Falling in Love in a Classroom

In the autumn of 2008, a brand-new English teacher arrived on the campus of ECIT, in the city of Nanchang, China. Everything around her was drenched in sweat; the cafeteria was so steamy she couldn't eat, and the apartment was bare and dusty. She wondered if she would ever feel at home.

On the first day of class, the school assigned her to the wrong classroom; she plopped her teaching bag on the podium only to be approached by a nervous student, “Um, sorry, teacher, this is Japanese class.” The next half hour was spent walking back and forth across the campus that seemed so large (to a small-college grad) as she tried to find her students. At last, the monitor met her at the doorway of the correct building. “I’m so sorry,” he said. She followed him to the classroom, nervous and off kilter. What would it be like?

A posse of four boys sat in the front row, one boy’s hairdo sprouting like a haystack from off his head, identifying the fun that was bottled up inside of him. The other students filled the room, unsure of this teacher who looked much different than the blonde Americans they had seen in the movies. The teacher handed out papers with English names on them, and, mistaking a student with short hair and baggy clothes for a boy, she made her first faux pas as she offered the girl a boy’s name. The new teacher spoke too fast, and the students’ English level was low, so low that it would prove be the worst level she would ever teach during her years in China. This class would prove to be the most unruly, irresponsible, unmotivated group of students that she would ever teach in Nanchang. In days to come, she would walk on top of the desks to get them to be quiet, offer them academic points for merely bringing a pencil to class, use a cookie sheet as a barrier between a chronic cheater and his classmate’s exam, and discover that a student had climbed in and out of the third floor window during a break. But at this moment, as the new teacher and the new freshmen experienced each other for the first time, none of this even mattered.

Because she was falling in love.

In years to come, when she would remember times with her “crazy class” (as she began to call them), she herself was mystified. What had caused her heart to fall for those students in such a deep way? Why did she sob, heartbroken, when she thought she would not get to teach them the second semester? How did she put up with all the ridiculous, schoolchild behavior that happened in that classroom? Why did she worry about them so much? How did this class irrevocably knot the emotional rope that bound her heart to this place?

She didn't know why.

But somehow, that first class had found a key to a part of her heart that she did not know she had. They were the first ones to unlock the hidden door, surprising the teacher and themselves with what they discovered inside. There was a fountain of love and fierce loyalty that had previously been untouched.  And it belonged to them.

These motley freshmen would not be the only ones to win her heart.

But they were the first.