What a Nine-Year-Old Called Shane Taught Me About Saying Goodbye Properly
I’ve spent over a decade teaching business English in Almería now, but the lesson that lingers in my consciousness and shapes how I treat every client and every student came long before that, on my last day as a trainee teacher at a primary school in Norwich.
Nine months in Norwich
I was twenty-six, fresh out of teacher training, and the class was a real mix: thirty-two nine and ten-year-olds, some from comfortable families, some from the rougher edges of the city. One of them was a boy called Shane. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but somewhere in those six months he’d taken a shine to me (an old British way of saying he’d grown fond of someone, usually without much explanation why). Looking back, perhaps I was filling the void of a father figure in his life. Anyway, we had a good rapport. The kind you don’t notice building until it’s there.
The last day
By the time my placement ended, I was mostly just relieved. A year of trainee teaching does that to you. I said my goodbyes to the class as a group: the usual end-of-term noise, chairs scraping, bags zipping, twenty-five “byes” overlapping each other.
Shane stayed behind.
He wanted to say goodbye to me properly, just the two of us. But before he got the chance, a parent walked in with a question. I turned to deal with it, the way you subconsciously defer to authority: parents first, paperwork first, the adult in the room first. I told Shane to wait.
He waited. A couple of minutes passed. He asked again.
“Not yet, Shane,” I said. “We’re not finished.”
So he shouted it from the back of the classroom in a breaking emtional voice. “Goodbye, Mr Hollett.” He stormed out before I could say anything back.
The hierarchy nobody teaches you
I spent the next couple of minutes finishing up with the parent, a person I didn’t know and would likely never see again. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, it hit me what I’d actually done. I’d ranked Shane below a stranger, simply because one of them was an adult and the other had stayed behind specifically, deliberately, for me.
If I’d been paying proper attention in that moment, I’d have chased after him. Caught him in the corridor, given him a hug and tried to muster up some piece of wisdom, not that myself as a twenty-six-year-old trainee teacher had much wisdom worth giving. Instead, I let the wrong person wait and probably added my name to a growing list of adults who disappointed him.
On the random off-chance that the now 29 year old Shane is reading this, Shane: I’m sorry. You deserved the proper goodbye.
I’m sure many of us have got regrets like these. Especially in a world where we battle with phone addiction. Look around any public space and you will see children craving attention from adults staring into pocket-sized screens. It makes me wonder how many times a day do my own children approach me, only to find me occupied by someone or something far less important?
I can’t ever have that proper farewell with Shane. The best I can do is to remind myself that the smallest students I interact with deserve my attention just as much as anyone. And sometimes the adults deserve it the least!
If you’re looking for business English training or English classes for your kids in Almería, get in touch.