A few years ago I headed to Paris to work for my then employer in their French headquarters. Six months into the job, the company announced massive layoffs. I, along with 10% of my fellow employees, was suddenly jobless. But unlike most of my newly laid-off colleagues, I was in France, miles from home. Should I hightail it back to the US and find another job? The practical side of me said yes. The adventurous lover of travel said: no way! After all, my wife and I had found an apartment and had started to adjust to life in Paris. And we had a visa to stay in France for a year. Why leave now? The only question was what could I do to make a living?

It is virtually impossible to get a job in France if you are neither French, nor a citizen of a country in the European Union. Unless you have a specialized and highly valuable skill, companies will not go through the time and expense required to make you an employee. The only American that I met in Paris that worked as an employee of a French company was a bond trader who had previously worked for a high profile New York firm. In this case, the person had a skill that was in tremendous demand (Paris is a major financial center), in limited supply (US trained traders in Paris are scarce as hens teeth) and guaranteed to make money for the hiring company. The bond trader, as well as other friends, recommended that I become a travailleur independent, the official French term for freelancer.

You are allowed to work as a freelancer in France as long as you register with the government, and you have a skill by which you can reasonably support yourself. In my case, I was in the IT industry, in which freelancers are widely accepted, so I headed down to the URSSAF office, the government agency in charge of registering, and of course, taxing, independent contractors. Just before I left, I made an appointment with a friend of mine, Jean Taquet, who helps people, particularly Americans, in dealing with the French government on immigration and work matters.

“You will have to fill out a form, stating the nature of your activity (the bureaucrats at URSSAF don’t call what you do for a living a business, they call it an activity),” he said. “You can put down two activities. For the first activity put ‘Consultant en Informatique’ which means Computer Consultant. For the second activity, put “Formateur”.

“Formateur?” I asked. “Trainer?”

“Yes, with that designation you can always teach English. Not as a University Professor of course, that requires the proper degrees. But English lessons. Or substitute teaching”

“Ok. If all else fails, I can give English lessons.”

“Of course.”

I headed down to the URSSAF office, which is on 3 rue Tolbiac in the 13th arrondissement, in the shadow of the Bibliotheque François Mitterand. After a brief wait, and five minutes of interrogation by a URSSAF employee, the employee entered my information into the computer and I was officially a travailleur independent. The only thing I lacked was a job.

I sent out resumes, registered with several IT freelancer websites, and even had an interview with a bank for a software developer job. But no employment came out of it. The IT business in France was in a slump, and they were busier sending work to countries like Morocco or Romania than hiring relatively expensive consultants such as me. Things were starting to look grim. I didn’t have a huge amount of euros, and the exchange rate was highly unfavorable if I wanted to convert some dollars into euros from my savings back home.

As I sat at my computer searching for IT contractor jobs, the words of Jean Taquet came back to me: “you can always teach English.” Inspired, I did a search on teaching English in Paris. I found that there were tons of jobs, and that the main requirement was having a University degree and English as your mother tongue. That was me. A lot of the sites also mentioned that it helped if you had a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. They also mentioned that working as a freelancer was common in the English teaching community.

This was encouraging. I felt, however, that an investment in a TEFL certificate would be helpful, as I had very little experience as a teacher. I found two schools that offered TEFL certification. One was at WICE (which has since dropped its TEFL program) an educational organization for Americans. The WICE program, however, took six months to complete. It would have been nice to spend a leisurely six months learning to teach ESL and enjoying Paris, but I didn’t have six months. I had to get a job by the first of the year or go back to the US with my tail between my legs.

The other program was offered by TRANSFER, a Paris language school on rue Godot de Mauroy in the ninth arrondissement near La Madeleine. They offered the Cambridge University CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults), which is the most widely accepted TEFL certificate, particularly in Europe. The cost was 1500 euros, and it took only a month to complete it. The next class was starting within two weeks. I went for an interview and signed up. The price was right and so was the timing. I was on my way to becoming a bona fide ESL teacher.

The CELTA course provided a reading list prior to the start of class, and required an initial essay based on this reading to be handed in on the first day. I read through the materials, and penned what I thought was a nice essay. I handed it in proudly and went on to the first class. I didn’t realize until I read the fine print that each writing assignments has a maximum number of words. You needed to keep the essay short, to the point, and error-free. My first essay was a little over the word limit. But I figured that they had my money, and they would put me through the motions of teaching, give me my certificate, and send me out into the world.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The four week CELTA course is designed to create real teachers at the end of the course. Since it is a fairly short period of time, they cram several months of learning into a single four-week session. And they don’t let you slide. My nice first essay, and the first essays of most of the class were handed back the second day. MUST REDO! The CELTA Tutor gave us some general ideas on what the assignment should have looked like, and told us we had to have it back before the end of the week or he would fail it. That was another new thing that we just found out. You could fail the written assignments, and you could fail the teaching assignments. Two failures and you would not receive the CELTA certificate. We all gasped collectively at this news. This was going to be a long, hard slog, and it was quite possible that we wouldn’t all make it to the end and receive our certificates.

