The Joys and Sorrows of Teaching English
Teaching, in my humble opinion, is the most wonderful job there is. I say that as a teacher who started her professional life working in digital marketing, convinced that “Me, going back to middle school? Over my dead body!” School, had been hell on earth when I was a child. It had felt stifling and overwhelming.
Marketing was okay; the pay was good and the job was easy. Maybe a little too easy. I got bored. In the end, I started looking for another job. I wondered what I could possibly do with my life, something that would be gratifying, meaningful, and somehow, teaching became an option.
Teaching means transmitting a set of skills to other people. It implies being able to look at the person who wants to learn, understand their need, their wishes, where they come from and what they want to go and to then to find a way to share with them the skills they need.
It is an incredibly gratifying job. My students’ progress and achievements are my pride and joy. Teaching taught me to appreciate the genuine happiness of participating in someone else’s dreams. If they fail, it’s because I failed. If they succeed, it’s a little bit thanks to me. I love the challenge.
Languages are the physical representation of how a culture perceives the world around it so teaching a foreign language is giving people access to a wider world. It is giving people the opportunity to experience the world in a slightly different way, to build bridges and connections with new people. It is also a tool to discover a new take on history, what happened somewhere else and how shared events can be perceived very differently.
Teaching English as a foreign language has its own peculiarities. It is a language spoken in so many places and by so many people that it can sometimes, from a very western point of view, feel like a universal language. But it isn’t. It conveys, through its vocabulary, its grammar, its cultural references, a specific way to look at the world, and it is important to keep this in mind in order to be as honest as possible with one’s students. English must be taught in its context, with all the widely different cultures that use English as their first language, with its history — and this represents a massive challenge in today’s teachers.
English is a specific language in its composition: a Germanic language with hints of Scandinavian words, as well as some loans from Latin languages such as French. This makes it a rather accessible language for European languages natives. This accessibility is made even stronger by the amount of content available 24/7 thanks to the internet. People all around the world can access music, videos, articles, movies, on every topic imaginable in English — which makes English a uniquely interesting language. It is considered today as a requirement to find a job, but it is also incredibly easy to access to anyone who would be interested.
All in all, English has taken such a central place in the world that it is easy to forget that learning it is not a “given” for everyone.
Teaching English as a foreign language is both challenging and gratifying. I have now been teaching for 4 years. I have taught 11-year-olds full of curiosity and wonder who had everything to learn and yet already so much to add to our classes. I have taught to 17-year-olds to whom I tried to impart the few tricks I have learnt over the years, the things I wish I had known when I set out in the world. I have been a model, a translator, a product manager, and a teacher, and by far teaching is the hardest and the most fulfilling experience I ever had. It is emotionally draining, physically exhausting, the pay is terrible, and most people think that I work 15 hours a week (I work somewhere between 60 and 75 hours a week), but it is awesome.
To anyone who suffered at school: I hear you, I was you, and I try my best with everything I have to make sure that none of my students have to go through it as well.
I don’t know if I’ll be a teacher all my life but one thing is certain: it has changed my life and made it immensely richer.
