#chocorant

Exam season is just around the corner, but I decided to chud around by finishing curse of the shadow

Please feel free to ignore this, but if you’re curious and wanna read then go ahead under the cut coz it’s like 2000 words (sorry if you’re on mobile :I)

p.s: I actually forgot to add the bit about my brother but whatever, it’s already 4am, sorry if it doesn’t make sense

Ok, first, let me give you a bit of background info. In case you didn’t know, my name is Rocio, I’m 22 and I just finished a BA in English with majors in linguistics and translation. At my school, the first two years we all study literature, linguistics, translation and teaching, but at the end of the 4th semester we have to choose linguistics or literature AND teaching or translation, and as I mentioned before I choose linguistics and translation.

I worked hard to finish college. I’m actually still not done. I still gotta finish a course, write a dissertation and do some paperwork before I get my papers and make it official, but I worked hard for it and I still do. I love both translation and linguistics, but I especially love translation and nothing would make me happier than doing it for the rest of my life.

And here is where I start ranting because in all the time I spent at school, every single fucking semester, I always heard the same damn thing with more or less the same words:

'Pay attention to your teaching classes, because you're gonna need them someday, trust me'. 'You know you're gonna work as a teacher anyway, right?’ Etc, etc, etc.

And you have no idea how sick I am of hearing it over and over and over again. This last semester I got to hear it 3 times in a few days. One day in a linguistics class (it was L2 but it was focused on applying linguistic knowledge to teaching). The professor said something like ‘You gotta pay attention to this if you want to be a teacher’ and I turned to a friend also majoring in translation and made a gesture of ‘phew, then we don’t have to worry’ as a joke. Then the professor saw me and laughed, but then she said something along the lines of ‘Well, you have to pay attention too, because you’re gonna be teaching at some point’. I got a bit angry because, how am I supposed to take that comment when I’m in my last semester after studying translation for 4 goddamn years?Anyway, I didn’t say anything.

After the class ended and I calmed down a bit, I told a friend (who had chosen teaching but also chose linguistics, was taking that same class) that the professor may have not meant it that way, but I didn’t really like that kind of comment (especially not at that point of the career) because it felt like they weren’t even giving me a chance, telling me that no matter what I did I was gonna be an English teacher when I hadn’t even finished the career. But then she just started to stroke my head and then she told me ‘Well, she is right’ and I just fucking stood there looking at her like an asshole because I literally just told her the goddamn fuckin reason I DIDN’T like people telling me that kind of stuff and she kept stroking my head and saying ‘Aww poor you, you’re gonna be a teacher even if you don’t like it’. It felt so patronizing and it made me feel absolutely awful. I just walked out and left her there.

After that, two friends were talking about how one wanted to be a teacher and the other one wanted to be the principal of a school and they asked me what I thought about that day’s class (the teaching oriented one). I told them it had been interesting but not really my cup of tea, and when one of them said ‘Oh, yeah! You don’t like teaching, right?’ I told her she was right. BUT after that, the other one said ‘Remember my words: when start giving classes you’re gonna be trying to remember our teaching classes because you didn’t pay attention’ and I didn’t even let her finish and I got SO PISSED because she didn’t even say if I start giving classes, she said fuckin WHEN I start giving classes and jesus fucking christ I don’t even know what to write because holy flying fuck ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS???

After that I didn’t want to talk to them, I didn’t even want to see them. The day of the next class it physically hurt how much I didn’t want to go to class. I got nauseous, anxious, my heart started beating faster and the closer I was to class the worse I got. I got to the classroom and I sat down but I felt like shit and didn’t want anybody to even look at me. I actually started crying. I went out and I couldn’t take it anymore, I started to shake really hard and I just sat there crying on the hallway. I don’t know if everyone heard but a friend came out, gave me some tissues and sat with me for a while. Then the professor came and she asked what was wrong and I told her how sick and tired I was of people telling me what I could or couldn’t do with my life. At first I thought she got why I was crying, but after that she told me a couple of times that I shouldn’t give up, and how I shouldn’t just cry and give up only because people told me I couldn’t do it.

