This year I will be celebrating 20 years of my career in language teaching. I taught my first language class when I was 14. Since then, I have taught people of all ages and different ethnic origins. I have taught little kids (extremely rewarding but incredibly difficult), older people (a little awkward and often intimidating), teenagers (draining but fun), and college students. I love teaching and believe that it is one of the most exciting, rewarding professions in the world. Do you know this beautiful feeling of being slightly buzzed, when your inhibitions fall away and you feel like you are about to take off and fly? Teaching provides me with this feeling that people search for through alcohol and chemical substances. Not everybody experiences this amazing feeling of a contact with your student audience that goes beyond words. But once you do, you will not want to give it up.
There is, however, one huge downside to teaching. It's the week before the Fall semester begins. No matter how much teaching experience you have, the week before classes you feel terrified. All you can dream about is how you will enter the classroom on the first day of classes, and everything will go wrong. You keep replaying your class plans in your head obsessively, which is something you never do for any but the first-day classes. Many teachers stop sleeping and eating because they are so nervous. Many start having panic attacks. On the first day of classes, you can observe educators with decades of experience walking around white-faced, wth their hands shaking and their teeth chattering in fear. Of course, all that disappears the moment you cross the threshold into your classroom and connect with your audience.
My classes start on August 23. I will be teaching all of my classes on that day and I'm already shaking with terror.
My classes start on August 23. I will be teaching all of my classes on that day and I'm already shaking with terror.
7 comments:
Nice post and, even if my level of experience in teaching is so low, I agree with you!
Unfortunately, it's impossible now for young smart men to be a teacher in some kind in Québec. I try to find someone who is good in business to start a non-school firm in education and nobody sees a market for that here, and they're right on this! Education is controlled by a bureaucratic-syndicalist femi-nazi mafia in Quebec.
"taught my first language class when I was 14."
This is my main error. I didn't find out sufficiently soon that teaching can be interesting...
I haven't abandoned this possibility, but I should go in another way...
"ducation is controlled by a bureaucratic-syndicalist femi-nazi mafia in Quebec." awesome. Any chance you could let us know how they took hold? Down here in the States, we're still marginalized.
Clarissa - you will kick ASS!
I will suppose that you're not sarcastic...
It's simple, Québec's government adopted the femi-nazi or "femi-favoritist" statist ideology in the conduct of their public organizations.
Femi-favoritist? I don't get it. Are you writing about how successful young girls are in comparison with young boys at school? If so, parents should valorize good academic standards with boys. Somehow they don't. Having good grades when you are a boy oftentimes means that you will be marginalized. Even if you are good at sports.
If you're talking about the low rates of male educators in elementary and high schools... well look at the salary and work conditions. Look at the pathetic health insurance provided to educators in Quebec. You will understand why educated men are not interested to work as educators, because education is seen as a female thing and therefore it is not valorized economically. If anything, this shows how Quebec's government is still partiarchal, not femi-favoritist.
Same thing with nurses... if not worse.
Ol.
Dear Clarissa,
I feel the same about next Wednesday... and I will teach a class I have been teaching for nine years now. I am compulsively changing comas in my syllabi, wondering if I should add or delete this or that reading, and changing evaluation methods.
What is worse is that during the week before class, we are bombarded with workshops with university staff, administrators, and tenured-track/tenured faculty doing service providing workshops. While sometimes these can be useful, they may also stress you out.
Fortunately, I was not told to watch my colleagues in the eyes while taking notes.
You will do awesome next week! We are stressed out because we love our work and we care for our students!
Ol.
"Femi-favoritist? I don't get it. Are you writing about how successful young girls are in comparison with young boys at school?"
Yeah, but not just that.
"If you're talking about the low rates of male educators in elementary and high schools... well look at the salary and work conditions. Look at the pathetic health insurance provided to educators in Quebec."
Sorry, but their condition are way better here than in US and Scandinavian Countries (not the Rest of Canada, though). I admit that it's not just because of the femi-favoritist ideology but also because of the patriarchical experience-integrism of the statist-syndicalist monopolist mafia in Québec.
"You will understand why educated men are not interested to work as educators, because education is seen as a female thing and therefore it is not valorized economically."
Sorry, but I am interested in that type of work and the femi-favoritist syndicalist mob controls the education and they're not interested to hire smart men. We should develop more non-school education organizations to fight against that shit.
"Same thing with nurses... if not worse."
That proves that "femi-favoritism" is not "feminism". Femi-favoritists are not interested to traditional female working conditions. They want to discriminate for women in the other occupations, espacially the men-traditional ones.
You'll be just fine. Go knock 'em dead ;)
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