Teacher's Sunday

Today was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.

I woke up at 7.45, after a late evening of preparing pumpkin-based food for a bunch of French people. A 'Cremaillere' (potlach) which went till late last night, in which I was the 'head cook', so to speak, expected to feed the masses equipped only with an internet connection (for recipes) and a pumpkin.

So waking up to face a 17km run with the Running Room - the group which trains for marathons, here in Westmount, west Montreal - was a tall order. But seeing the beautiful sunlight outside, I mustered up the courage.

The group had dressed up for hallowe'en, and people were running in costume, and had brought their own food for a bake sale, raising funds for people to go to marathons later this year. Their unabashed north American costume-wearing bore its fruits; making an idiot of yourself for a good cause is a well-accepted activity here. And so it damn well should be. Of course, the hardcore runners (who ran 25km around a lake) were equipped as per usual, and didn't slow down a whit for all the Hallowe'en shinanigans. Luckily for my left knee (currently taking its revenge on me for my vagaries this morning), I didn't follow them all the way.

Otherwise, I've spent my Sunday preparing for a job interview in a hotel (yes, I'm looking for anything at the moment, and hotel reception is as good as anything), and getting some food ready for the week. A few meals to grab on the way out the door, so I don't starve during the day or blow a fortune on overpriced crappy sandwiches.

The job interview in a glitzy downtown hotel didn't happen after all, and while I was standing outside the door, after the would-be interview, it started to snow. Only very lightly, and barely a couple of minutes, but it's the first snowfall of the year. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I love snow!

This evening was spent preparing more applications for schools. I'm hoping to start a position in January, and am going all out, applying for 4 to 5 jobs every 2 or 3 days (which gives me time to redraft, contact people, get extra information they need, etc...), on top of preparing the lessons for this week. Three different sessions, preparing adults for the TOEFL examinations, in two different schools. One is a very well recognised university, and the other is a dodgy little language school in town, whose arm I had to twist to get anything like a decent hourly rate from. But better than a kick in the teeth.

I'm balancing a crazy timetable, and have already mixed up a couple of appointments, which is partly behind today's interview mixup. Yes, my talents with timetabling, so well known amongst my friends and family, are being put to the test, to say the least. It's a learning curve; I hope to come out of this a bit more savvy about how to plan my week around train times, maps to find unknown places, making job interviews and appointments on time, preparing my materials without the help of a photocopier in a school copy room...

But I'll be back to schoolteaching soon, people. Armed and ready, you'll see...

Work

It was 25 degrees celcius today in Montreal, and people were sunbathing on their lunchbreaks in the park. I didn't have a lunchbreak; I'm jobhunting. "Pounding the Pavement", as one of the business English texts says is a common idiom to describe my situation. Pounding indeed. One of the reasons I originally decided to come to Montreal was that I had a fairly comfortable life and job in Stuttgart, and I needed to step back from that, to know what my next step would be. I've sure as hell done that all right.

Being jobless or in a precarious situation at work is one of the rare problems that a well-established, qualified teacher doesn't have to face often. Teachers qualify, get a job, and then move to the next job without having to face the concerns of being fired from one day to the next because of downsizing, because a powerful client doesn't like your face, or because your boss had a bad morning. Although some teachers struggle to find a position, we mostly take our position for granted. Unless you do something horribly wrong, you're probably safe, you just might have to deal with a bolshy parent or a stroppy teenager, but you're not likely to end up jobless.

Unless of course you decide to pick up your stuff and leave for another continent on a whim, without securing a contract on the other end, that is. But only idiots do that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, there are some things you learn about yourself when spending your time interviewing, running around trying to convince people that their company is the best thing since sliced bread, and the only thing you ever asked Santa Claus for since you were three was to have a job in their scrumptrilescent company. I, for one, am learning to make everything count more. Friends, family, possessions, the knowledge that I've got fresh vegetables at home waiting for me for dinner, and that the sun shone really nicely this morning through the trees when I was out running. The insecurity and fear of looking for work makes you focus on the essentials. What's really important, and how can I be grateful for it.

Sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true. I hope anybody who reads this realises that right now more than ever, I value them for who they are. I have a couple of students who read this, Julia and Pragathi, and I have never been so grateful for having been their teacher. My parents might read this, and I know they don't believe it but I love them and appreciate what they've done for me over the years. My sister is endlessly patient with my vagaries, my endless rants over the phone, and my crazy ideas for how I'm going to change the world. My friends in Stuttgart think I'm raving mad, and my friends in London are just checking in to see if I'm going to be in another country by the time their TV series is over.

But having a permanent job isn't the only form of important work. Friendships are work, and so is study and leisure. It's hard work to practice the guitar for hours to be good enough for a gig, or to keep at a friend till they tell you what's really the matter. And some forms of work are really fascinating.

Last week I went to a reading by Colum MacKann, an Irish author whom my mother is officially in love with. His all-too-obvious Dublin accent punctuated a series of readings from his short stories, from Dancer, the biography of Rudolph Nureyev, and his most recent, Zoli, an unusual tale of a roma gypsy girl. His writing sounds like some of the most gruelling work I could imagine. He has travelled and spent time in the most unlikely places, doing 'reasearch' for his novels. He's worked all sorts of mad jobs and sacrificed years of his life for one piece of writing. His friendliness and genuine interest in each reader who came up to get a book signed, testified that this is work to him. Art is work; simple as that.

I just came back this evening from a public lecture on Seamus Heaney in Concordia University, given by Kevin Whelan, an Irish UCD scholar. It was a beautifully conducted lecture, which dealt with some of Heaney's biography without reducing his language to the mundane events of his life. Dr. Whelan obviously has a love for Heaney's work which goes so deep he barely needs to be prompted to deliver a fantastic lecture. As a teacher, it was so satisfying to finally grasp some of what the song-and-dance over Heaney actually is.

I could have sat in front of the TV and watched a series with my flatmate. I could have quietly finished my chapter of 'Les Miserables' (yes Julia, I'm keeping up with the reading, although I don't read as fast as you!), but I have decided to make the most of the academia in this city and go out to an academic lecture after a rough day's jobhunting to attend this lecture.

Who knows what I'll think of this time, when I look back on it years from now. One thing that's for sure; this will be one of the times in my life I most appreciated the value of an honest day's work.

Storytelling and street smelling

This past week has been just as hectic and fantastic as the others. This city seems to be crammed with surprises, and I'm loving every minute of it so far.

So last weekend, I'm on my way home through Parc La Fontaine, and I stumble on a group of storytellers, sitting in a circle around a chair. It's a fairy story about a baker woman who tricks fairies into letting her back into her life, after being kidnapped as a slave, explaining the history of the 'Baker's dozen'. Little kids and big kids are sitting in a circle around this fifty-something year old woman, with a dark shawl and a little squeaky voice, sharing a tale she'd probably heard as a child herself. The sun occasionally lights her face from between the branches of the overhead trees as she tells her familiar story, and she makes the most of it to show the children where fairies live... in trees.

I stayed for three hours, listening to the rambling tales of Quebequois mountains, clever Arab merchants earning donkeys through language trickery, and even attempted a story myself. I've told the tale of how Finn was saved from his fellow giant Cuchulainn by his clever wife, Una, several times to my grade six and seven classes. Storytelling is easy when it's your mother tongue, you've got the attention of a class, and a book to support you if you get lost. But telling Irish folktales in French, in a park, with no book to support me, was another matter.

A matter which allowed me to admire the talents of the Breton storytellers, who are unparalleled in the art, next to the Irish, that is. In this Francophone group, the Breton guy (I've got his name on a card somewhere, I'll dig it up) completely stole the show, turning folk tales and Bible stories into modern commentaries about news stories. He used tales by Marcel Ayme, and tweaked them to suit his own lively style. Outstanding.

And this was a complete fluke, a chance event, like so many in this city brimming with music, art, theatre... That's precisely what I missed in Stuttgart; being able to scour the city as a 'flaneur', soaking up whatever is going on. Like I did as a kid in Paris.



My friend Lisa sees the 'flaneur' as a privilege of a wealthy society, and which is largely reserved for males (women are often pestered if they meander about a city alone), and I'm sure this is absolutely right. Nobody with six children and a mortgage to pay can really hope to be much of a flaneur. But it's something so engrained in me that I can hardly help it.

