the best things come in small packages.

A teacher on the cusp of her retirement once told me, you aren’t made a teacher, you’re born one.

Her words rang true the other night as I walked out of school feeling, well, crap. Exhausted. Had struggled through severe sleep deprivation [read: hangover] to lead brattish six-year-olds in a pointless game of duck-duck-goose before teaching a lacklustre ninety-minute adult class.

Left class guiltily wondering if I’d sent my students away more confused about English than they were an hour previously.

That voice in my head at work again, bludgeoning me with the steely blade of self-doubt.

Thinking, not for the first time, f*** it. I’m not meant for this.

Appetite lacking, but limply agree to meet Ali for dinner. Food, after all, fixes all.

First restaurant shoos us away, owner making vague gestures at closing. Bemoan craving for spicy tofu and a stiff drink to mark general crappiness of evening.

Rice it is, then. Onto our local, Mary’s.

Salvation. Ever-welcoming Muslim mother scrambles to her feet. Ushers us inside, clears our usual table. Round face, bound in headscarf, eagerly awaits to be ordered in our [my] bad Chinese.

Cue eleven-year-old daughter [and restaurant namesake]. Bright-eyed, pony-tailed Mary bursts from her bedroom [a wall away] still in school uniform. Urgent babble between mother and daughter; flurry of excited hand gestures transfers attention to us. In painstakingly slow Chinese, Mary explains to us ming tian wo yao kao shi …. tomorrow I have… something. The rest is lost in translation; even Ali’s four-lessons-a-week worth of private Chinese lessons fail us.

Then a shabby exercise book is fetched. Click. Kaoshi: exam. Mary wants to read to us.

Few things get between me and my dinner. But, that night, over chopstickfuls of rice and egg and green tea and a badly-animated school book, we hear our little waitress speak slow, careful English for the first time. We hear about Zip and Zoom and what Zoom thinks of Zip’s school canteen. We guide Mary’s timid pronunciation of “is”, “they” and “it’s”. We test her grammar, her spelling.

I drop noodles and tofu all over the table in between nods of encouragement and “Yes, good!”

Forty minutes later, I sign my name and a smiley face at the bottom of her Unit One vocabulary list; she has managed to get nearly every word right. We praise her; she returns a shy “thank you” before babbling away in enthusiastic Chinese. Draws us a map of how to get to her school from the restaurant that is her home.

We leave. Mary is smiling. I’m smiling. The table is a mess.

So, maybe I’m not a teacher. Maybe I’ll never get my adult students to say “thank you” instead of “sank you”. Maybe I’ll never get those spoilt over-privileged children to stop throwing my pens around the room or pinching me on the arse when I turn around.

Whatever. I feel good again.