In June this year, I will have taught English in France for four full years. These four years have been as much a learning experience as a teaching one. How did I end up being an English teacher in France?
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers
Never have I thought that I would become a teacher, and an English teacher to boot. My tertiary education was in Finance and Economics. Everyone expected me to clinch one of the highly coveted finance jobs. It could be a financial institution, or a financial position in a non-financial sector. So, there I was, for 12 years, a cog in the wheel in the convoluted world of finance:
Reports, Reports, Reports
Generating sales figures, gathering data, analysing numbers, producing statistics, justifying valuation, and verifying results.
Employers usually dressed up these numbers rather than presenting them in raw form. They especially needed to justify to clients that the fees, trailing with zeros, were not paid out in vain. The end products usually arrived in the form of a report that I painstakingly prepared, yours faithfully. The thickness of the report, in part, depended on how fat the fees were. So, that was my job: crunching numbers and churning reports. At times, I felt that clients were only interested in the final numbers. Those usually sat in the executive summary, on the first few pages of the report. As long as these figures were within their range of expectations, the rest of the report was just procedural embellishment.
My point is that my former professional background has not much relevance to my current profession as an English teacher. English was the working language, which I used on a daily basis, both oral and written. I also have a good grasp of the financial and economic jargon.
Back to School
English was not my strongest subject in school during my primary and secondary studies. I cannot recall what was being taught in class. The only memories of English lessons that I had were those with an English teacher, who was also my form teacher, in primary school. It was not what he taught during the lessons that left an impression on me. Rather it was his unconventional teaching methods, at least unconventional for the 1980s.
One of his approaches to force us to speak English was making us pay 10 cents each time for not speaking English in his classes. Each time we uttered a non-English word, each time we broke out in our mother tongue, we would reluctantly dig into our pockets for a coin. It went into a big glass jar, placed at one corner of the teacher’s desk.
In the beginning, one could hear sharp, distinct “clink” “clink” sounds as the coin hit the bottom or the side of the jar. As the time flew by, the sounds became blunted as the jar filled up. By the end of the year, the jar could have doubled as a heavy dumbbell; we used the money raised to fund our class outings.
English Grammar
As for English grammar, I have almost no recollection of anyone drilling grammar points into me. Only a fuzzy memory of having to memorise the past tense of various irregular verbs and how to use continuous tense correctly. That is the extent to which I could recall the instructions on English grammar.
I don’t remember ever having to demystify the differences between present perfect and past tense, or differentiate the four main types of conditionals. Nor do I remember learning when a gerund or an infinitive is to be used, or memorising phrasal verbs. What is a “phrasal verb”? And a “gerund”? What is a conditional and why do we need so many types? All these terms did not exist in my life before France, at least that’s what my memories tell me. Or was I just suppressing some traumatising childhood memories of English lessons? Perhaps my teachers did try to inculcate grammar rules in me, but to no avail?
English Composition
However, I do remember the sessions when I had to write the English compositions, and those sessions did not elicit favourable reminiscences. At every session, I would spend half the allocated assignment time staring helplessly at the blank blue-lined page placed before my eyes. Spinning stories was clearly not my forte. As the minutes ticked away to half time, I would scramble to put down first words that were remotely connected to the topic, on the blank page. Words that would then be often erased, and re-written or replaced by another, until some form of a sentence appeared. Each assignment was like a visit to the dentist – each word agonisingly extracted and spat out. This process would continue as I ploughed through the assignment to reach the minimum number of words required.
As you can imagine, English was neither my favourite nor my strongest subject in school.
What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?
That said, you may be surprised to hear that being a librarian was one of my two dream jobs. If an adult ever asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, the other was being an artist. Since a young age, I have always been a voracious reader, and I read mostly in English. My appetite for books did not secrete enough creative juice for me to write good English compositions.
So, how did I end up being a teacher, an English teacher?
