As much as I love to bitch about how I'm never going to make any money or attain any kind of career rank or prominence doing what I do, I have to admit that I love teaching. This afternoon I walked into my third year class and not only were all my actual students there, but also a couple of guests to the class who are or were teachers themselves and who are from Japan. If I stopped to think about it, I'd have probably been too nervous to be myself while I teach because I'm not a native speaker and I'm sure sometimes I make mistakes. But you know what? It's my class and something kicks in when I'm teaching that lets me forget that I'm shy. If I had been less hung up with shyness and perfectionism while I was learning the language I probably would have made progress a lot faster. Up until very recently I would concern myself too much with trying to figure out the exactly perfect and culturally precise way to express something rather than just doing it my own way, which I know is good enough to get my message across. I have lived so much of my life feeling like there is some big teacher up in the sky grading me on the level of perfection of my every utterance or sentence. I think it's just a relic of being an overachieving student. It feels good when a teacher praises you and somehow an internal teacher grew in my head and has sat up there evaluating my performance ever since.
So, I guess my liberal arts background did prepare me to be a teacher. That's sort of useful. I liked what my sister said at breakfast this morning. She said a bachelors degree means you can get hired as a bartender rather than a waitress at nice restaurants. She was speaking from experience. She rocks. We both agreed that college was a lovely fantasy world where we had all the time in the world to sit around with friends in coffee shops thinking about how endless all of life's possibilities were. It was nice, but it did squat to prepare us for the working world. That's not necessarily bad, it's just true.
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