If you're a language teacher - and especially a teacher of children or adolescents or young adults - there have probably been plenty of occasions (as you consider your ridiculously demanding schedule, comparatively meagre salary, and those exhausted headaches that follow marking duties) where you have wondered whether it was all worth it.
Well, promotions, better schedules and holidays, and the odd really "magic" class or smiling face can certainly help to ease the burden, but there is one true reward for teachers that never fails to brighten up my eyes and at the same time make me feel like a sleepy old tree in a garden full of rapidly thriving plants that I never sort of, well - noticed were growing so well...
That's when you meet or hear from a student years after you taught them.
I've had plenty of these moments, as I'm sure many teachers reading this have, too. Off the top of my head, there was the strapping young man who stopped me in the street in Korea, greeting me by name in flawless English that rang with self-confidence. I'd taught him four years previously as a high school student, and he was now really going places at a top-tier university in China. At first I didn't recognise him, but within seconds the eyes and the smile closed the gap in my cobwebby memory. When had this nice, shy, rather studious teenager with struggling English turned into this tall, confident and very well-spoken man of the world?
The younger the age of the student (when you taught them), the more profound the surprise and emotion when you meet them again later. I taught a little girl in Korea in kindergarten when she was about 4 or 5 years old (and I was a first year teacher without any real training at all in terms of teaching such young children). Five years later, I'd moved city and was managing a new private academy specialising mostly in upper primary and middle school age groups. This girl (now a 5th grader) walked into the academy with her mother, and asked for me by name (they'd moved to the same new city and her mother had heard I was managing a school there).
I was flattered that student and mother had remembered me (and had come to this school specifically based on my presence there), but beyond that I was simply floored to see how much she had grown up, and how that early promise she'd exhibited with English had really flourished. I remembered all the late night reading I'd done to learn more about how little kids learn, all the mornings going in extra early to make and laminate special games for them, etc. etc. bla. bla. - and well, sorry to sound misty, but I felt proud of both of us. I had to find an excuse to go back into the staffroom to hide the tears in my eyes.
There have been many other meetings "after the fact (of having taught a student)" like this, some predictable but many almost freakishly random. The Internet and Web 2.0 facilities like blogs, Twitter and Facebook have certainly increased the chances of students tracking you down if they remember you and want to find you. Just tonight I heard from an undergraduate student I'd taught at a university in Daegu, Korea, who has just made her way into a prestigious post-graduate international relations course at one of Korea's best universities. The warmth of her correspondence and the things she appeared to remember most really got me to thinking that - as teachers - it's often easy for us to forget the many faces and the countless lessons, but for them - the students - if you manage to make a good impression on them and turn on a light or two in their minds, they never forget you.
And if they do run into you or come along and find you - be prepared: these young people have the potential to make you feel better about yourself and the job you did/are doing than you ever thought imaginable! Not necessarily because you were a great teacher or a good person or whatever - but because the person standing there in front of you makes you realise that it was all very much worth it!
What about other teachers out there? Do you have any feel-good or gob-smacked stories about students you've run into many years after you were their teacher?
