Richard’s Pilgrimage to Dream
by Zimu Wang
Something was very different and unusual about my first Further mathematics lesson. The chairs and desks were moved against the walls; in the middle of the classroom, some blankets were laid on the floor with students standing around them, in astonishment, in confusion. I dropped my bag and went to the washroom, upon my return, there were no more curious faces, but people sitting on the blankets in a circle – among them were my peers, and Richard, my teacher.
It was the first lesson in the shape of an informal seminar about life. We sat face to face, listening to Richard sharing his experience of being a Slovakian who barely knew any English at the age of 20, who then made the decision to head out for America to chase his dream and whose path had led him, for the moment at least, to be my teacher here in Guangzhou, China. I sat there listening in awe, amazed at the brand-new world he described to me. Since that day, he has never failed to impress me in all aspects. He is indeed a magician of teaching and a philosopher of life.
Born in the small Slovakian village of Vyhne with a population of approximately 1300 people, Richard spent the first 18 years of his life there. “The possibilities that you will have later in your life are not dependent on the place where you were born,” he stated with confidence. Even though the village was rich with history and a pleasant place to live, he had grand dreams that determined he was bound to venture out into the wider world: to travel the globe and teach it how to do Mathematics.
At the age of twenty, Richard went to America for a four-month summer job as a university student. It was the first time he had left Slovakia, and it was not just about the job, but also a chance for him to improve his English. Back in Slovakia, Richard had only two to three English lessons every week at high school. “It was just the grammar exercise. I always got A, but I couldn’t speak English at that time.” After the summer, things were already getting better, yet he could still only speak what he called “Kitchen English”: the basic conversational skills to ask for directions, get your things done in the bank, and buy train tickets – but he was still far away from having enough language to teach.
After graduating from college, Richard received his first opportunity to have an interview for a teaching job in New York, where he was given some Mathematics problems to interpret. Since he never studied Mathematics in English, he did not know terminologies like ‘equation’ and ‘fraction’. At the end of the interview, he was told that his English was adequate to explain the questions, but that he needed to improve his vocabulary. Regardless, and to his delight, he was accepted and was one step closer to his dream.
During the initial stages of the first job, Richard spent every other Saturday taking English lessons focusing on Mathematics vocabulary. However, he learned the most in the classroom through his students. Phrases like “open the bracket” are not mentioned in the book, therefore he listened and picked this and others up as the class discussed, or asked the students straightforwardly how to express different mathematical terms. “Because I work with it, the next day I use it, so I will never forget it. It’s just there. It’s part of me,” says Richard.
Richard’s pilgrimage to his dream was not without a hitch. Being a freshly-graduated rookie in the New York City, he had to pay for the rent and food — a huge expense for him at the time. So he borrowed money from his parents and grandparents. But the real challenge for Richard lay not with his English or paying back the money, but within the school. He was teaching in a part of the city where the people were poorly educated, drug addicted, alcoholic and jobless, and many of these traits reflected more or less on the kids. Being constantly hungry and abused, many of the students barely cared about Richard’s lessons.
There were so much tension and behavioral problems that Richard had only 20 minutes to teach Mathematics while the rest of the class was spent dealing with issues like arguments and physical fights. Coming from a loving and supportive family, he found this situation difficult to face. “I was not ready. I did not expect something like this might be happening in one of the richest cities in the world like New York.”
Nevertheless, Richard made it through and fulfilled his two-year contract with the school. During the holidays in these two years, he travelled with friends he made in the city, sharing the cost for rental cars and hotels, making the journeys pleasant yet affordable. Since that time, he has become addicted to traveling as it has enabled him to feel how nature’s vast beauties touch people’s hearts and move the soul in a way that is almost beyond description. He invited his parents to visit him, took them all the way from New York City to Florida, where they reunited with a relative who had immigrated to America after the second world war, thus they had never met before.
The hunger for more experiences made Richard realize that he did not want to simply go back and settle down in Slovakia, get married and live a life which everybody else around him was living. He says, “I don’t know what’s going to happen in five years, ten years… But for now I really enjoy living abroad. Because I still think I can learn many more things that I and people around me can benefit from later.”
