"Teacher, Teacher"

If I were to ask you which word you think that Moroccan students of English would say more than any other in the classroom, you might guess some boringly common word like "the", "of" or "and".

And in theory you would be right. But we all know that real life experience ranges far from the theoretical and statistical "truths" that we expect every particular situation to conform to.

After a week of teaching English to Moroccan students who range in age from 10 to 40 (not all in the same class, of course), I can testify with absolute certainty that, of the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, the most common word that comes out of their mouths is "teacher".

While they may use "the" and "and" in most sentences, the students match and surpass those words' occurrences with their repeated pleas for permission to speak in class.

From the very first day, this sort of behavior has baffled me. I admit my memory of elementary school has faded, and my conception of the real life classroom has faded into some sort of ideally-ordered learning laboratory thanks to a year teaching extremely well-behaved Ivy League students. However, it still seems that if a student is going to say something in class, it would be more logical for the student to say the answer, rather than repeating ad nauseam my job title.

What I do remember from elementary school (students of which compose only two of my six classes, in any case) is that we would get in trouble for "blurting out the answer"--readers who were forced to endure time in class with me when I was younger are free to comment on how often I was a perpetrator of this offense--but I don't ever recall being reprimanded taking the relationship of the person in front of the class with the rest of us and repeating it as if it were going out of style. And I am inclined to think that I do not remember it happening because it did not happen. I remember my fellow students and myself as the all-or-nothing sort of children: either we blurted out the answer or we respectfully attracted the teacher's gaze by straining our arms skywards and perhaps grunting to emphasize our exertion.

I realized today that my students' insistence on addressing me as "teacher" extends beyond merely those in my classroom. When one of the Moroccan employees came around to collect attendance, he held out his hand to request my attendance sheet and addressed me very respectfully as "teacher".

At that point, it dawned on me that "teacher" was being used as a form of address in the way that we might say "professor" or "sir", a conclusion that is confirmed by how the Arabic title for teacher (الاستاذ - "al-ustedh") is used.

This realization made me feel slightly better about the situation. Their use of "teacher" represents what linguistics call "first language interference". Students take a structure from their native language and extend it into the second language (or third or fourth language, as the case may be) without realizing how it fits into the new social and linguistic context.

However, I still think I would prefer that, if they are going to say something, they would just skip straight to blurting out the answer. At least then, I would be exposed to more of the lexicogical variety of the English language.