An old American in my eyes
Before I knew Jack, who worked as an engineer representing their American company in our plant at that time, I thought foreigners must have been very different from Chinese, not only in their tall figures, blue eyes, white skin, but in their attitude towards life, but I found I was totally wrong after making friends with him, and becoming one of his students. He was an engineer, not a teacher, but he had many students who studied English from him. Perhaps you could not understand why he did so. For money? Absolutely
wrong, he never asked anything for that. “A strange old man.” People who didn’t understand him said so. Yes, he was a special teacher. No classroom, no payment , no work time. As I said he had to work in the day time in the workshop, he could only offered his spare time to his individual student after work, that means when his mate drank in a bar, he spent his time with his student in his office. Maybe the most interesting thing was that his students were from different age and level in English, some from junior, some from senior, I was the oldest one for I worked as a teacher , not a student like them. How did he gave a lesson for those different students? At first he had individual class for each student, in this way, he could not only make a different method for different students, for instance, talking face to face, writing a short story one after another, but also the student had courage to talk to him without worrying about other’s comments. We know , in China most people have no problem to read a passage fluently if he has learned in junior or senior for a few years, but few of them can open their mouth to speak when they really meet a foreigner somewhere, even some graduated students have the same problem. I didn’t know if Jack had noticed that problem, so he tried to change the bad habit in the beginning , it did work efficiently, not more than one month, all of his students could talk loudly in English, though their vocabulary still needed enlarge.
Secondly, he made a small party every weekend for all of his students. In the party all tried to speak English, some of them told a story, some of them recite an English poem, in the end, there was a competition, it was to make a story in English in two groups, we were given the same title for a story, let’s see which one was more interesting and better when we were telling it. All of us liked this game, for each one had chance to show ourselves.
During this time, I invited him to our school to have a talk with my students, I wanted my students to know what they were learning was a tool which was used to communicate with people. We sat in a circle, my students were very nervous in the beginning
, because most of them were the first time to talk with a foreigner face to face, however, Jack was a very kind man, he showed them some small pictures and talkedabout the story in it, soon my students were attracted by it, and when he asked some questions about it , some of them answered them, they were very pleased for what they said could be easily understood by the foreigner, and they really had a talk with a foreigner, that was important for them , for since then, they knew what they were studying were very useful for future, those single English words which used to be so boring for them became interesting and lovely, they enjoyed English more and more, three years later, after they graduated from senior ,two of them
went to a famous foreign language institute.
I didn’t expect that invitation for him to my class would change his life later
. One afternoon when I was going to leave from his office, he suddenly asked me if it was a good idea for him to work as a teacher to our school after his retirement, he told me that the idea came to his mind when he talked with my students, he thought what they needed was to practice, if he stayed in China , his language was able to help more people. And it was true that his language would not be made the best use it did in China. Two months later, he had all formalities completed, then we became co-workers. Many news reporters came to our school to interview him when they knew he worked here without asking any payment, he said: “my retirement pay is enough to support my daily life,I have got all my reward when i see the smiles on students faces ." In the world, people live in different world in different way,and they have different ambitions for life,every one have only one life,what is happy, what kind of life is valuable and meaningful,each one is trying to find the answer, some people find it when they are leaving the world, some people didn't till they die, for
my English teacher,Jack, I think he got it.
