I was reminded the other night of how much I don't know about my students, despite having worked with them for months.
We were starting a unit on transportation, and our list of possible modes of transportation included airplanes and helicopters. One of the questions was, "Have you ever been in an airplane?" The student, a middle aged man who is in the Columbian army and is in the US as part of an assignment to the Colombian embassy, laughed and said that yes, he'd been in a helicopter. One of his friends laughed and said "paracaísta"--parachutist. It turns out that he regularly jumped out of planes and copters, doing patrols around the country during the 1980s and 90s.
This description of an adrenaline-fueled soldier battling narcotraficantes didn't square at all with my mental image of this person as a laughing, joking family man who probably rode a desk. We got to talking later, over slices of pizza, about the recent violence in Mexico, and how it compared to the situation in his country in years past. As we were talking, it hit me: he'd lived through the violence when revolutionary groups attempted to subvert the Colombian state, and were committing random acts of terror as well as killing civilians. Not only had he lived through it, but he'd probably been in the military at the time, actively fighting these insurgents. This is the same military that has since been accused of committing some horrible atrocities while trying to eradicate those responsible. I'd heard about this era of violence in my Latin American history classes, but it was a sobering realization that this same man who was struggling to be able to say "I ride a bike" had regularly jumped out of airplanes over the jungle and had survived some of the most legendary violence in modern Latin American history.
It reminded me that what we learned in our pre-service training--that all adult students come to English class with a wealth of life experiences--really was true. It reminded me not to make assumptions about people, and it reminded me to keep firmly in check any feeling of superiority. It reminded me to be grateful for things in my life that I take for granted--like having grown up in a stable country, without the threat of war over my head. It reinforced my commitment to what I'm doing: giving people the skills they need to be able to express themselves in English.
