My teaching hobby

When I used to live with my dear friend Miriam, we were both studying at TWU: I was studying chemistry, and she was studying to be an elementary teacher. We had frequent arguments on the same thing: I was convinced that chemistry was the pinnacle of knowledge and actually made the world turn around. She didn't think so. One day, she spoke the final word that ended all our arguing. Heather, she said, everybody needs teachers. Even chemists are taught by teachers.
Even though I am working part time tutoring right now, I don't consider myself a teacher. Teaching is a hobby for me.
This week the word hobby gained a new definition for me. One of my students has been doing better in his studies, so his mom, not wanting to waste the money she paid for the term of tutoring, decided to send his teenage sister in his place. I'll call her Michelle in the interests of confidentiality. Michelle was not happy to be forced to come to the school.
She came in and I greeted her in French and she responded with rolling her eyes. I made the first mistake of the day by saying to her, "Hey, you look a lot like your mom!"
She glared at me.
"Your mom's very pretty." I said hastily.
She plopped down on the chair.
"Okay, let's see what you have for homework?"I asked (in French).
She pulled out her binder and shuffled her papers a bit.
"I want to play a game." She said in English.
I usually spend the last ten minutes of the lesson playing cards with my students, since they're often exhausted at the end of a long day. Sometimes we play bingo, or crib, and recently one of the younger boys has taught me how to play 'operation'. (scared the pants off me the first time I got buzzed!)
"Well, let's do some homework first." I said.
"I just have an English project." She said, pulling it out.
We were supposed to be speaking in French but everything I said, she answered in English. I decided not to push it, but keep answering in French.
"I need my textbook though." She said. "I don't have it here."
I saw on her sheet that she had to look up the definitions of some words.
"Why don't we use a dictionary for that?" I asked. "We can work on it together."
I got a dictionary and we looked up a few words. A couple of minutes later she slammed the book closed.
"I don't want to do this anymore. I want to play a game."
I smiled nicely.
"Well, there's not a lot of point coming here if we don't do SOME work. I tell you what, I'll give you three choices. We can either work more on your English project, or we can do some math"-
"I don't have any math" She interrupted
"Or we can practice some essay writing and translation." I finished.
She glared at me for a moment and then said, "Ok, writing."
I pulled out a story book and explained how we'd work on translating a short story together. We were three minutes into it when she suddenly threw down her pencil.
"I changed my mind. I'll do the math."
I tried to smile. I remembered Robin giving me some advice for difficult students: If they know you're FOR them, or there to help them, then they'll make an effort. I opened the math textbook. I knew she was working on fractions and algebra, so I turned to the chapter.
"I don't know how to do those." She said blankly, gesturing towards a simple 1/2 + 3/4.
"All right then, we'll work through them together."
I wrote out the question for her. Robin had made a really cool chart on fractions that I'd brought to work with me and I held it up.
"Okay, when you're adding fractions, the first thing is to look and see if the denominator is the same. Now, what number does 2 and 4 both go into? What multiple do they have in common?"
We worked through it.
The next question she wrote out wrong and I pointed it out and she said, "Who cares?"
She said she didn't know how to multiply fractions and when I showed her how to do it from Robin's chart, she wrote the problem out extremely slowly and then looked up at me.
"I'm going to do this one as slowly as possible." She said, "So it takes up our entire time."
I wanted to wring her neck.
We played cards at the end, and I asked her what her plans were for the weekend and she said she had a ringette camp and I said, that'll be fun! And she said, "No, it'll suck."
When she left I felt deflated. The school has a gentle black lab that they keep around to help the kids with anxiety issues, as they generally like to play with him, and his kennel is right beside my desk. I have 16 flea bites all down my right side from him and another 6 on my legs. He came up and tried to kiss me and I pushed him away.
I can't say that I totally agree with Miriam that teaching is the highest calling, although I better not say too much now that I'm married to an almost-math-teacher, (who does believe that chemistry is lower on the intellectual chain than physics and math), but I have to say that it is not really a hobby per se and it is one of the hardest callings. A good teacher deserves their pay, every cent of it. My kudos to all the teachers out there, to Robin, to Miriam, and especially to my mother who put up with me when I was exactly like Michelle.