Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002

Interview with Maria Eugenia Guimerans about her article.

Secondary

Mario: So Maria Eugenia, I wanted to ask you, having carefully read your article while I was retyping it, ……I wanted to ask you one or two questions. When you work this way in your present school, um, what's the reaction of colleagues?

Maria Eugenia: Well, some of my colleagues agree with me, for instance, the people in the English Department. We really get on well but others who belong to different areas, …. they don't believe the same. And sometimes they tell me that I am treating my students like a mother..

Mario: I think you told me that this is your third school, and that your first teaching experience was in an Academia, in a small private school. What was it like there?

Maria Eugenia: Oh, it was really, really fantastic. It was really fantastic because I met Amao and we were doing co-operative work, because he taught the group Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I had to teach the same group Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the following week the other way round. So, that helped me a lot because we had to be in extremely close contact.

Mario: Yeah, of course, you had to co-ordinate.

Maria-Eugenia: OK, and as I am a very untidy person, I took the habit of writing everything down.

Mario: So that you could tell him?

Maria Eugenia: Yes, in order to tell him.

Mario: So it was a good discipline.

Maria Euguenia: It was not only good discipline for me, I must admit it was also very interesting. And the students were all lovely. Lovely, lovely.

Mario: So in a way it was a better teaching situation for you than the present job.

Maria Eugenia: For me, yes, because it was more personal. I like and love being personal with my students and getting to know them really well.

Mario: Yeah, sure. What's the history of this, I mean when does this come from within your own past, because we always teach in function of the past, in one sense, and so where does this come from in you?

Maria Eugenia: Perhaps from my university years when unfortunately I met some teachers who were utterly awful, and every time I saw them treating us as non-human beings I tried to tell myself:
you have to remember that you don't want to be like that, like that dreadful man!
The process of telling myself this hurt a lot.

Mario: Did you encounter the same kind of behaviour when you were a girl at secondary school?

Maria Eugenia: In some ways, yes, because when I was a teenager I was sent to a private school. And they were very strict and they were always telling us what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and we had to obey everything, rules and rules and rules and rules and nothing but rules. And they were very disappointed if we didn't get high marks and things of that sort.
So I always felt stressed. Overloaded. Overloaded.
I always had to do things to be better. And I was never "better" enough. I had to improve more and more in order to achieve high marks. Marks were the only thing that mattered..

Mario: So you chose English despite bad teaching?

Maria Eugenia: Despite bad teaching, yes, yes, yes!

Mario: And in the article I get a very clear picture of a set of very very operative and useful behaviours that you use as a teacher. Usually, behind such coherent and cogent behaviours, there is a strong belief system. How would you describe your own belief system?

Maria Eugenia: My own belief system? Well, I believe in human beings. I believe that everybody can have and must have opportunities to develop and achieve whatever he wants to. I think that I have to make them realise that the future could be better if they do this or if they do that, no matter what job or profession are they going to do.
I mean, you've got to be as honest as possible , to be a good person, to be efficient, to help other people….Sometimes I feel that I am trying to teach them English, but what's more important is to make them realise that they are human beings and that they have to be good persons.

Mario: As a mother with two children, how do you help them to cope with school?

Maria Eugenia: Well I tell them that it's a kind of rehearsal. They are going to have good teachers, bad teachers, strict ones, less strict ones. In real life they are going to have good colleagues, bad colleagues strict bosses, etc.. So they have to accept them and they have to learn how to live with whoever.

Mario: How do you help them to cope with the less good teachers?

Maria Eugenia: I tell them:
well we are not perfect, we all of us have internal contradictions so perhaps this teacher is not good at teaching you, but maybe he is good at helping you in some other way.
Are you maybe looking at the situation only from the point of view of a student?You have to to try and look at it from the teacher's point of view, too.
It's very difficult for teachers to deal with students. You see that we teachers take exercises home to correct, that we sometimes get highly stressed and so if your teacher is in a bad mood… remember you can be in a bad mood too….. anybody can be in a bad mood. So that's all there is too it.

Mario: We have touched on many interesting things in this interview. Are there any more things you would like to say?

Maria Eugenia: I would like to say that I am very lucky to have this job, I am very lucky to be working with my colleagues in secondary school. I am very happy with teaching, with the students, with all the learning, with all the stuff that is included in teaching because I always want to improve myself. I am always eager to know different things……..

Mario: Maria Eugenia. Thank you for the interview.