Begone, age 24.

May 10, 2005 23:43

Now that I have my name on a dozen resumes and cover letters that are floating around the city, the nice French directors at the language school seem to be trying to create a position for me. It appears that I am going to be sort of the brains behind the ESL department, creating new programs and writing supplemental materials and scoring written evaluations. I am conveniently not the boss of the other teachers in the department, as it is composed of a bunch of guys between the ages of 40 and 65, and the 6'2" Anita, who also speaks fluent German, wears fully carnation pink outfits, and calls me "hon." As well as one other girl around my age, but we are certainly the anomalies of the pack. Today was particularly exhausting -- I came in early, trained for the whole morning on how to do the class scheduling, then taught one of my "princess" students (the name we give to the students who are oh-so-particular about which teacher they have and when they come in for lessons, though they also breezily cancel and reschedule at their convenience, and are often late. They are housewives, more often than not). She was thirty minutes late, and then she spent thirty minutes asking me about my wedding (which I tried to tie in with the grammar in Unit 16 of the intermediate book), and then she plunked her English-Spanish dictionary on the table in front of me and said, "Okay! I want to learn everything in this book!"

I said, "We'll start on that tomorrow."

After that, I had the second shift with our newest intensive program student -- actually, it's called the "Crash Intensive Program," which is a melodramatic yet fair name for a completely exhausting couple of weeks. This dude's company paid for him to come to Atlanta from Bogota, stay in the Residence Inn, and take one-on-one business English lessons seven hours a day, for two weeks straight. The first couple hours are generally quite good, but then lunch happens (and the lucky teacher on the first shift takes the student to a nearby restaurant and gets paid to eat a free lunch), and the three hours after lunch are something of a struggle. It's just not natural to try to cram in seven hours' worth of new information. Today, I threw in a lot of role plays and article readings into the book's mush of grammar and corporate speak, but as 4:15 hit and I tried to introduce the phrase "to have an effect on" into practice, both of us seemed to grow foggy, and spitting out sentences about what overcapacity could have an effect on became impossible to do without a lot of stuttering and repeating. For both of us, unfortunately. He definitely didn't mind when I shut the book at 4:25 rather than 4:30.

(He had a barometer on his watch, which was fantastic. At one point during the class, I looked out the window and said, "I think it's supposed to rain this afternoon." He looked down at his wrist and said, "No, it can't. There's not enough pressure in the air.")

And after that, I had more training, this time on how to score the written evaluations. Sometime between all of these things, I had time to eat a banana and a cup of yogurt and a handful of pretzels from my student MJ's semi-secret snack stash, as well as to stare out the window and half-muse, half-worry about the two diametrically opposed short-term life plans that rumble around inside me with scary amounts of conviction. That is to say, I think I could be completely comfortable as someone who gets advanced degrees and works damned hard at one career or project for a long time (and I don't have a problem with wanting to make a name for myself, as long as it's while doing something that helps others, and that I believe in wholeheartedly). Of course, I don't know what that career or project or even that advanced degree could be, and this has me feeling like somebody-who-is-not-me at six years old, because I spent elementary school always knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. Two summers ago, there was a Japanese visa on its way to me, and, with the issues of seemingly incalculable time and distance bearing down on us through the heat, my mom and I drove across town to look at wedding dresses at a vintage shop. On the way home, with the first dress I'd tried on resting on the backseat of the car, my mom told me that she'd expected me to never get married, and instead to travel the world teaching English or doing whatever else would sustain me, blithely having no ties to any country or any other human being. Sometimes I do a pretty teriffic job at being unintentionally standoffish, but my connections to people, in general, are hard-wired. I doubt I could be the Great Traveling Nobody for very long, but I also want to make sure that I don't forget what it is to stay in hostels, write in my paper journal with pens from various hotels, read Mrs. Dalloway on varying forms of public transit. I had a SARK poster above my bed at home for years and years that reminded me that as long as I do something I love, "the money will follow," and while I'd like to say that such a thing makes me want to travel all the time and always have a couple of these "Update Journal" Firefox tabs minimized on my laptop screen and trust that someone will eventually want to pay for my sentences, the quaint idea of a joyous little parade of money following Passionate Me tends to lead me back to the idea of getting serious about something and allowing myself to be competitive about it. Obviously, I am turning this into far too much of a black-or-white issue, when it is not, of course, Life Of Travel and Fun! vs. Desk Job. Sometimes I make things too hard for myself and try to wrap myself up in quasi-philosophical blather so that I don't have to make any real decisions or do anything concrete beyond hitting the "update journal" button. Move along.

I suppose I'm allowing my mind to fight hard for keeping this "transitional" job transitional, even though the part of me that turned me vegetarian, and that never wants anyone I know to ever completely leave my life, says, "But they're so nice to you at the language school! Don't you remember that you're having a fondue party with your students on Thursday? And now the directors have paid you for all this training, and you're still thinking of just leaving if you get another offer?" Of course, I stil haven't broached the massive issue of economics -- specifically, Laurie's brokeness, due to this job -- and the fact that, while I don't want to sit at a desk all day, I'd at least like a place to put my lunch. I always end up hiding mine in a dark little corner behind a poster of Germany in the teachers' room.

It's going to be my birthday in twenty minutes. I shall celebrate by going to bed!

milestones, jobbyness

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