Then, there is my temperament. My idea of a teacher, especially someone who teaches the younger generations: patient, caring, considerate, knowledgeable, passionate about what she does, good communication skills, strong work ethic, etc. She should possess most, if not all, of these qualities. My friends and close ones would be in a conundrum if I ask them upfront to pick out the qualities that apply to me. They would either expose me to the cruel truth, hoping I wouldn’t be mortally hurt, or tell a barefaced lie to protect my feelings.
No professional experience. No academic knowledge of the subject. No relevant teaching qualities.
Leaving Hong Kong for France
It is a banal story. Wife follows husband to new country for his work. Wife gives up her career…Nah…the second part is not true. The commonality ends there, at the wife-follows-husband-to-a-new-country-for-his-work part. I did not give up a high-paying, glamourous job for my other half at the time when I left Hong Kong for France.
I had been living in Hong Kong for four years when I decided to follow my soon-to-be husband to France. Perhaps it was a premature mid-life crisis. Or perhaps I was one of the lucky few who realised early that my job brought me no gratification, except in financial terms. The job was actually sapping my energy mentally and emotionally. At that point of my life, the pastime that I picked up in Hong Kong—trail running—was my only respite.
Pushing my physical limits—devouring kilometres of forest trails, racking up thousands of metres of elevation gain in races—was the only way to show I was still in control of my life. Be it reckless or wise, I quit my job 3 years after I arrived in Hong Kong. I permanently left the financial industry after 12 years in Singapore and Hong Kong. By and by, without securing a new job.
No more obligatory makeup that clogged up my pores, heels that pinched my toes, business suits that constrained my natural movements.
A New Editorial Job
A few weeks after I quit the financial world, through word-of-mouth, I met a French couple. They were trail running enthusiasts themselves, and needed help with their budding English local trail running magazine. The serendipitous situation secured me with an editorial job that I was passionate about. No more number crunching and report churning. No more slogging 10 hours a day behind the computer screen. The monetary compensation was less than a third of my previous job, but I was much more content than before. That lasted for more than a year before I decided to pack my bags and leave for France.
Job Search
I enjoyed doing just nothing the first few weeks after my arrival in France. It gave me the opportunity to explore Orsay, my new city, and re-integrate into the French culture, after 20 years of absence. The first time I came to France was in 1999 when I was here as a jeune fille au pair, staying with a host family.
Many a morning, I would spend a couple of hours at my favourite boulangerie, La Pause Gourmand—leisurely breaking my fast, catching up on the news, or reading a book. In the later part of the morning, I would explore the new city by doing a short run. For the rest of the day, I would self-study French. Once a week I would attend a French class. With a smattering of French, remnants from the 1.5 years of sojourn in Paris 20 years ago, I also started unhurriedly exploring job opportunities. Life was idyllic.
Restlessness Sets In
However, I got bored after a few weeks. Too much of a good thing. Since Silviu was working, I was alone by myself most of the time in our Mickey Mouse apartment. I am restless by nature and get bored easily. There was a limit to how much reading I could do in a day, and to doing it every day, before I got bored. There was a limit to how much language of Molière I could cram into my brain. Besides, the futile job search did not help to ease the agitation that I began to feel after the first few weeks in France.
Someone had warned me, before I left for France, that finding a stable job here would be tough due to the high unemployment rate. The person wasn’t exaggerating. My smattering of French didn’t make the situation any easier. Job search, even if it’s in your native language, is not easy. Imagine, I had to undertake the whole process—internet searching, writing CV, writing motivation letters, responding to e-mails, attending interviews—in French.
Landing My First Job
I landed my first job five months after I settled in France: a part-time English teaching position with a language school in Paris. The compensation and working conditions were not ideal.
Beggars cannot be choosers. After four months of forced nonproductiveness, clinching a job left me exhilarated. I no longer had to consume my rapidly dwindling savings, and I felt useful again! Besides, at that point in time, I was thinking teaching English was just a stint, while I looked for something else. Four years later, I am still an English teacher. Despite the ups and downs over the four years, I like what I am doing overall.
That is how I became an English teacher.