How was your childhood home? Describe it and its surroundings.
I grew up in a charming village house, unspoilt by a beautiful garden. It was all stone, decorated with flowers. The bedrooms were upstairs and overlooked the lavender fields; in the distance we could see a river where, children, we spent every moment that we had free. The house was in the heart of the village, there was a church close to home, and every morning it was his bells that woke us up.
Tell a disturbing story that you (or one of your friends) have experienced.
At the time, I went out with the man I was crazy in love with. We had been together for a long time when finally he decided to introduce me to his family. These parents invited us to dinner at their home. They were real bourges, so I was very afraid it would go bad. And I was right to worry. Just arrived home, I felt that I was not welcome. His mother welcomed me coldly! And his sister hardly spoke to me. It was the kind of women who talk to you in the back as soon as you leave the room. But they did not even bother to pretend that meeting me pleased them! I did not know what to do with me. Fortunately, it was a big party: the wine flowed freely, and I took advantage of it so much that I was stunned well before we sat down to eat. It was serious. In addition, I had not eaten the day, and by the time we went to serve the main course, I fell in the apples! Shame! Obviously my friend dumped me the next day.
What do you like most about your job? What are the issues? Have your opinions on your profession changed during your career?
I have been working as a teacher of French as a Foreign Language (FLE) for over a decade now, and unlike some of my colleagues who feel jaded after teaching for a while, I like my job better than ever. I consider it one of the most important in the world today. Although poorly paid, teaching work is demanding, exciting and rewarding. At the beginning of my career, I thought that the foreign language was only a communication tool. But as time went by, I realized that what we were doing in the classroom was much more important than I thought because, in addition to teaching young people to communicate with people from another country they were also taught to open up to other cultures and to get to know theirs better. Knowing the other is essential to know oneself. The same goes for language and culture: we understand better his own by comparing them to others. Language courses are therefore vitally important, especially in heterogeneous society such as ours.