my first class

Since I was eighteen, I have been back and forth about being a teacher. In the last ten years, I have managed to enroll in and then quit TWO teacher-prep programs. And over the last year in Alaska, I worked with so many teachers and students, a lot of people just assumed I was a teacher…and I sort of let them, but my heart wasn’t in it. I quit my job in Juneau because it didn’t feed my soul like I want my work to do.

But it seems I can’t quite get away from teaching. Despite my lack of training, I am the new ESL teacher for a group of eleven or twelve students and Belatrix, a software development company in a suburb of Mendoza. The challenge is real and I am enjoying it so far. They are eager students with many clients in Utah (why Utah? I’m not sure yet…).

It’s an interesting thing to teach something I know so intimately as my own language. Teaching people how to use English proficiently makes me feel differently about the language. The act of instructing the “how tos” English makes it seem somehow outside of me, like it is somehow not quite my own. As if I have to somehow pull it out of my being to be able to look at it and talk about it. And if I forget to do that, I can’t see it quite right and can’t teach it, can only use it and say things like “that’ just how it is.”

Does that make any sense?

Words, languages, communication. These things are consuming my life.