TEACHING AS AN ACT OF “GETTING USED TO IT”
Life after LLI: going through the threshold of experience
This is a subsequent article of the PostScript that intends to give a critical view on the happenings at the Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa program — Which soon will be called Licenciatura en Bilingüismo (but that is another matter to be explicitly discussed later) — we will refer directly to the academic event that is developed on Friday once a month called Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa Talks.
The series of LLI talks have brought to us a concurrent pattern of inspiration and the last of these was not an exception to the case. We had the chance to get a notion of the experience that former students of the program have gained after their graduation.
The initial LLI talk of the semester took place the 12th of August at the auditorium of the library Banco de la República. The first of the duplex was titled “life after LLI: going through the threshold of experience”, presented by the former student and now adults academic coordinator of the CCA Colombo Americano Pereira, Tarek Manzur Henao. His talk drenched the audience with his motto: “Teaching: Not in it for the income, in it for the outcome”. Which he persistently remarked by emphasizing on the value of teaching not from the monetary perspective, but for the chance to grow personally out of professional experience. This message inspired an audience mostly composed of students of teaching guided and autonomous practicum, who attended to the talk, presumably, questioning their future in the laboring market of teaching.
Though Tarek’s initial message focalized on his undecidedness to become a language teacher, he finally assumed the challenge to which he referred as a “difficult” thing he didn’t want to do. The presenter talked about the experience of the practicum at La Julita school, to which he confessed: “to be honest, this was the worst experience I had”. A practicum that allowed him to understand that teaching in the public sector was not his “thing”.
On the other hand, Tarek shed a positive spark in the line of employability. He stated that in many professions you have to wait until you graduate to start working, but in the teaching profession one can get a job without even graduating. The possibility of having a job and studying allows to gain a more critical view of the theory that is presented at university. Tarek insisted that students of the program should take advantage of what they learned in the program because: “What you are taught will be used at some point in your professional life (…) take what you are doing now seriously because you will use it and then you will be in competition with each other once you graduate to get a job.”
As a graduate, this presentation promoted the willingness to take risks and start teaching. To all appearances, the presenter’s intention was that of leaving a bitter taste that some have assumed rather realistic, and some have considered it to be a chaotic view of what teaching is at the beginning line. But at the end, we have all understood that teaching is an act of “getting used to” or in other words, assuming the teaching realities that to some might be the most wonderful experience or for some, not as good as desired. What we surely have to gain from Tarek’s experience is that after graduation, there should be a period of experimentation in different setting and scenarios, and it is this empirical journey that will allow us to identify the context in which one feels comfortable.