This book series may be why I am a writer…  and a teacher.  [Starfire; Reprint edition (October 6, 1998)]

So, I’m TEFL-ing. Grammatically speaking, TEFL is a noun, and an acronym at that, standing for the class I’m taking: Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I suppose it’s really a gerund if we zero in on the “teaching” aspect, which is exactly what I’m doing here in Santiago specifically and in my career in general.

Today, I had another first day of school. I just love these. Getting new school supplies, packing up a backpack, figuring out which way to walk if you’re lucky enough to walk to school (and not S-curve across the Bay Bridge for two years, for instance). All in all, it’s a chance to “start afresh” as they say. Anne of Green Gables is one of my all-time fav characters of fiction and I believe one of her favorite mottos was “Tomorrow is already fresh, with no mistakes in it… yet.” Meaning, the mistakes are likely just around the corner, but here at the beginning, all is new and untarnished.

Now that I think about it, Anne was a teacher herself, so maybe everything really is falling into place career-wise despite my not knowing the language of my new country, never mind the 90 percent slang you’ll often here as well as all the dropped “s”-es and everything else that makes the Chilean accent challenging even for folks who majored in Spanish, from what I hear. Hey, maybe my naivete puts me ahead of the game! May as well start from scratch, right? Cachai? (That’s slang for “Get it?”)

Okay, back to Anne and this career path of mine that is coming into clearer focus:

• Young Girl falls in love with books. Reads them. Tries to write them. Would eat them if she could, but they look much prettier on her bookshelves. Hence, girl’s desire to move said books around with her from country to country.

• Teenage Girl falls in love with magazines, everything about them. Their paper stock, the full-bleed advertisements involving a boy and a girl or a girl and a city street or a girl and a typewriter, etc.

• Semi-Adult Girl moves to NYC over said love of magazine publishing. Girl lands dream job, meets cool fishies, but misses home and returns to Cali, where she gets to be the bigger fish in a much smaller pond deal, but she likes the pond (and meets even more cool fishies whom she now misses just as dearly as she missed the first fishies!!).

• Adult Girl takes a hard look at where print publishing is going and thinks, A-hah! I will teach! I will return to my first love of books and try to write one for real and teach the ones that other folks have already written for real. Yes! (This is mid-2008 we’re talking about.)

Then… economy implodes. Everyone rushes back to grad school. By graduation, 3,500 teachers have been laid off in SF alone! A-hah! Teaching jobs in the Bay Area might be the only ones harder to find than publishing jobs! Fantastic! Oh, wait, hubby is moving to Chile… strong economy, lots of executives who need to learn English, tons of language schools… It sounds like this girl may be way more employable in Chile than in Cali after all.

And that catches you up to the present, where Adult Married Writer-Wanna-Be-Teacher Girl has commenced a four-week TEFL certification course so I can do just that. Teach in Chile. Nerd out on English grammar (anyone want to battle with phrasal verbs?). Get to meet a bunch of different folks, which was always my favorite part of working at a regional magazine and being able to profile so many everyday folks from everyday (and not-so-everyday) walks of life. And manage to keep a schedule that will make it possible to finish this novel so I can maybe one day get a job back in the States reading and writing and talking about books.

My mom always told me that if you ask seven-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll almost always blurt out their pure passion, before it’s corrupted by financial ambition, “practicality,” etc. This is why you might come across a lot of seven-year-old artists, astronauts, and Olympic athletes. This is also why I wanted to be a fashion illustrator until I was ten and realized I couldn’t draw for squat. I should have just taken a cue from Lucy Maud Montgomery and gone with being just like Anne Shirley when she grows up, with her zesting for adventure, stomping through the mud around an island, falling for the nice boy (eventually), and realizing you’re not so crazy to love books to the degree that you do.

Thank you, L.M. You writers really are my favorite teachers.