Class now began in earnest. In the mornings we had lectures on things like grammar and how to do “student centered” teaching – where the students rather than the teacher do most of the talking. In the afternoon we taught a class. The classes were made of up French students who received free instruction in exchange for being our guinea pigs. We prepared lesson plans, and taught two 90 minute classes in the afternoon, rotating who would be the teacher for each day, since there were five of us in each group. If you didn’t teach, you had to critique the person who was teaching. Worse, Guy, the strictest tutor, sat in the back of the room and critiqued our lessons, and if something went wrong he would stop the class and berate you right then and there - in front of the students. Needless to say, teaching was incredibly nerve-wracking, and we all hated it.

To ensure that my lessons plans would pass muster the next day, and to do the new writing assignments as well as correct writing assignments that had been handed back with a REDO on them, I began working until midnight each night. Then I would collapse into bed, wake up, and do it all over again. Weekends were spent catching up on the reading, doing lesson plans for the following week, and sleeping. This had turned out to be one of the hardest classes I had ever taken. The pressure was intense, the criticism by Guy was devastating, and morale was low among my fellow CELTA candidates. One woman developed extremely high blood pressure and had to leave the program. The rest of us hunkered down and formed a sort of support group – to bounce off ideas for teaching and to help soften the blow of the constant criticism. We initiated a custom of going across the street to the bar after class on Friday, to have a few drinks and blow off steam about the week we had spent.

I said to myself – constantly – “I can do this.” It wasn’t hard, just made more hard and stressful than it had to be by the tutors. I imagined myself teaching on my own. Once again I said to myself, “I can do this.” And my teaching improved. The first week I was totally inept, but by the third week I could acquit myself fairly well in front of a class. I no longer felt desperate if I had a written assignment handed back – we would all just look at the paper of the group member who passed the first time, and made our papers conform to it. The going was still tough – still staying up until midnight to finish work - but the class was drawing to an end.

I passed my final teaching assignment, and got my CELTA certificate. One of the guys in my group made it by the skin of his teeth – he failed one teaching assignment, but pulled his last one out of the fire and passed. Two of the women in my group passed, a third failed and did not receive a CELTA. In all, two people in the entire group went home empty handed, having failed the course. The rest of us were qualified to teach.

For me, the next step (after several days of sleep), was to find a job. I rounded up a copy of FUSAC magazine, a good employment source for American expats, and started going through all the ads for ESL Teachers. TRANSFER had given us a list of Language Schools to avoid, such as Wall Street Institute, which has its own methodology and doesn’t require a teacher that is CELTA-certified. Within weeks, I had contracts to teach for two language schools. My job, with both of these schools, was to travel to the client company’s site in Paris, and give individual lessons to business professionals in the privacy of their office. I was selected to do this because of my background in business and IT, which was in demand at a lot of firms. My schedule was Monday and Wednesday: clients of Langues et Entreprises, and Tuesday and Friday: clients of Business Languages Skills, known as BLS. Thursday I kept open for myself: to do lesson plans, to run errands and get caught up on personal business. In retrospect I should have made Friday my catch up day, so I could take long weekends, but at the time I was just glad to have work.

What do you have to look forward to as an ESL teacher in France? Here was my experience. You’re not going to make a huge amount of money, and it’s good if you have some money in the bank or a significant other that has a steady job. But you get an amazing amount of free time, and you get to know Paris like the back of your hand. You meet interesting people who work for some of France’s largest companies, and as you talk to them, you learn things about French culture and life that you would never learn as a tourist. And you are teaching something that you have known from childhood – your own language. In my opinion, there are few better ways to make a living. You are your own boss, you maintain your schedule in conjunction with your students, and if a student cancels at the last minute, you get paid! Plus the time that the lesson would have taken is yours. A surprise hour-and-a-half break in the middle of the day. If you tire of France, you can teach ESL all over the world. Right now there is demand in Europe, Southeast Asia, Mexico, Korea, China, Japan: in short most of the developed and developing world where they need to speak English to join the global economy. Or you can start right here in the US.

By Michael Norris