Episode summary
Have you ever known exactly what you wanted to say and found nothing there? A nap-time scroll and a Kyoto English class explore drawing a blank versus work that was not built in a day.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re joining me for the first time, I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you decide to stick around. And to my returning listeners, it’s good to have you back with me again.
Have you ever known exactly what you wanted to say, right when you needed to say it, and then reached for the words and found nothing there? Not the wrong words. No words. I have. More than once. And today I want to tell you about the time it hurt the most.
This week, a two-hour nap and a stranger’s question on the internet sent me all the way back to a classroom in Kyoto, and to a hole in my own English that I didn’t have a name for until yesterday.
This brings me to the phrase for the day: draw a blank. Draw a blank.
Think back to your school days. Now imagine that you’re taking a written exam. Ten minutes in, you’re still staring at that blank exam sheet. No words, just an empty paper, staring back up at you while your mind stares back down at it with nothing to offer. That blank space on the page is the image. In English, when we say someone draws a blank, we mean the information or the words are supposed to be there, and for a moment, they simply aren’t. The page in your head is empty.
A student stares at a test question she studied for last night and can’t remember a single fact. A comedian gets three words into a joke he’s told a hundred times and forgets the ending. A man at his own wedding reception opens his mouth to give a toast and realizes, mid-breath, that he has nothing. All three of them know something. It’s in there somewhere. It just isn’t coming out.
Here’s a quick example. While teaching a class, in front of about twenty students, I drew a blank on something I should have known like the back of my hand.
Keep that phrase in mind. It’s going to come up more than once before we’re done.
I’ve been anti-social-media for over a decade now. Barely any Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, ever. I’ll use YouTube, but mostly to watch clips for my students to use in lessons or to fall down some long educational rabbit hole. But I’ve been trying to think of ways that I can increase my English teaching reach, so I’m experimenting with different platforms. Today I was exploring X.
Eliana went down for a nap, and she’s been recently transitioning from 2 naps a day to 1 nap, so this bought me about 2 hours of free time. I made some food, opened my laptop and started exploring an unfamiliar world.
A handful of posts in, I found someone asking bilingual people a simple question: does your English ever suddenly feel wonky, off somehow, and you don’t know why? I don’t know who this person was, and it doesn’t matter. What mattered was that I recognized the feeling immediately. I’d had it in Japan more times than I could count. I’d just never had a word for it, and I’d definitely never known the source of it.
So off I went chasing an idea across cyberspace. I found a 2026 paper and read most of it while my food got cold. As best as I could understand it, while examining bilingual people under heavy mental load, the study found signs that the brain will sometimes hold back your first language on purpose so your second language can still get through. The first language skill isn’t gone. The brain is triaging, meaning deciding what gets through first when everything can’t get through at once. I replied to the post with that summary. The title of the paper is Differential adaptation of bilingual language control to cognitive load: Evidence from cued and voluntary switching. It’s publicly available if you want to read it, but as you can probably tell by the name, it’s a bit dense and technical.
After that educational detour, I returned to X. I saw a few more posts of people talking about their experience with language learning. Somebody encountered the idiom “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and didn’t realize that Rome is the name of the city in Italy until after their English class was over. Another post was someone overwhelmed by rapid-fire workplace jargon and acronyms. One was about the difficulty of learning to sing an English song with correct pronunciation. And, somebody else was lamenting that their writing skills were so much weaker than their reading skills. In my scrolling I found so many experiences that I could relate to.
But my mind kept coming back to that first post I saw and my life in Japan, where I had days when my English felt genuinely diminished. That’s its own special kind of frustrating, because my Japanese wasn’t strong enough yet to pick up the slack either. I was stuck in the middle, competent in neither direction, at least for a few uncomfortable seconds at a time.
The clearest version of that lives in a weekly class I used to run in Kyoto. A free community Eikaiwa class, which just means English conversation class, held in a good-sized city with a solid, reliable turnout. On a normal week it was about twenty people. Some special events we’d have, parties really, could pull in closer to fifty, but that’s a different story. This is about a regular Tuesday, or whatever night it was, with maybe twenty people in the room.
My co-teacher then was Japanese, and his English was good, but not good enough to run the class solo. So the responsibility fell to me. I was the native speaker. I was, whether I wanted the job or not, the arbiter, meaning the person whose word settles the question, of what counted as correct English.
And more than once, a student would ask how to say some Japanese phrase in English. I understood the Japanese completely. That was not the problem. The problem was that when I reached for the English side, there was nothing there. I drew a blank, in front of the room, as the person the room was counting on not to. I’d eventually stumble through some explanation, get there sideways, and move on. But I remember exactly how that felt: like a stress dream where you get to school and you have to give a speech you didn’t prepare. Oh, and you forgot your pants.
It happened more than just that one time. I’m not telling you about a single bad night, I’m telling you about a pattern, a specific shape of failure that showed up again and again in that same room, under that same kind of pressure.
Here’s the part that took responding to a stranger’s X post to help me see clearly. As I got more experience teaching English, more hours in front of more people, it started happening less. Not because the language got easier. Because the job got cheaper to run in my head.
Which brings me to today’s second expression: Rome wasn’t built in a day.
An idiom with pretty straightforward imagery. Rome, the actual city, did not spring up overnight. Roads, walls, aqueducts, all of it took generations of people laying stone after stone. The saying uses that history to make a point about anything big: significant work takes real time, and you can’t rush it into existence in an afternoon, no matter how badly you want to.
Here’s how it maps onto my Kyoto blank. Learning to run a room in two languages at once, to catch a student’s grammar mistake, spot a useful idiom, and steer a free conversation somewhere worthwhile, all while translating in your head, that’s not one skill. That’s a city. And you don’t finish a city with wishful thinking. I’ve now taught more than ten thousand lessons to over a thousand students, and it’s that pile of lessons, not any single breakthrough, that eventually made the classroom feel lighter. Spotting an idiom, catching a small grammar slip, nudging a conversation forward, those things are second nature to me now. They cost less mental bandwidth than they used to, which leaves more room left over for everything else, including my English staying online under pressure.
Notice the difference between today’s two phrases. Drawing a blank is a moment, one specific gap that opens up and closes again almost immediately. Rome wasn’t built in a day is about why that gap gets rarer over years.
So here’s something to think about. Is there some skill in your life you’re frustrated with because it isn’t mastered yet? Or, when’s the last time you drew a blank at something you’re supposedly the expert on? The two experiences may be more related than they first appear.
Standing in front of twenty people with no English coming out didn’t mean that I’d lost my native language skill. It was load, more happening at once than my brain could run at full speed, nothing more than that. The capacity that fixed it took years to build, one lesson at a time, and it’s still not finished. But it’s nice sometimes to take a moment to appreciate what has been built and all the work that went into it over the years.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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