Fears to become a Spanish Teacher

When deciding on a career path, it is important to think carefully. It is important to enjoy your job given that it will dominate a huge chunk of your life. It is not enough that a job simply pays the bills, it must bring you happiness.  

Teachers of Spanish as a foreign language have it covered: our students love us. But not everybody thinks the same way. This is where the issue of “self-confidence” comes into play (here we would need a drum roll and a bang on the cymbals). As long as we are university graduates – wow – how good does that sound – we should feel a little superior – but this is not the case. Every time a friend, neighbor or even a member of the family, Auntie Gertrude for example, says: “Ok, you’re a teacher, of maths, of physics…? Of Spanish! If the people can learn to speak Spanish in the street, what use is a Spanish teacher? After a while, comments like this begin to do damage to our ego. Later, you realize that a doctor, for the soul reason that he/she is a doctor, gains the respect of everybody, at least in Spain.

Teaching the Spanish language

The crisis limits how fussy we can be about which career path we choose to take. The doctor ultimately has the lives of patients at his finger tips; the maths teacher teaches us things that we couldn’t learn alone and sometimes we can’t even learn with a teacher. Even humble trash collectors… what would we be without them? Every profession plays an important part in society.

But a Spanish teacher that works in Spain or Latin America… What purpose do they serve exactly? An abyss of depression is hidden in this question. And so, to avoid this abyss, we decide to create an image: “professional, magical and dark”. We start to fabricate a special language: we fill our speech with subordinate clauses and words that make us look more important than we are.

This need to feel important (and useful) leads to a situation we have all experienced at some point in our lives: you’re in the classroom, with a nice group of motivated people when, all of a sudden, like a panther on a gazelle, the question arises. I remember when an Austrian boy asked me: “if the verb SER expresses something permanent and the verb ESTAR something transient, why do we say ESTAR MUERTO?” I was so surprised but I gave the following reply without leaving a pause: “because Spain is a catholic country and for a catholic, death is simply a step that one has to make on the path towards paradise”. I was so proud.

Crikey... doesn’t ignorance make you daring?   

The fear of saying "I don't know"

Nowadays I feel ashamed of my answer; I’ve learnt that it is important to overcome the fear of saying I DON’T KNOW. Sometimes we have the sensation that we should be living encyclopedias to serve our students. In a multidisciplinary world, with all the visions of language, grammar and teaching that exist, it is unrealistic to know everything… but I remember an anecdote about a mechanic that opened the hood of a car, rummaged for five minutes, pulled his head out smiling and said “all done!” The customer complained when the mechanic demanded 60 Euros for his labor. Faced with an unhappy customer, the mechanic said: “I am charging you 5 Euros for my time and 55 Euros for the 15 years it took me to learn where and how to repair the damage.”

As teachers, let us not forget that there is no problem in saying I DON’T KNOW if we can guarantee that we are going to find the solution and give it to our student. Remember to keep an open mind about teaching, picking here and there at different methodological approaches as we overcome our fears and become teachers, in the full and wonderful sense of the word.