While writing the first post in the series I have borrowed from A Landscape selected at Random, I thought up a few more questions people ask me all the time that have gotten a bit old.
Question number 2: You're an English teacher, right?/Why didn't you become an English teacher?
This has always been a bit common, but since I started working at the University it's become people's number 1 assumption: if I work at the university, I must be an English teacher.
When I was unemployed lots of people suggested I should become a full time English teacher, starting with my mother-in-law. Now when I mention that I am preparing for "un concours" people often assume it's to become an English teacher.
The most basic reason I am not a full time English teacher is that teaching and linguistics were never career interests for me and I never studied or trained to teach English, especially not as a foreign language. While I was an Assistant I tutored some kids and IUFM students to make some extra money, but it was more about the limited options I had in Ariège than a specific desire to teach English. When we moved to Toulouse I ended up tutoring with Acadomia because I wasn't finding enough clients on my own and I was desperate to do anything. I wasn't exactly opposed to working as an English teacher, but the harder I tried to find work teaching English, the more I discovered it was really difficult to find a "regular" job with a decent salary. And how the heck to do you explain gerunds and how to chose between past perfect and past perfect continuous?
Despite my lack of training and real interest in teaching English, I do still tutor 3 kids in a family once a week. I heard about the family through the French American club and at 30€ an hour paid in CESU I motivate myself to prepare little activities for the kids and do my best to answer their questions about their latests grammar lesson. But if I got a raise of 120€ a month I would drop the tutoring in an instant.
I think the thing that irks me the most about this question and the assumption it belies, is that any interests or talents I have are ignored in favor of a caricature that foreigners must only be good at teaching people their native language. Occasionally I have asked the person why they aren't a French teacher when they have insisted on the fact that I should give teaching English another shot, but I don't ever remember that having a particularly memorable impact.
Maybe I should try something like replying that I'm not an English teacher for the same reason that Eva Joly doesn't teach Norwegian and Carla Bruni doesn't teach Italian.
3 comments:
I guess people ask this question
a)because there's such a demand for English teaching in France (even if, sadly, that doesn't necessarily translate into attractive jobs for native speakers) and b) because it's an obvious option, and the way so many of us started out here. It's one of those questions that seems perfectly innocuous until you get asked it all the time. I love your ideas for answers in the final paragraph - you should definitely try those out!
Someone (a French person) just said to me on Monday that she sees me as an English teacher! Though I am actually leaning towards that, but it's because I like teaching - not because I speak English.
-Shannon
I could have sworn I started following you a while back, but it turns out I didnt - fixed now :)
Your comment about people assuming you have no other talents reminds me of a conversation with a translator where I said how impressed I was she just learned french as an adult and got good enough to translate professionally. She said she was more impressed with people who managed to work in another language doing something other than translating etc. I don't entirely agree as I think she was just being modest (and of course translating and teaching are special skills over and above speaking a language) , but it is something to think about!
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