I grew up in Paris, in a very privileged, wealthy neighbourhood, which was largely geared towards the retired Christians and dinosaurs of Parisian aristocracy. Neuilly-sur-Seine had large boulevards with leafy trees and ecologically friendly solar-powered parking metres, each worth about the price of a new Mercedes. The entire community flocked to the church every Sunday in knickerbockers and prim red reading glasses, squawking out hymns as they left the feelgood ceremony. The priest sang along with the guitar-playing adolescents, who had rehearsed the hymn during their scout weekend in the hills of Dordogne the previous weekend. The birds sang, and Sarkozy - yes, THE Sarkozy of current fame and infamous dizzy presidential heights - was mayor, and had the excruciating dilemma of choosing the colour of the new set of children's slides and swing sets to adorn the local park behind the church. And the slides were changed every six weeks, if my memory serves me right. The unnamed north African teens were safely kept away through Sarkozy's subtle tactics of having military police at every other street corner. A peaceful, Christian, whiter-than-white safe haven, barely a stone's throw from Paris. But no one threw stones. Of course.



I hung out with the 'foreigners', who were scarce in the local public school, populated almost excusively with the offspring of respectable, God-fearing French families, who owned apartments in Paris and the Alps (for skiing in winter), Corsica (for swimming in summer) and a country house not too far from Paris (for fine weekends). So my friendship circle consisted of a Croatian hippy with body odour issues, a Serbian singer whose father had earned a fortune in professional basketball, and a French hanger-on who had lived in Egypt and had gotten into our school through some shady deal with the headmistress, because of his father's connections. We didn't have the money or the privilege of going to the trendy overpriced cafes, bars and nightclubs sported by the glitzy teens who populated our school, and were strangely unimpressed by the priest's efforts to recruit us for the scouts and the upcoming church fair. We smoked, were sarcastic, and played guitar on benches in the cold. We wrote songs and poetry, and admired the indie music scene for its 'alternative' nature. Radiohead CDs littered our bedrooms, and we read Henri Bergson and Nietszche, and knew how fake it all was.

The dichotomy of horrifyingly wealthy christian hypocricy versus teenage pseudo-marxist spleen left little room for anything else at that time, and after many evenings of sitting on the same bench listening to Predrag (the Serbian kid) groan about how, like, unreal it all was, I would decide to get lost. Literally.

I'd go to the Metro station, Les Sablons, and after a 10 minute ride, hop off at Chatelet-les-Halles or Odeon, to meander around the streets of the latin quarter. Sure, it was full of tourists and students, but at least it wasn't packed with money-and-religion-soaked teenage girls with pretty haircuts and expensive scooter bikes, or depressive wannabe artists. I'd browse books in the second hand bookstores, and walk around the labyrinth of streets near the Sorbonne, till the cobbles all looked alike and I wasn't sure which way was north. I'd listen to blues CDs in the stores, and on a good day, spend my Mum's treat of a restaurant ticket (a 30 Franc voucher redeemable only against food in restaurants or takeaways) on a slap-up crepe with cheese and a dessert. There were hairy weirdo travellers and students with dreadlocks selling posters in the metro, and that saxophonist at Concorde metro station, who summed up Paris in a solo.



So being a 'flaneur' means more to me than meandering about aimlessly or window shopping (which, again, it surely is in some places). In Paris (as now in Montreal) it was a way to anonymously soak in the city. It's a sort of altered mind state in which you absorb whatever's going on - and so much of it is - without having to dwell on specialising or knowing everything about a subject to be a part of it. I'd stop to listen to Bulgarian orchestra musicians playing the Four Seasons on accordeons (they couldn't bring the church organ with them into the street), as well as teenagers breakdancing in the underground corridors of Les Halles. I'd talk to bums about where they came from, and chat with American tourists, explaining the conversion rate between Dollars and Francs. I learnt what I later understood from reading and speaking to artists, actors and musicians; that there is no high or low culture except the canon fabricated by political elites. There's culture in the museums, planned by a government-appointed and state funded organisation, but there's the culture growing organically, in all its uncontrolled weirdness. The Bulgarian organists in the Paris metro, sprouting out between the cracks of the French music scene, just like the storytellers of Bretagne appearing in the park in Montreal.

My French literature teacher used to sardonically quip that 'Shakespeare is worth a pair of boots' to ridicule the notion that the literary canon is political. Well, by revisiting the flaneur in me, while meandering about this city, I'm finding out that Shakespeare is certainly in a pair of boots, when you can afford to wear them down that far...