She stared at me with such confusion that I was actually taken aback. "But how can you assess us properly if you do not give us an exam that has right or wrong answers?" she asked. I tried to explain my method of teaching to this sophomore university student, stating my belief that students being able to orally express their opinions, ideas and reasoning is just as valuable as knowing a right or wrong answer, that the "why" is just as important as the "what." However, during my explanation, I kept wondering if I was simply confusing her even more. She was so concerned. So serious. If I do not give the class an exam that has right or wrong answers, then how can I possibly grade them fairly? If everyone has different opinions, then how can we know who is the best?

Her question was genuine, based on intelligence, curiosity and skepticism. The departure from the standard "Can you speak Chinese?" or "Can you use chopsticks?" was a welcome one, and it showed that this student really cared about her education and whether or not it was fair. I tried again to explain more clearly. Eventually, she seemed to accept my answer, but I could tell that she would ponder it for a while. And so would I.

I began to think about what it means to be a teacher and, more importantly, what it means to be a foreign teacher. I am here in China to teach English, a skill that is valued as a key component for this country's continued development, but is that where my job ends? What does it mean if my students can speak English, but they cannot understand how native English speakers think or behave? I constantly strive not only to give my students challenging and stimulating lessons, but also to compel them to study me--the way I act, what I laugh at, the topics I choose to discuss, which all hold invaluable insights into Western culture that the students simply cannot get from any book. Learning a language is not just about sentence structure and vocabulary. It's about culture, understanding and history. It's about communicating between countries and learning to accept differences, while embracing the much greater similarities.

As a foreign teacher I am a wonderful well of knowledge that they can draw from freely, but it's up to me to give them access. Helping my students feel comfortable with a foreigner, getting them to ask as many questions as possible about differences in our ways of life and handing them a key to the Western world though my eyes are more important than any rule of grammar I could ever teach them.

So it seems to me that the main question is not what we are teaching, but why we are teaching. Why do foreigners all over the world travel far from what they know to teach children and adults in other countries? The world is getting smaller by the day, with new foreigners and tourists arriving in China every hour seeking answers to the mysterious East. And many people do not just want to visit a place as wonderful as China, but rather they want to be a part of it. Getting a job as a foreign teacher is a popular and fairly easy way to do this, but the actual job of being that foreign teacher is by no means simple. Too many foreign teachers get lost in their work, struggling to "perfect" their students' English, while missing a unique opportunity for cultural exchange and personal enrichment.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my students the other day about making friends with foreigners. He told me that he thought it was difficult because it's hard for Chinese students to imagine that they have anything in common with people from other countries. It was such a simple thought, but one I had really never considered. I know I'm a foreigner in their eyes, but I had never realized that they might feel shy around me because all they see are differences, both inside and out. I had always thought that their shyness was due to lack of language perfection, but it was coming from lack of understanding. I hope I'm showing them that, at the root, we are all similar.

That is the real reason why we teach in foreign countries. To help bring our worlds closer together and open up the idea of a language not just being a tool for communication, but communication itself.