After finishing the first job in New York, Richard went to Australia where he has taught at the University of Technology. Up till now, he has already traveled to over fifty countries and has taught in nine of them. After coming back to Europe, Richard lectured at the University in Munich, Germany while teaching full-time in an American international school in Austria where the students were multi-ethnic with a majority of them from Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin as well as Slovak and Czech, are all branches of the Slavic languages. Therefore, Richard was able to learn a couple of phrases of the students’ native languages. Using these phrases in class, he immediately spotted a connection between himself and the students that turned out to be an effective ice breaker when facing a new teaching environment.
So when he moved to Dubai, he signed up for Arabic classes on the very first week, and, again, found a much quicker connection with his students following his demonstration of enthusiasm for their mother tongue. The teacher-student relationship was brought closer through the recognition of Richard’s interest in and respect for the local culture.
Presently working in China, Richard has become a devoted Chinese learner. As one of his current students Minyi says: “Richard is really passionate about learning our language! He always practices by speaking Chinese with us after school and chatting with us typing in Chinese on WeChat, a social platform popularly used in China. He can already understand most of our conversations and has no problem in having daily communication with us in our own language.”
Apart from being multilingual and well-informed, it is the unique teaching technique that makes Richard a magician of teaching. Being asked about his intention to have us sitting in a circle on the floor in the first lesson, he responds: “I learned as a teacher, when you create a barrier between yourself and the students, you will never succeed. If the barrier is not there, it doesn’t guarantee the success, but the probability of successful growth and learning on the student’s side is much higher.”
By removing chairs and tables, Richard removed the barrier between the students and him, allowing energy to flow freely. In Richard’s point of view, teachers are not almighty and teaching is a two-way process. Sitting in a circle puts everyone on the same level that every time one brings something new into the circle, others learn, regardless of their age or experience. “We [teachers and students] are equal in the sense that all of us are humans with weaknesses as well as strengths, with faults – smaller or larger, mistakes which we have committed in our lives.”
By inviting students to work out problems on the whiteboard and ask them to speak out the solving process loudly, as if they are teaching the rest of the class, Richard also tries to help them develop in as many different important areas as possible: communication, reasoning, public speaking, eye contact, posture, and confident presentation.
Furthermore, he always spots confusion in students’ eyes and takes the initiative to provide help. In a country where a majority of students are timid in expressing themselves when being uncertain about the content, what Richard is doing is extraordinarily beneficial for the youngsters, encouraging them to bravely ask whenever there is a question so that the hesitation won’t become a barrier to their learning. Last but not least, Richard makes mistakes on purpose from time to time when demonstrating his solving process on the whiteboard to figure out who is focused, thoughtfully processing the ideas shared and who is only simply copying.
All of these techniques are there for a reason. By doing this, I create an atmosphere of friendliness to build the trust and relaxation for students in terms of ‘my mind is open, I’m ready to learn’. When your heart and mind are open, that’s the place where the growth of your spirit happens,” Richard concludes.
For Richard, teaching Mathematics is living the purpose of his life, something that naturally brings him happiness and a strong sense of satisfaction. He is a spiritual educator and a genuine believer of affection who is always full of positivity as if nothing ever worries him. “Although it might seems so,” Richard says, “this is of course not true. I am not a superman, just a regular human being. Thus I naturally have my own problems and worries. Maybe I am just trying to deal with them differently, applying various approaches and techniques I learned from many people of diverse cultures on my journey through out the world.”
Yet, to many of his students, Richard is one of the few who seems to truly comprehend life’s ultimate goal and makes it more than meaningful by tirelessly following his dream while serving others. He tries to show to people that Mathematics is not only about memorizing formulae and teaching is not only to ensure the students get A’s, but something much deeper. As he says: “Through innate questioning we train minds staying alert, while contemplation upon our feelings provide us with tranquility and peace in our hearts; these techniques can help us to live a more balanced Life in the present, finding so the ways to fulfillment. And when we rightly utilize mathematics as a tool, it shows us the path not only to its own beauty, but also to the beauty of life and our hearts. We just need to slow down so that we can fully soak in it. This naturally increases the awareness of your being and of the connections in your life. From the amazing impeccability of fractals, tiny dew drops on the petals of roses, through magical colors of butterflies‘ wings or tunes of birds’ chirping to the mysteries of colossal Universe. Through increased awareness and encounters of beauty we can realize the fragility of our existence, appreciate everything around us much more and live a meaningful Life.”