The Value of Communication

Since I was a little girl I have heard that effective communication is key to a relationship. Somewhere in the back of my mind it always applied to a romantic relationship considering that the people who told me this were always talking about love, the perfect marriage, and so forth.

It was just this term that I realised just how important communication is to all of life. I'm currently living and working as an English teacher in a foreign country. Their customs here are far different from mine or the ones I'm used to. They are used to every one has a job, and if it isn't their job, they don't do it. They pass things on to other people, with no one clearly taking responsibility.

Normally, I would read about this sort of behaviour in my myriad of anthropology books, have a chuckle, and think barely anything of it for the book would explain in great detail how things work. It seem to be different when you are actually living in the world though.

In any event, after living here and trying to work through it all, I realised that communication was more important in every day life than I had ever given it credit for. Due to the culture differences, no one would tell me what my job would entail, nor what was expected of me, what the students knew and didn't know, what they needed to know, etc. This made my job difficult, but not impossible. I proceeded to try the best I could to figure out the answers to the questions of what exactly I was supposed to do and needed to do for this group of students so they could get the best education for their money.

As the term progressed some students would talk to me about what they wanted me to change. "Talk faster", "talk slower", "please let us do more oral English" and more. These comments were extremely helpful as they helped me change the class about for them to help them learn. However, this was only a select group of students who had the courage to talk to the teacher. I had already known they were going to be a shy group, as that is what the culture is like, but I didn't know they would be like statues. They are extremely difficult to get to show any sort of emotion, so I couldn't tell if they understood or not.

It took several weeks for me to really start lamenting the fact that they didn't respond in any way, nor did they actually communicate with me on much of any level until the end. Shyness was taken into consideration in my nightly contemplation of what I was doing wrong. No matter how hard I tried to think of it, I could not clearly see an answer to my problem. I needed the students to communicate with me.

A month and half passed and I had my first meeting with the head of the department. I told her my woes, and only then did she tell me all that the students had related to her. At this point, there was only a month more in the term, so I couldn't change a whole lot. However, apparently the majority of the students didn't agree with those that spoke up to me, asked questions, and showed an interest. Those students told the dean what they needed, but the dean never told us. It was not her job, after all. It was the job of the foreign affairs specialist that they fired shortly after I got the job.

A full term went by. It was my first time teaching on my own. I did a horrible job, I think. I can pin many things that I would have done differently if only I would have known. Communication is the key to understanding cultural differences, getting the most for your money, and quality out of life, in my opinion now. I'm sure I'll never take it for granted again when some one actually opens their mouth to tell me something, whether that something is what I want to hear or not.