Professional Neurosis

Matt and I are exceedingly busy. We have typed out our weekly schedules for each other and post them on the walls and refrigerator because we are finding that having internet access to each other’s lives is not enough.

I’ve been teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) – well, in reality I’ve been teaching English to Korean women. I find that even though the job officially pays $10 an hour it actually pays about $5 after you add up all the hours I spend trying to figure out what I’m doing. I have been contemplating doing this kind of work as a career once I finish this degree (which happens in May) so this job is been a sort of test run. It both gives me the opportunity to gage my interest in TESOL but it also gives me the opportunity to use my women’s studies training. This is because I’m working with a group of women who are highly educated and who have left lucrative careers to follow their husbands to seminary in a foreign land. They find themselves suddenly domesticated and lacking basic language skills. Needless to say, the first American idiom I taught them was “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”.

I really like this job so far but I must confess - I know very little about the English language and grammar and punctuation and all that stuff. Not to mention, my class consists of speakers at all different levels of fluency – from beginners to most advanced speakers. And, to top it off, I’ve never taught anything ever. So, I just smile and laugh at my own craziness and introduce them to my neurosis. I think they like me…

I must tell you that it's impossible to write on a blackboard without your butt shaking. And when I’m already nervous this just gives me one more reason to laugh out loud. Then I have to come up with a reason that explains why I’m laughing but I’m interrupted by Most Advanced Speaker who points out that I’ve left the “p” out of “especially” (reading: “esecially”) and I realize that I’ve been correcting Beginner who keeps pronouncing it wrong. And by then, I’m just laughing myself to tears with no reasonable excuse.

They would probably talk to each other about the chaos that surrounds them but I’ve told them that English is the only language they are allowed to speak until 11am when class lets out. I’m pretty sure they believe that I regularly forget to take my medication. (Little do they know, I have no medication.) When words gets back to the acclaimed professor who “highly” recommended me to the ESOL director she will call it a case of "mistaken identity". In short, I’ve been very busy wreaking havoc in this prestigious, east-coast, hoity-toity university.

This is the building I teach in. Room 214.