A challenge

I have recently started volunteering as a 1-1 English tutor. I signed up for it, thinking it'd be a bit like my beloved Time Together, where I could befriend a new arrival and we could muddle through the confusement of this crazy country together while I helped a little with English along the way.

It's nothing like that.

For a start, my tutee has been here longer than I have. Thirty years longer to be exact. So if anything he is more American than I may ever be (please note that it's not a particular goal of mine, in fact remaining English against all odds is more of the goal). And he can speak English - yes he has an accent, but so do I. But, after thirty years of living here, he's decided he now has the time and the motivation to learn to read and write in English, and that's where I come in.


If I were to choose two 'things' that define me in this world, beyond family and friends and Jeremy, I would say I am a reader and a writer. A reader first, because I've been doing it obsessively, compulsively, since I first learnt to, er, read. And my writing comes from reading - it's through reading that I've developed a habit of narrating my life as I live it. In my head, I should add, although it'd be pretty hilarious if I started doing it aloud, and often in the style of the book I'm reading at the time. In this way I think I was a writer long before I started committing words to the page. I use language, absolutely, to interpret my world and to interpret myself. Without words, actual words, with their roots and derivations, their specificity of spelling and fluidity of pronunciation, I would be lost.

But when faced with teaching someone, teaching an adult, how to read and write I panicked. I started to see my world of words, my language, so differently. With its rules that I never give a second thought to, that are so slippery and wriggly - almost impossible to pin down, entirely impossible (for me) to explain. To get anywhere I have to narrow my vision, to look at one small pocket of the language and explain only that, to ignore for the moment the exceptions to the rule - they will, I assume, come later. Knowing all the time that he should put no trust in this language, yet, because it will move and unbalance him the moment he thinks he has mastered a part of it. I'd never realised before this how inexact spoken English is, how vague and easy to misinterpret when it is not accompanied by the knowledge of its written form.

Sometimes it feels impossible. It is too vast. It needs to be learned intuitively, with the instinct and trust of a child - who casually accepts irregularities and soaks them up into their very being so that they become fact and truth and normal. But then I think how great a gift it is to learn to read, to learn that there are words that can describe frighteningly accurately who we are. Words we do not use in the every day but that exist as counterweights to our everydayness. Reassuring in their precision, their beauty.

So we plod on. My biggest fear is that I am doing a terrible job. I am a reader and a writer, but not a teacher, and I know that I will learn as much from this relationship as he will - probably even about my language (certainly the UK curriculum setters did my generation a disservice when they decided grammar lessons were inessential) but definitely about how to teach. If nothing else so far I have learned a deeper respect and wonder for this language of mine.