Addiction- AnabelleI must admit it: I have an addiction.Rick on FlickrIs it drugs? Not really. Alcohol? Nah. TV? Maybe. But I want to talk about addiction to school.I’ve been more or less vocal about it on social media, but now I can make it official: I am leaving my full-time job and going back to school, full time, in September.It might come as strange for some of you. But I know myself enough to realize when I don’t belong; and I certainly do not belong in an office.I belong in a classroom, either as a student or, eventually, as a teacher.Now, I’m starting back from the bottom: an undergraduate diploma in applied lingustics to teach ESL. Undergraduate. Like 100-level coursework. Easy peasy, right?Probably. But even then, it will make me happier than sitting here, day in and day out, translating stuff I don’t really care about. I feel no personal involvement in either the company or the work itself. Translation (or at least the type I do) is boring. And I’m not even a trained translator, so I’m still wondering how I got the job in the first place. I’m actually not that good at it.So, yeah, maybe I’m going back either because I’ve simply been institutionalized and I can’t imagine myself outside of the system… or maybe my unconscious is telling me that I DO have something to bring to the academic world. I just needed to find it. And as I find myself increasingly reflecting on my situation as a bilingual/bicultural individual in Canada , I think that linguistics might be the way to go. Literature wouldn’t have let me explore these questions, and I want, WANT, to work with both my languages and make a positive contribution to the state of French in Canada. And without this experience, without this dip in literature and this work as a translator, I couldn’t have figured it out.Here. Federalist, but no assimilated Anglo. Simply a believer in a better future where English and French Canada have more open and honest communication, where the language barrier is slowly taken down, brick by unilingual brick.
