In June this year, I will have taught English in France for four full years. These four years have been as much a learning experience as a teaching one. How did I end up being an English teacher in France?



Numbers, Numbers, Numbers




Generating sales figures, gathering data, analysing numbers, producing statistics, justifying valuation, verifying results.





Never have I thought that I would become a teacher, and an English teacher to boot. My tertiary education was in Finance and Economics. It was expected of me to clinch one of the highly coveted finance jobs, be it in a financial institution, or a financial position in non-financial sectors. So, there I was, for 12 years, a clog in the wheel in the convoluted world of finance:  



Generating sales figures, gathering data, analysing numbers, producing statistics, justifying valuation, and verifying results.



Reports, Reports, Reports




Reports - Procedural Embellishments.





These numbers were usually not to be presented in their raw form, especially when your employers needed to justify to clients that the fees, trailing with zeros, paid out were not in vain. The end products usually arrived in the form of a report that was painstakingly prepared by yours faithfully. The thickness of report, in part, depended on how fat the fees were. So, that was my job: crunching numbers and churning reports. At times, I felt that clients were only interested in the final numbers, which could normally be found in the executive summary, located on the first few pages of the report. As long as these figures were within their range of expectations, the rest of the report was just procedural embellishment.



My point is that my that former professional background has not much relevance to my current profession as an English teacher. Other than the fact that English was the working language, which I used on a daily basis, both oral and written, and that I have a good grasp of the financial and economic jargons.



Back To School







English was not my strongest subject in school during my primary and secondary studies. I cannot recall what was being taught in class. The only memories of English lessons that I had were those with an English teacher, who was also my form teacher, in primary school. It was not what he taught during the lessons that left an impression on me. Rather it was his unconventional teaching methods, at least unconventional for the 1980s.




“Clink” “Clink” sounds as the coin hit the bottom or the side of the jar.





One of his approaches to force us speak English was making us pay 10 cents each time for not speaking English in his classes. Each time we uttered a non-English word, each time we broke out in our mother tongue, we would reluctantly dig into our pockets for a coin and dropped it into a big glass jar, placed at one corner of the teacher’s desk. 



In the beginning, one could hear sharp, distinct “clink” “clink” sounds as the coin hit the bottom or the side of the jar.