Lots of people have dreams about what they want to be when they grow up, but I never did. Lucky for me, although I was raised in the 50s, my family thought girls should go to college too. Sure, I played "teacher" with the younger kids next door, but I had no desire to go into that field. Teaching was an "appropriate" profession for a woman when I was young, so I didn't want to do it. The desire not to choose a stereotypically female profession drove me to take Physics in high school (one of only two girls in the class) and I got my only "C" in it. Then when I went to college, I hadn't learned my lesson because I signed up for "chemistry for chem majors" instead of the easier one. All I remember of that fiasco is bursting into tears in front of the poor TA from Greece because I couldn't bend the glass tubing correctly.
Follow me below the kos curlicue for the rest of the story.
Clearly science wasn't going to be my chosen profession, but when I entered college I didn't know what major to pick, so I went with "undecided." I loved languages, so I studied French, having had French in high school. When I was pushed to choose a major, I chose French. Then I dropped out after two years to go to work full time and took classes at another school at night. I studied some German and some Italian and then I took a course in French linguistics and I was totally hooked. When I returned to my first school, I continued with the French major, but then I switched to a linguistics major with just ten units left to go.
I don't know if linguistics as a discipline is better known now than it was forty years ago, but at that time it was a very new field. People always thought if you were a linguist it meant you could speak a lot of languages, and I would have to explain that it was more about the study of language, and not particular languages. Initially I just figured I'd get a PhD. in linguistics and do some kind of research at a university. I needed some way to earn some money, however, so I took a job teaching English as a foreign language in the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan. I had no teaching experience at all, except for a couple workshops. I was really nervous.
I remember the first time I stood in front of the class as the teacher. While I tried to act like I belonged there, in reality, my inner self was saying, "What am I doing up here in the FRONT? I'm supposed to be back there with the rest of the students. Who thought of getting into this in the first place? Maybe it wasn't such a good idea." I muddled through somehow, and my first semester managed to finish without any terrible gaffes.
In the meantime, I took the three classes that were available at that time for people who wanted to teach EFL or ESL (English as a Second Language being the name often given to teaching English to immigrants.) The third class included a session in which you were videotaped. I watched the tape with the teacher, and she said I did well. I watched myself and for the first time, I thought, "I belong up there!" I was getting tired of studying, and it turned out that I was more interested in practical linguistics than theoretical linguistics so I decided to stop with an M.A and look for a job.
I wanted to move somewhere with ESL classes for adults since I didn't want to teach children, and I was told that San Francisco and New York had good programs. I couldn't decide which place to try, but in the meantime I attended a summer institute in Illinois. While there, I met a guy from San Francisco, and he said, "San Francisco is a beautiful place. You should move there." I figured it was just a flippant remark to him, but I ran with it. I decided that's where I would move. I told him one day that I was going to move, and that he could meet me at the airport or not as he wished, but I was going to move there anyway. To this day I can't imagine how I moved so far away to somewhere that I really knew nothing about and had no friends except for a guy I had met during the summer who might or might not meet me at the airport.
I came to San Francisco and started looking for a job. I looked up all the English schools in the phone book, grabbed a map, and started making the rounds. I found a secretarial school that didn't need any more English teachers, but whose two elderly proprietors gave me a pencil as a souvenir. I applied at Berlitz, and got a job for a couple nights a week. I kept looking, and applied at an English Institute in Chinatown. It happened they needed someone and I was told to come back for an interview. It was such a lovely day, I checked the map and it was only eight blocks to my next destination. I decided I'd walk it. Midway through, I realized that San Francisco was actually very hilly, and the eight blocks were up and down a lot of hills. I certainly felt it the next day, and never did that again!
My interview proved to be a success, although I was really nervous. The interviewer sounded like a machine gun when he spoke, and I tried my best to answer. I had to do a sample teaching assignment with some of their students (back in 1969, this was a very unusual thing to do) and they were impressed that I brought along some "realia" (real life things) to use. The job was for ten hours in the morning and fifteen hours at night, for six weeks. As it turned out, they decided to hire two of us. I was told that I was hired because the university I got my degree at was noted in the field of ESL teaching, but that I would be give the ten-hour section of the job because the other person was married and had a wife to support.
When the six weeks finished, the classes were picked up by the San Francisco Community College District, and I continued to teach adults in their non-credit division until I retired after forty-one years in 2010. Not bad for someone who never planned to be a teacher!