How to become a teacher if you did not major in education - stateside.

There are tons of companies that provide stream-lined processes to get an Alternative Teacher Certification.  Some school districts do it also, but the companies make it much more convenient.  It costs about $700 more to go with a private company... but, they give you online checklists and other perks that are extremely helpful when dealing with such an overwhelming amount of hoops to jump through.  Also, they take their fees out of your paychecks, so you only pay the full price if you get a steady teaching job.  It was a good choice for me.

Now the specifics.  Most of the requirements for AC (Alternative Certification... Everything in education has an acronym.  Prepare to be sick of them.) are time-based.  You have to attend something like 15 sessions of training at about 8 hours each, and by some unspoken rule ALL of these sessions must take place in small, faraway towns.  Attendance is recorded digitally, you have to swipe your card when you arrive and when you leave, so there is no signing in and taking off.  Out of these, one session was very informative (google Dr. Wong, he's funny... or maybe I was delirious when he took the stage after I sat through 6 hours of boring training), and the rest were redundant and slightly condescending (Think generic phrases like "Each student is different!" and "Let them know what you expect of them!").  This had nothing on the training for my actual district.  If you did the math correctly, you've already realized: You have to have a ton of training for the company to SUGGEST to the school district that you are ready to be hired, then once you are hired the school district forces you to go to MORE training.  More on that later.

Back to the company requirements.  Aside from training, you have to take some tests.  Most teachers only take two tests: the PPR (Pedagogy and Professional Responsibility) and your content area exam (A geometry teacher would take a test on geometry, and so on).

Unfortunately for me, language teachers must take 2 tests for each language they want to teach:  A written test (the PBT, paper-based test) and an oral test (the TOPT, texas oral proficiency test).  Did you think I was lying about the acronyms?  It gets much, much worse.  Anyway, seeing has how I wanted to teach 2 languages, I needed 2 PBTs, 2 TOPTs, and 1 PPR.  Each one is free and is administered in your neighborhood.  Haha!  Just kidding of course.  Each one is $70 (if you sign up 6 months in advance, otherwise expect to pay another $60 for EACH), and administered in towns that are 2 hours away from any major city.

I gallantly signed up for all the tests and attended all the training sessions.  The first time, I passed the PPR, the French TOPT, and the Spanish PBT.  This meant I had to retake the French PBT and Spanish TOPT.

The Spanish TOPT is universally considered among teachers to be extremely difficult.  I have heard of native Spanish speakers from South America being unable to pass it.  I bought study guides and annoyed the hell out of my then-boyfriend by making him help me study (he was Mexican) and if it weren't for him I doubt I would have passed (thanks Mau!) at all, ever.  I have two framed things in my apartment:  my diploma from college and the score sheet from my Spanish TOPT saying I passed (with the minimum passing score... that test is a bitch I tell you).  Those are the 2 things of which I am most proud.

I retook the French PBT and passed easily... before I took it the first time I had had a really rough break up the night before.  That's the only possible reason I failed it because when I retook it I remember thinking, "This is extremely easy, wtf happened before?"

So, at the end of that summer, I was Highly Qualified (HQ) to teach and was the proud owner of a Probationary Certificate, meaning I could legally teach the subject and after one year I could get a standard certificate.  Presumably this is to cut down paperwork since most first year teachers run screaming for another job and never need a standard certificate.  But I didn't know that.

Me listening to book reports in which English words are mispronounced to the point that most of them sound like extremely offensive racial slurs and profanity:

Study Abroad - Strasbourg - July 2010

Well.  I‘ve been in Europe for two weeks and no blog entry, woops!  I’m sure you’ll forgive me, since if you are reading this you are probably my mom (Hi mom!).

First Day: missed train from airport (close to Paris) to Strasbourg.  Got there in plenty of time, even sat around waiting, then realized at last second you needed a credit card with a microchip to validate your tickets (American cards don’t have the chip, they have a stripe), so we had to pay extra, get a train from the airport into Paris then Paris to the dorms.  By that time all the “good rooms” in the dorms were taken, mine is a cozy walk-in closet with no internet, hence the lack of blogging.

My room (luckily I wasn't expecting the Ritz):

Since then:  It’s kinda been a blur of classes, tours, outings, and parties.  We rented bicycles for a month (Strasbourg is beyond biker-friendly) and have been appreciating that decision ever since.  We were able to cross the border into Germany on bikes (international bike rides!  Yes!) .  

Bridge into Germay from France:

The locals run the gamut from helpful, friendly dreamboats to shady, aggressive rude people (both of these references include both genders) but in general we feel quite safe.  We, by the way, are the people who live on the 5th floor of the dorms, a motley crew including an Australian girl studying international business (Katrina), another French teacher from Dallas (Laila), a student from Indiana (Gabby), and a Norwegian guy studying law (Roy).  So we all live on the top floor of a building with no elevator and no AC.  We take forever getting ready to go anywhere because it is a border-line catastrophe if you get all the way downstairs and realize you forgot something, rendering necessary another sweaty slog up the stairs.

There is a man-made beach in Strasbourg that we biked to last week and it was quite fun.  The plan is to go again today since Laila didn’t get to come last time.  We’ll see I suppose, I have a quite large paper to write and not very many people are awake right now (it’s about noon) since we went out last night, so that might not happen for a while.  I initially planned an impromptu visit to one of the neighboring countries for this weekend but lots of schedule conflicts popped up so that is on hold.

The only part of Strasbourg that I don’t like so far (this may apply to several cities or even northern Europe in general) is that the people are extremely individualistic and rarely civil, much less welcoming, to strangers.  The dorms are rife with exceptions to this generalization, but man, it can be rough.  In an everyday context, saying “Bless you” (a vos souhaits) after someone sneezes is tantamount to asking them to recall a traumatic childhood event; they give you a cold look as if to say ”Why are you talking to me?”  Then there was the couple I walked up to in a park (they were drinking wine) and I asked for a corkscrew, to which the woman responded in not-so-dulcet tones “We don’t have anything, go away.”

Again, probably isolated incidents and most people we have met are very friendly and welcoming.  The mentality is definitely a change from southern hospitality though, which constitutes one of the (few) areas in which I prefer Texas to France :)