One of the first pieces of advice I ever received about teaching was to start with an open mind and no preconceptions. However, no matter how hard you try, nearly all of your knowledge has been attained through a biased lens, and assumptions are insidious and pervasive. I have found that one of the joys of teaching is finding these cheeky assumptions, and reconsidering what you consider obvious. 

Imagine you are trying to explain the difference between past, present and future tenses to a child who speaks minimal English. As a gesticulate person, I found myself gesturing to my left when referencing the past, the middle when referencing the present, and pointing to my right when I meant the future – trying to form a timeline in the air. This wild flailing did nothing but bewilder and perhaps amuse my student. Instead, once I finally managed to express myself, his conception of time worked vertically, as his gesturing went from up to down.

In retrospect, this may seem obvious, but at the time, it had never even crossed my mind: my gestures were purely instinctive. Upon further research, I found that this is concordant with Mandarin spatiotemporal metaphors such as shang zhou (上周), which literally translates to ‘up week’, to mean ‘last week’. The subsequent rabbit hole I fell down exposed me to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory in linguistics which posits that language itself influences worldview, adding a new dimension to the idea of language learning. 

Although a very brief and simplistic example, this anecdote serves to remind us that biases perpetually infiltrate our lives, and teaching can make us aware of them. It is so scarily easy to get stuck in your ways, so I relish the opportunity to break any moulds I find myself in. Teaching is certainly a two-way experience, no matter whether it’s going vertically or horizontally.