A Teacher, Taught

I have been tutoring a 56-year-old Korean woman for a whole year, and today was our last lesson together. During the past year, we had established a pretty stellar tradition of swapping English lessons for homemade banana bread. Since it was volunteer tutoring, she had elected to fill my belly twice a week in compensation.

But she had unintentionally given me so much more than just the tasty homemade “cake” as she called it. A teacher/tutor must possess a fierce thirst for knowledge, because teaching is the greatest way to learn. The powerful insights that I have gathered from my lessons with Chae-Hee can be summed up in 4 ways:

1. How to Welcome Silence:

Chae-Hee and I would occasionally go to lunch to celebrate major learning improvements that she had accomplished. While dining, I learned that it is okay to be silent. From what I could deduce, Chae-Hee feels incentive to speak only when necessary. So many of the words in our culture (gossip and curse words) are useless and unnecessary. She taught me that profound comfort can exist in silent exchanges between individuals, and soon I stopped feeling the urge to say random things to fill the silence.

2.How to Use chopsticks:

I had learned to utilize these instruments before, but Chae-Hee taught me how to use using them. Chopsticks make you slow down when you eat and force you to appreciate every mouthful of tasty chow. I was so used to using my fork as a shovel that I never realized the enchanting powers of chopsticking. This might explain why many Asians who use chopsticks have beautifully slim figures.

3. How to Nurture and love

Chae-Hee would tell me how she would go to the grocery store literally every day and cook a meal for her children three times per day. Today she planned to cook Lamb for her son upon request. She doesn’t feel the need to occupy her time watching television or surfing the web because her biggest priorities are to take care of her children and to make sure that they stay healthy and well-fed. She puts all of her energy into nurturing and loving others, while she rarely takes into consideration her own needs. One day we discussed what we both thought we were good at, and she couldn’t come up with anything to say about herself. I said, “Are you kidding me? You are an incredible mother and a brilliant chef!” She said, “Yes, I think maybe I am a good mother.” Another time I gave her a writing prompt that questioned what she would do with an invisibility cloak, and she wrote, “well I would go to a bank and I would get much money and would give to poor people.”

4. How to Construct Meaning and Set High Standards

In January, I handed Chae-Hee a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and asked her if she would like to challenge herself. Back at the beginning of the year in September, Chae-Hee made me repeat the words “How are you?” because she wasn’t sure what they meant. Yesterday, she finished reading Harry Potter. I was a walking exclamation point when she told me she had finally finished. I thought, wow; if this broad could read an entire novel in a foreign language, I could do anything I set my mind to. Every week, we would read the summaries she made about each chapter and discuss the questions she had about the book (Rowling invented an absurd amount of vocabulary that couldn’t be found in her Korean-English translator). And every week, her summaries were dead on. I was baffled, and she knew it. We watched the movie during the second last week of class and I bought her the second Harry Potter movie as a reward for completing the book. She needed no reward, however, but to know that she had completed such a remarkable feat. The smile she bore as she flipped through the pages to show me just how many she had read will brighten my day every time I think of it.

Another life-lesson I took away from the Harry Potter success was that we can construct meaning by connecting the events of our lives. I always made sure Chae-Hee was aware that she did not have to understand every single word when she read them; she just had to make her own connections between concepts or words that she did understand. Her summaries proved that she could accomplish this handsomely, and she found this advice to be extremely helpful. In life, we will never understand everything that happens to us. But by developing a positive mind, we can connect all the seemingly meaningless events that pass us by each day and construct meaning out of them. “Going through the motions” stops immediately when you give everything in your life a purpose and try to analyze or connect the things that bring you joy.

Check out a story that we wrote together in the post below this if you liked this entry. Our story might be a bestseller one day, so there’s your sneak preview.

In Chae-Hee’s thank-you letter to me (she is moving back to Korea but we will still be pen-pals), she wrote:

I had fun studying with you. You taught me how to study English and understand it. I think my English improved. You are very kind and smart, and warm-hearted. I think you will be a great English teacher. And you were a great teacher to me. Thank you very much, I will miss you very much.

I wish that I could tell her what a great teacher she was to me.

Maybe I’ll send her this entry one day and make her play with her translator again once her English has gotten rusty over in Korea.

I’ll tell her that her banana cake tasted delicious, but her inspiration tasted even better.