I can't tell you how many times I have been asked that question. Thousands, I guess. Well, the answer is simple.
When I was growing up, the unspoken truth within our family was that there were many professions a young man could follow but only two with honor: medicine and law. This made the choice of a career rather uncomplicated. It's true that I admired television's debonair Dr. Killdare and was immensely impressed with his stunningly beautiful nurses. But the sight of blood had always made me dizzy and I couldn't stand the sound of sirens or the smell of hospitals. So, by the time I graduated from high school (sometime around 1985 give or take fifteen years), my mind was made up. I could never be a doctor.
On to the university I went and for the next four years I studied criminal justice. It was an excellent program that gave students a solid grounding in the realities of the field. As part of my major, I was an assistant in a lawyer's office, spent many hours in court, sat in on parole hearings, and even (notice the background on this page) worked in a prison! After all that experience, my mind was made up. I could never be a lawyer.
Fresh out of the university I decided to "find myself". What better place to begin the search, than on the ski slopes? So, I moved to Lake Tahoe. Of course there was no snow that year. To pass the time and pay the bills, I took a job in a casino in Lake Tahoe, where I emptied slot machines, breathed second-hand cigarette smoke, and asked myself "What should I do?" several million times a day. I had lived abroad for a year when I was 20 and knew I loved to travel. But what kind of profession would allow me to live and travel around the world?
In 1977 I entered a graduate program in Teaching English as a Second Language. After graduating in 1980, I was ready to begin the adventure of living abroad. Then, almost out of the blue I was offered a teaching position in Santa Barbara, a lovely coastal town north of Los Angeles. "Well," I told myself, "I'll go there and hang out at the beach for a year and then move abroad."
Yesterday, twenty very interesting years and thousands of ESL students later, I woke up and found myself in Monterey not Santa Barbara but, more to the point, still in California. How did that happen anyway?
This semester I'm teaching at Levels 3 and 4 in the ESL program. For detailed information, select the class that interests you..
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