I wasn’t crying because I felt hopeless and I was giving up. I was crying because I was angry. I was angry at those teachers that asked us who wanted to be a translator at the beginning of the semester only to try to shoot us down. I was angry at my friends because they complained about how no one appreciated teachers and about how hard it was for them but then turned around and did the same to us, to me. I was angry at all those random assholes who told me I couldn’t make it without even giving me a chance because WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME AND ABOUT WHAT I CAN OR CANNOT DO?? If you don’t like translation then fine! Good for you!! If I respect your profession and your choice to teach even if I don’t like it for myself, then don’t you think I deserve the same courtesy?? Because I respect teachers, I really do.

In 3rd and 4th semester of high school I had an anatomy professor called Rios. His class was really fun, mostly because he told us stories and kept swearing all the time (leave me alone, we were like 16 or something) but he was also super strict. We had to do 4 tests through the semester, and if you failed one he didn’t even let you take the others and you went straight to final. And even if you passed them all, if you didn’t get an 8 in average, you also had to do the final. In third semester he failed almost half of the classroom, but when we saw we had him again for 4th semester, we all cheered. He was strict as hell and he kept swearing up and down, but he recognized his mistakes and he was fair and absolutely great.

In 8th semester (also high school) I had a sociology professor called Samayoa. He also gave me history class in 2st semester. He was really kind and his classes were awesome, but I especially remember his last class in 8th semester. It was the last semester so he made us do an activity where we were supposed to tell our friends how we felt. Needless to say we were all crying at the end of it. But class ended early, my friends and I went to say goodbye to him and he asked us what we were gonna do in that free hour we had before the next class. When a friend joked saying ‘probably cry some more’, I answered ‘nah, let’s go play basketball instead’. But then he just turned and looked at me with this weird face, and then he turned to my friends and told them ‘Please take care of this little miss. She may have this iron cover but the glass inside breaks easy.’ I almost started crying right there because at the beginning of the semester I wasn’t even sure he remembered me and there he was, saying exactly how I felt at that time. It’s been 4 years and I still remember it.

When I first started college I wanted to study literature, but after just one class with a professor called Itzel (one of my favorite professors ever, I love her so much) I started to think about choosing linguistics. And I did! I’m really happy that I did. I may not particularly care for some fields, and it can be complicated or confusing at times, but I don’t fucking care because I absolutely love it, I really do. I got to learn semantics, phonetics, Old and Middle English (Professor Selene, another one I absolutely love), psycholinguistics, typology, and tons of other stuff, and that’s all thanks to my professors, because they love what they teach, I could see it in their classes, and that made me like them even more. But all that started with Itzel’s class and I couldn’t be more grateful. Also, she’s super awesome in general.

And last but not least, Professor Stacy. I took translation with her in 6th semester, but I also took a class called Advanced Editing in 5th (one of the main reasons I obsess with format, proofreading and editing, and also why am I so good at it, aww yeah). In that class we also did a bit of creative writing and it was really fun, but I never found out what grade I got in the last paper. In 6th semester I asked her about it and she sent me an email telling me she lost the file but she did have my grade. And then she told me she thought I had promise as a writer and all through the semester she kept telling me the same. She and her class made me love translation even more, and she made me think about trying my hand at writing, and for that I’ll always be grateful to her too. I still have that email with my grade.

I don’t want to teach, because I know I’m bad at it. I’m bad at it and I just don’t have any interest in getting better because I just don’t have any interest in teaching. Also I get nauseous when presenting in front of people.

I don’t want to be the reason some one ends up hating a subject and I don’t want to be remembered as ‘that awful teacher I had in X school’. I’d prefer to do something I love and I’m good at and leave teaching to those who actually want to teach.

Those horrible teachers I’ve had are part of the reason I don’t want to teach, but the good ones are an even bigger part of it. They all wanted me to do what I love and several told me so. I owe it to them to be happy, but mostly I owe it to myself.

So when you tell me that, sooner or later, I’m gonna work as a teacher (something I’m bad at, something that, for several reasons, I'd hate to do) at some point no matter what I do, of course I’m gonna get angry.

Is that so difficult to understand?

Because seriously, if you are so close-minded that you can’t even accept the fact that other people may not want to make the same life choices, then I feel really sorry for you.