Confession of an ESL Teacher

I will tell you a secret. I will go to Bangkok soon to have a total make over. I intend to have a nose job and to have my skin bleached. I might also buy tons and tons of hair dye. No, it is not what you’re thinking. I don’t have white hair yet. I am not that old. In fact, I won’t buy black hair dye. I will be getting yellow hair dye.
I might also visit an optical shop and get some colored contact lenses. Blue will definitely be in my shopping list.
I will do all of these because of love. You see, I fell in love with a girl. Is she beautiful? Ummm. I don’t know. Please don’t ask me that question. All I know is that I love her. Period. My love for her made me decide to stay in Cambodia for good.
So, what’s the problem? The problem is that I think she cannot reciprocate my feelings. She cannot love me back. Yeah. I understand. I am not her type. She is looking for a Caucasian guy. She abhors colored people. In fact, she doesn’t even like her own color. She is Asian of course. But she is using whitening skin products I guess. You see, my inamorata is light skinned. Although she still looks very Asian.
Actually, that is not a problem either. It is not a problem for me because my love for her is not erotic. It is filial. Platonic.
Why are you laughing? I can see that smirk in your smile. No, really. I don’t intend to have sex with her. I just want her to be happy. That’s all. That’s why I am here. That’s why I am helping her. Call me an idealistic nut. But I really am platonically in love with her.
That is the very reason why I volunteered as an ESL teacher for more than a year. Yeah, you read that right. Volunteered. Of course now I am teaching in a prestigious English school in Phnom Penh for I have to feed myself. Nevertheless, my intention is really pure. I just want to help her.
Well, yeah, of course she cannot see that. In fact, she told me once while we were conversing, “Teacher, please speak like American. Cannot understand teacher. Please speak like American.”
I replied, “I am a Filipino. I am not an American. So, I cannot have that American twang. I believe though that my pronunciation is okay. You see, I passed TOEFL with above-average mark. Aside from that, I’ve travelled to eight different countries and people whom I spoke to understood my English.
My teachers at University of Cambridge’s CELTA didn’t complain about my diction and I passed the said course. So, I guess my pronunciation is okay. But if you cannot understand what I am teaching please call my attention and I will be happy to explain the lesson to you more.”

Let me digress a bit. One of my Khmer colleagues in school has a penchant for challenging me and testing my grammar skill.I guess he has this preconceived notion that foreign teachers don’t know grammar. I was a bit annoyed because I don’t have time to prove to him my grammar skills. I have a lot of things to do that proving to him from time to time that my grammar is okay is I feel just a waste of time. Though, since I am basically not a wary person I sometimes give in to his demand to answer his queries.

There was a time that when I entered his  classroom I saw a post on a wall about passive and active voices. I nearly fell of my seat when I saw the post. These are the photos of the said post.

 Presumably, the said teacher doesn't know that some Active Sentences cannot be transformed into Passive Sentences and one good example is the sentence "Thyrong was sleeping at home." This sentence cannot be change into a passive voice because the verb "sleep" is an intransitive which means it doesn't have an object. "At home" is not an object but an adverbial phrase. 

Let me go back to the topic. Once, my inamorata  taught me that I must pronounce “travel agent” as one word. She even argued that it is spelled as one word without a space in between. I nearly lost my patience when she argued with me passionately. I kept telling her that it is spelled as “travel agent” but she doesn’t want to believe me. Imagine, a student who cannot even make a grammatically correct simple sentence arguing with a teacher whose TOEFL iBT score is 104?

Several times, she complained that my grammar sucks. In fact, I once lost my University teaching job because she complained that my grammar is awful. It was really a sad day for me. I just wished that he saw my TOEFL iBT result which says that I "have a very good command of English vocabulary and grammatical structure."

Of course, I taught my all my students to have their own minds and to examine all the things that I say. However, I told her that I am really one hundred percent certain about my spelling of the compound word “travel agent”.
I also told her that I can pronounce it as two separate words for clarity especially when I am talking to a non-native speaker of English. Sadly, she doesn’t want to believe me.
It all boils down to one thing. The color of my skin. I am heartbroken because of colonial mentality. For her it doesn’t matter if I am good in English. For her I am still Asian.
That’s why I am contemplating to have a total make over. Maybe she will learn to love me if my skin tone will be different.
But what the heck. Isn’t it that I must be proud of my race? I am who I am. Guess I will still leave. But to look for another lover who will love me for what I am.