La Vida Idealist

Last week was my last of teaching.

It made for a week of fun and a week of sadness. In every class, we had a party, which ranged from me bringing cookies to every student chipping in to make food. Some members of my intermediate classes and I grabbed beers afterward, extending our lessons into the night and onto the somewhat earthier aspects of English (for example, one particular term, they learned, does not just signify the excrement of male cattle).

But underlying the fun was the downer of goodbye. I noticed many students lingering after class longer then they normally would have. The female students gave me cheek kisses, a familiar Costa Rican gesture we’d avoided to this point. Almost every class asked when I’d be back, to visit or to teach again. When the last of each group went home, I took one of those breaths where a weight falls from your chest to your stomach.

I imagine every teacher goes through this. You take the time to get to know the students, you build relationships with them, and then like a jarring film edit, the semester is over and they move out of your life.

Teachers always say how rewarding it is to hear from former students. Maybe 15 years later, a student runs into you at the grocery store or sends you a letter, and they tell you how much your class made an impact on them. You like this because, admittedly, it provides some validation for what you’ve done. But you also like it because you want the best for every person who ever sat in your class.

The particular wrinkle of TEFL is that it’s insanely unlikely that you’ll be able to see your students again. To teach in a foreign country means never being sure if that ambitious but poor student opened his restaurant, never being sure if that super-smart but boy-crazy teenager pursued her career dreams or ended up with a kid at 17.

So, to Adolfo, Agustin, Angie, Arelis, Bryan, Carlos, Cisleny, Dinnia, Elder, Eleicer, Fabio, Grace, Jonathan, all three Josés, Leidy, Keilyn, Luis, Luis Zuñiga, Manuel, Mary, Milagro, Monica, Rebeca, Roy, Saul, Tatiana, William, and Zeneida: I hope you guys find success, however you choose to define it. And I hope I taught you well enough to understand all that.

Luckily for us, Kent Green will continue to write for La Vida Idealist after he leaves Puerto Jiménez.

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