We had a choice of assignments in my OAC year of highschool (yes, I'm old enough to have gone to highschool when they still offered a fifth year). You could either read two novels and compare them in an essay or you could spend your spare each day for a month being a teaching assistant in a grade nine or grade ten class. I thought teaching a math class would be a piece of cake. I was good at math. Plus selfishly I thought it couldn't hurt to put down some experience tutoring math on my university applications into engineering.
That semester there were no grade nine or ten math classes during my spare. Instead I got a grade eleven general math class. In a portable. At least with grade niners you were guaranteed to be a few years older and therefore could command some degree of respect (one could hope). But grade eleven general math? Half of the students were the same age as me if not older. And oh, a girl who I had been friends with in primary school happened to be in that class. We had fallen out of touch in highschool and now suddenly I was her TA, in a math class that was two years below her grade. It was awkward. She never asked me for help. The teacher always looked worn down and defeated. I didn't really blame her. Something was wrong with the school system if I needed to teach kids who were learning to drive how to add and subtract.
On my first day I was asked to take attendance and learn the students' names. I came upon a stereotypical nerdy Chinese boy in glasses surrounded by a bunch of punks with greasy slicked-back hair. I asked his name and he stared at me blankly. The punks started chuckling. I asked for his name again but still he just stared. Didn't know the language? More laughter. One of the punks put his hand on the boy's shoulder and said to me "This is the King Man," (snickering). "He's my friend, the King Man," and gave me a joker's smile. I ignored him and asked the boy a third time with more force, irritated that his silence was drawing attention. "I told you, he's the King Man!" and now several of these punks burst into laughter.
"He is NOT the King Man," I barked and then heard the teacher calling me over, wondering what the problem was. I explained that I was trying without success to get one of the students' names for the attendance. "Oh, that's Dennis Ho," she said. "But you won't find that on the attendance because his real name is King Man Ho."
Another day I was asked to tutor a student who had been failing. I was reviewing multiplication with her when I realized she couldn't subtract. More specifically, she couldn't subtract anything from zero. Her answer was always zero. Now negative numbers is a pretty abstract concept. You can't show it with objects. You can't say "Here are five pencils and I take seven away and look, we're left with minus-two pencils!" At first she wouldn't believe the answers weren't zero. She thought I was trying to fool her and wanted to punch my face in. She could have very well beaten my skinny ass. The only way I got through to her was using a calculator and then pretended not to notice her embarrassment. After that she was more open to learning from me.
In the beginning I tutored students and did the marking. Eventually the teacher had me designing the tests myself. Problem was, the students were made aware of it which made for a lot of peer pressure to "go easy". Then during the actual tests the teacher would leave the classroom to go for a washroom or coffee break. Since we were in a portable it always took a while for her to get to the main building and back. Or perhaps she was just in her car trying to pull it together. It put me in a tough position monitoring students who would talk or cheat once the coast was clear. Not to mention the chaos that ensued when one time, during a quiz, the punks started a pencil-whipping fight the second the teacher left. Like with old school wooden pencils you need to sharpen. Full force whipping, as if you were trying to dart a wild animal. Some kids ducked under desks. I thought I was going to lose an eye.
The most interesting character in that class was a skinny tough kid named Robert who had a gold tooth. It was engraved "R" for Robert. I can't make this stuff up. One gleaming gold tooth front and centre of his smug grin. He used to call me Angela. The first time he did it he was yelling for me from across the room to come over. I hadn't looked up since it's not my name. Finally it dawned on me that there wasn't any student named Angela in the class and looked up to see he was gesturing at me. I corrected him a few times but it never made a difference. He always said "Yo Angela," and that was that.
By the end of the month I was pretty relieved to be finished my assignment. The experience hadn't been particularly inspiring or rewarding. The King Man still didn't speak and Robert still called me "Angela". The girl who couldn't handle negative numbers was still making mistakes but no longer wanted to punch me in the face. Instead she started coming to me a lot when she had questions and I thought hey, that's a start.
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