Language teaching can be a bittersweet undertaking, as the narrator of Patrick Dougherty’s ‘On Teaching’ knows. It can be with mixed feelings that one watches one’s students sail away to new horizons.
But as Olivia Or shows in ‘A Mother in Six Tones’, the feelings of learners towards language can also be complex, and the yearning for home shores profound.
Insightful alone, these two works together provide a thought-provoking duality of perspective.
Visit 2014 Vol. 1 for more ‘On Teaching and Learning’, and 2014 Vol. 2 for more ‘On Teachers’. For more on language and identity, see the 2018 Vol. 1 poetry page ‘On language, place and culture’.