Role Reversal

So, quite a big change of events today. I just got back from my first day, in over 5 years, as a student. I got flashbacks from my first day at University, in regards to that uncertainty feeling, the excitement of exploring empty classrooms and scanning the corridors of fresh student faces. My first job was to find the list of names. There are seven different levels of study, within each level there is an ‘a’ and ‘b’ level, and with anything from 5-15 in a class, you can imagine the amount of names floating around the walls. I found my name, it was standing out, due to its length. DENHOLM TOBY ALEXANDER. Not hard to find. It was sitting 3^rd in a line-up of about 10. 903, was my classroom number, 9^th floor. I had a breeze through my co-students names, studying them and trying to dissect them and conclude upon some nationalities. I’d been told that most of my co-students (past statistics have proven) would be Japanese.

Well, I would never have guessed the line-up. Our first task was to introduce ourselves, in Korean of course (NO ENGLISH in class time), so as we went around we all said our name and nationality and something extra, maybe an “I like” or “I don’t like”, just something simple. Anyway, as we went around we discovered the geographical diversity of our group. From left to right we have, an American, a Frenchman, an Austrian-Korean, a Korean-American, Me, an Australian, a Vietnamese lady, a Japanese lady, a Singaporean lady, a Danish-Korean and finally a Cuban man. Oh, please don’t forget the Korean teacher.

Amazing I thought.

Something else amazing was the role reversal I’d found myself in. For the past two years I had taught myself to be a teacher, then became one, and loved it beyond my wildest and most distant of dreams. Now, here I was, being the student, sitting back and watching a teacher, teach me. It did feel a little peculiar. There were moments when I was like, “I wish I was up there”, making little jokes, funny facial expressions, and strange shapes with my mouth, tongue and cheek bones, to convey to the audience the perfect phonetical deliverance. At the same time though, I was loving the simplicity of sitting back and being a sponge, absorbing this and that, jotting down things at my leisure. A nice reversal of roles, if you like.

Both of my teachers are lovely. One male and one female. The male was very relaxed and leisurely. His style expressed this. Some loose, beige, trousers, with a long sleeved, nicely fitted t-shirt with beach/ocean imagery. The lady was a little more abrupt, styled matched this, but with that, more expressional and dramatised in actions, AKA, fun…..

The content, of the textbooks we got, seems to be all stuff that I have studied on my own, in the past. It’s material that I’ve studied but always stumbled and eventually tripped upon when it comes to the crunch, conversation. My university is geared towards enhancing speaking ability, so laminating this, previously swatted knowledge, into my conversational nature, is the goal. Fingers crossed. 

No pictures yet.