continuous: My students are talking in class.” And while some of the students laugh at the joke, the muses for the example embody the present continuous and are too busy talking to understand that I’m making fun of them.

“I’m sorry,” he says after I ask him to stop playing a game on his phone for the third time. “You aren’t sorry,” I say, “or you would have stopped.” The rest of the class enjoys this.

There’s a quiet boy in my class who sits by himself but moves to whomever I assign as his partner. He works hard and I always hear him repeating the vocabulary. He was late but I don’t mind; he comes in quietly. His denim jacket reads, “Bursting Tires/Fuck Police/Rock and Roll/1960” like a slam poem.

The second time the person knocked on the classroom door, a half hour into the lesson, I resolved not to open it and kept teaching pluralization. The third time they knocked louder and my class reacted with a unified groan mixed with a half-gasp. I walked to the door, threw it open, turned, and kept writing on the board without interrupting my sentence on the intricacies of the –s/-es/-ies dilemma. Five minutes is Chilean, 10 minutes is late, 15 is absent, but after 30 you no longer get my attention.

Prepositions of place. I can demonstrate, with a student coerced to the front of the classroom, next to, near, to the right of, to the left of, behind, and in front of. With the addition of another student we can show between and in the middle of. There’s no way I can figure to, within good taste, show on top of or beneath. Not with students at least.

“Teacher, what is the difference between they and you?” Perspective.

Every time I give you a rule in English, I tell them, prepare for that rule to be broken by the time I erase the board.

I ask the six students who bothered to show up to the class of 15 where my students are. One girl offers up a word that, unknowingly, might foreshadow the lives of these men: alcoholics. I correct her, offering “hungover” as a more appropriate adjective. For now.

Melissa, my mentor, always asks me if I am ok as if I am going to tell her that, no, I’m not, that I lost a leg over the weekend or a student jumped out the window. Her “are you ok?” carries the weight of someone expecting a negative answer. An interesting negative answer at that.

I write, “Ryan kicks the cat” to show subject-verb-object and they gasp. I erase it and instead write, “Norma kicks her boyfriend.” They cheer and shout and Norma adds in a quiet, low voice “in the ass.”

The grammar book that I brought from the United States, written by the famed-in-her-circle grammarian Betty Schrampfer Azar, is dedicated to “Wild Bill Schrampfer, 1903-1994”.

The woman who hands out the binders handed me a contract to sign and I told her in Spanish that I need time to read it, that I don’t read Spanish. She said she needed it now so I signed it and gave it back to her. She looked at it and told me that it was a contract for someone else, that I had signed the wrong contract. I told her, again, in Spanish, that I don’t read Spanish. She seemed confused as to whose fault this was. Again: perspective.

My coworker asked if I sang. I said no. He said it was a shame, I’d make a natural baritone. He asked what I was listening to and I said John Coltrane. He said, oh. I asked what he was listening to and he said Journey. I said, oh. We smiled at each other for the rest of eternity.

The security guard asked for my ID at the door and I said something in terrible Spanish about not having one and he waved me in, saying welcome, English professor.

The IT guy walked into my classroom before class started to fix something or check something or simply to play with the wires coming out of the back of the computer. I smiled and thanked him until he left, unsure of his mission or what he was saying.

The janitor walked into my classroom before class started to rearrange the desks and empty the small garbage can and he talked to me in rapid Spanish and I smiled and thanked him until he left, at least confident in my thanks that time.

I assigned him the role of “Alice” in the small skit we were performing and he leaned into the role, adopting a high-pitched voice and serious demeanor. Halfway through he dropped the voice and I was forced to teach the class a new vocabulary word: puberty.

I can throw my marker in the air and watch it rotate five times before catching it. I drop it a lot. I always hated teachers that dropped their pens. 

Second-long interactions suspended in amber for you to observe. Second-long observations picked from a day of thousands. Allow me to curate my life for you.

This post was originally published on Ryan in Chile. 

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About the Author

Ryan Evans is a writer from Seattle, Washington currently living and teaching in Santiago, Chile. More of his writing can be found at ryaninchile.com.