I have started working finally. I started, in fact, at the end of April. It took me forever to work up my courage to begin the search because I kept hearing about how difficult it was to find a job. My resume (CV) had been edited over and over. My friend A* did a revision for the French and then her neighbor, who is a professional in such things did another revision. I was getting tired of redoing it but not actually getting out there. So, I finally went to the unemployment office in my new neighborhood and then I had to do another revision for them.

I thought to myself that perhaps I just needed to break the ice for myself and get out there into the market. So I found an old FUSAC magazine that I had laying around and searched the ads for teaching positions. The FUSAC magazine is for the English speaking community in Paris and has everything that you could want including jobs, apartments, and people connections. I found a dozen ads for teaching that had email addresses and the next morning sent my resume off.

By the next day, I had a couple of responses that said they would put my info in the file and some that said that the position had already been filled. The day after that, I got a call asking if I would come in for an interview that Wednesday and the next day, I got another call for another interview, which I set for Thursday.

I went to the first interview and really liked the space and the people. The woman who interviewed me asked very good questions and spoke well about the art of teaching. I told her that I needed to think about it, however, because it was going to require a lot of moving around from business to business to do the teaching.

On Thursday, I went to the second interview and from the minute that I walked in the door had a bad taste in my mouth. It was one of those places where people are overly friendly and smiling like you are the next greatest thing and offering you coffee and making sure that you have been attended to. I swear that I had three people in the space of 5 minutes ask me if I had been taken care of.

Then I went into the “interview” and was handed a stack of papers to fill out of which one set had questions like, “What are your 5 best and 5 worst characteristics” or “ What are your goals in the next 5 years”. These were not my idea of good interview questions. After what seemed like hours, the girl came back and the first thing she did was “explain” the school system. I felt more like she was trying to sell it to me. It was a program where the students sit behind computers and every so often came into see the teacher for an evaluation. After she told me about how wonderful the program was and asked me all the same stupid questions that were on the stupid questionnaire, she told me about all the benefits of the job. The last thing that she finally told me was the salary. It was 1400 euros for 31 hours of work. After taxes that was 1100 euros. I told her that these were not acceptable wages for me, that in Paris you wouldn’t have enough left over for a cup of coffee with friends after paying rent, bills and food.

I called the woman from the first job back and said that I would accept the job. They would pay me 22 euros an hour for the work and said that a teacher could average 25 hours a week. I haven’t yet got up to that many hours but have not done too badly. I lose a lot of hours during the summer months though.