I recently completed my first winter English camp as a teacher. At previous schools that I’ve worked at, there was no difference at all between the programs during school time and holiday time. I decided to teach at a different school for a two-week period to bolster Kris and my cash flow a little at the start of the year. I was expecting two weeks of drudgery, with seven-hour days filled with monotonous grinding through workbooks with a paycheck at the end. I was instead greeted with a friendly work environment, a host of (largely) charming students, and a fresh slice of a different teaching style.
During my interviewing for the position, I met all of the teaching staff at the school, including the other teachers that would be working the camp and the head of the English program at the school, including my eventual co-teacher. I did not pay much attention, as I was used to simply working in my own classroom with little interaction with the other teachers. As the camp wore on, I found myself bonding more and more with the other teachers. At the beginning and end of every day, all of the teachers doing the camp sat together in a staff room for half an hour, killing the required time before we could teach and go home respectively. I hadn’t taught in a workplace where there was a communal space since Kris and my first year, and I realized how much I missed spaces like it, particularly if the co-workers were engaging. It was comforting to sit and make small talk, discuss the plans for the day, or even just sit and people-watch.
After the morning meeting, we would all head to our respective classrooms and teach our classes. Each class was assigned two units of a special textbook to teach, with one unit being completed each day, complete with a craft matching the content of that unit. Students would rotate between classes every two days, meaning that if a class was particularly disruptive, you wouldn’t have to deal with them for more than two days before they moved on. It did also mean that the gem classes filled with ideal students were also only fleeting. By the time the camp ended, my co-teacher and I had taught the same content and made the same crafts five times. What started out as a tentative, experimental quest to try complete everything became a well-oiled machine after the first week.
This was largely due to the fact that my co-teacher was incredible. While I was expecting to do the majority of the work, I found that it had already been done for me. She had prepared the crafts, planned the lessons, made the presentations, and even printed out and organized all of the potential homework and worksheets. When she was in the class, she did most of the teaching. I would fill in to provide pronunciation, explain a particularly complex concept, or to allow her to leave the classroom to sort out some issue with the camp in general. I was in awe of the respect that the kids had for her, and her control of the classroom environment. I learned a host of techniques from her. It was a pleasure to work with her, and the highlight of the camp for me. Were she not leaving the school in March, I would be more tempted to switch jobs to work at the school full-time.
That is not to say that the school did not offer the opportunity to me. From the first interview for the camp, the school expressed interest in hiring me, offering me a position multiple times throughout the camp. By the time the camp dinner rolled around after our penultimate day, it had become a drinking game – myself and a colleague secretly finishing our drinks each time the head of the English program offered me a job. It was an unexpectedly effective game, particularly when everyone else figured out the one simple rule, and proceeded to set us up for regular drinking.
On my last day at the camp, nursing a slightly wonky gait and hazy memory from the night before, I said farewell to my homeroom class with more emotion than I was expecting. When I told the kids that I would be leaving and not coming back, they surprised me by rushing to hug me, say goodbye, and share how much they would miss me. I had not had such a farewell in a long time, and I was touched. I was expecting nothing more than a grind to a paycheck, and had instead grown as a teacher, made new friends, and apparently impacted a group of children. Not a bad way to start 2019.
