I especially hated classes that lasted an hour and a half. I would walk in and look at the students. At first I would feel I must try, I must make an effort to vary things. I would begin by going over the last lesson, asking the beginners “Where do you live?” and letting each one name a street or a suburb, and then asking them “Where are you from?,” and, slowly and patiently, like explaining a piece of algebra, like pointing out the difference between a square and a triangle, I would try to make them aware of the difference between “I am” and “I do.” “Where do you live?” I asked. And then I would select one of them and ask her or him to put the question, and sometimes I would discover that the person I had chosen, my student, who had been listening to me explaining all of this for an hour and a half at a time, could do nothing, neither ask the question, nor understand my original command. In my eagerness, I must have often confused them.

But this did not stop me going back over everything. I tried to speak slowly to help the ones who could not make out a word of what I was saying. I told them to write their own questions starting with “do”; I carefully introduced new items of vocabulary. This was how each class began. For the first ten minutes I felt energetic and anxious that these people in front of me would learn and remember. I wrote on the blackboard for them. I moved about as I spoke. But soon the first temptation came to look at my watch, to wonder how much longer I would be stuck in this airless room. And it would always be disappointing, no matter how long I put off looking. Only ten minutes would have passed, or only fifteen, or only seventeen and a half. There was more than an hour to go, and no break.

Then they would open their textbooks. The beginners’ book was called First Things First. They were always happier looking at the pictures. I sat at the desk and we went through all the drills the book suggested. They asked me questions, they asked each other questions, they answered questions. They practiced the negative.

Most days I felt such relief when the class was nearly over that I was able to summon new energy and liven them up before they walked back out into the world. They could catch buses and trains to the suburbs, have coffee or a beer in one of the bars below the school. I had another hour-and-a-half class to teach. When I gave the class pieces of writing to do, or divided them into groups and told them to make up a story, I dreamed that I could walk out of the building and never come back.