Announcement and realizations

This week, the people in France put down their cigarettes down long enough to send me a letter informing me of my future (for the next year, at least). So it's official: from October, Matchamonkey will become Misadventures in France. It doesn't have quite the same ring, but the misadventures are sure to abound.

With my time in Japan coming to an end and now having received a job placement for next year, I've come to a few realizations over the past weeks...

(1) For all my whining, this may be the best I ever have it. I will never again be paid this well to work so little. I make more money than I can spend, I have state-sponsored health care, and I pay very little taxes in any country. I earn all of this by sitting at my desk reading novels, and occasionally studying Japanese. I get to work later than my colleagues and leave work before them. Most everything is taken care of for me; if I don't understand something, it is taken off my hands and dealt with by someone else. So although I criticize a lot, the day will most certainly come when I yearn for the good ol' days in Japan.

(2) I am old enough to teach college students, i.e. I am old. My job next year will involve my teaching college students who want to be English teachers. At first I was like "Cool, I'll be around people my age," but then I realized that in fact I would be teaching people who were younger than me.

(3) I am not qualified to teach people who want to be English teachers (see also previous post about "gooder"). In Japan, we sometimes forget how well the rest of the world can speak English. Here, the most difficult question I might be asked in a day is how one says, "My dream is to be flight attendant" in English. My French students, on the other hand, will quite possibly have a better command of the English language than I do. They will most certainly be better spellers than I am. I am reminded of a German TA I had in college who knew the rule for when "the" was pronounced "thee" and when it was pronounced "tha." I think he was better at English than most of his students. While he was a special case, my future students will certainly have in-depth grammatical questions that I won't be able to answer.