In episode 5, Brian alluded to the tension we sometimes face between being teachers and being adventurers. I also alluded to my hopes for relaxing and developing a more personal rapport with these ‘students,’ almost all of whom are older than me. You saw footage of us drinking (and drinking and drinking) with them…what you didn’t see was the ride back the next day, which was an agonizing 7-hour stretch in a cramped van on broken paths that barely passed as road – while extremely and obviously hungover. I had a foreboding sense that some irrevocable had changed in my relationship with these students, but I didn’t completely comprehend how until the next time I stood before them as a teacher.

All Monday, Rob and I discussed the nightmare scenarios for how class could go – laughter, mockery, disregard, unwillingness to respect a teacher they had seen both hammered and hungover barely 48 hours ago. I walked into the classroom, stood before the whiteboard, and had a sudden and powerful de ja vu. Echoing laughter when I stood there. Laughter literally in my face, bordering on mockery. Disregard when I tried to move quickly past the laughter and onto some subject completely unrelated to anything they might be thinking about as they laughed and laughed. Disrespect at my further attempts to get the class under control. It was all there, exactly as I imagined it. I had lost all esteem, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do.

Looking back, I realized I should have just rolled with it. I should have laughed heartily at myself, asked them to tell any stories from the weekend, and then taught them some vocabulary about drinking (and recovering from drinking). After all, their reaction wasn’t malicious – they were genuinely amused. Instead, I fumbled awkwardly through the next couple classes, trying to make the room once again a place of learning English and not of laughing at the English teacher.

So the weekend came with a couple price tags, and dignified respect was definitely one of them.