Teacher Culture

Well, it’s official: I’m a teacher. I know I shouldn’t be so surprised, as nearly my entire purpose for coming to Paraguay was to teach English, but this realization caught me a bit off-guard last week. You see, I went to my first teacher’s conference, a cultural experience in and of itself, and what you might call my own personal initiation into the world of teaching. The conference, a short bus ride away in another suburb of Asuncion, was organized for teachers from Christian schools all over the country by a Christian book publisher. It was held in a mega-grocery store supercenter with several conference halls perfect for lectures and workshops and practicals.

My first impression when I arrived was how out-of-place I looked in line waiting for my conference materials. There were only a dozen or so men out of a dozen hundred or so participants, and of these I was easily the tallest and blondest, too. In a game of which-one-doesn’t-belong-with-the-rest, I was the easy-to-find and sure-fire answer to the not-so-difficult puzzle. Although I looked and felt so strange among a group of so many Paraguayan women, though, there was something quietly reassuring about being in a group of teachers. I felt relaxed, like things would be taken care of, and that I’d learn something from all the nice folks around me if I cared to. I felt like I was at home once again in elementary school amongst a group of mentors just like my own dear teachers of school-years past. I’m pretty sure I even saw in the crowd my own first-grade teacher, Mrs. Roush, alongside many precious other educational characters that have had such a great impact on my life.

I realized, too, that the looks, attitudes, and even the personalities of teachers transcend cultures and countries. The relaxed-but-professional clothing, the cloth tote bags, and even the uniquely teacher haircuts of these Paraguayan educators proved they shared a common culture with their North American counterparts. The way they spoke one with another, their friendly glances, and their proud, but not too proud, postures betrayed the fact that they were all educators. The teachers’ interest in learning new methods of teaching and excitement at prospects for creativity in the classroom, finally, showed me, too, that they were all of a very special and unique sort.

The main-hall lecture consisted in the recounted history of the many psychologies of modern learning, starting with Pavlov’s behavorialism and ending with the more recent constructivist approaches to education. The smaller lectures proved even less inspiring, with more-or-less demagogic professors teaching common-sense methods for classroom instruction while at the same time always lamenting the quality of education in the Paraguayan school system. I had the chance to attend one such lecture on story-telling within the classroom, and ended up leaving some hour and a half later with very few practical things that I could put to use as an itinerant English teacher. Despite the impracticality of the conference, however, I’m very satisfied that I had the chance to attend. I had the double privilege of being invited to a mysterious and obscure “teacher in-service-day” while also being initiated into their top-secret culture; a culture, I learned, that transcends even the boundaries of language, frontier, and time.