Hello again and welcome back to Happy Hour. Today we have in our studio one of your favorite co-hosts, Sarah. Hi, Sarah.

Hi-ya~

In the previous episode, Sarah was sharing with us her work experence at a vocational rehabilitation center in France. And in today’s episode, let’s carry on with her story.

You said it's a rehabilitation center. So it's not just the language teaching I'm assuming, it's also other types of skills.

Yes. So the English course that I was teaching, all the English courses because they were slightly different, they were based on mainly technical English because the training programs that offered at our center, we are specialized center in that we only teach IT based courses, so computing. So you might be an IT tech you might be training to become an IT technician, a software developer, a network manager, those kinds of jobs.

And I'm curious, apart from you, you said people who went for the job, they're all significantly older than you. But who were your colleagues? Were they mostly French or more like an international...? What is it like?

I think the vast majority were French natives. I think everybody was, I'm trying to think now.

So you are the only foreign...

Yeah, I had quite a few colleagues. So no, not all were French natives, but I would say the majority were. So the lingua franca was French, everybody spoke in French, my training colleagues, because I had different types of colleagues, my training colleagues, the majority were from industry backgrounds. So they were not trained teachers initially when they came to the center. They had been working in large computing companies or had been working in IT departments in different cities across France.

Oh so they are industry professionals.

Yes, mainly.

And were these people mostly full time part time or did you also have volunteers at the center?

I think almost everybody was working full time. There were a couple of part time workers and I don't believe we had any volunteers, because again, it was a professional organization.

It’s probably difficult.

I don't think we had any volunteers, at least I wasn't aware of any volunteers.

Now let's talk about how you felt about that experience. You work there for how long in total?

In total about... so I think it was seven years as trainer and one year as a language assistant. I think that's right.

That's a very long time. So there must be something that have kept you there. What were these, let's say, rewarding moments, the moments that made you feel like I want to stay here. I wanna keep on doing what I'm doing.

I think one of the main reasons, it's a little bit of a cliche, but I think for any teacher, it's the same. When you see your students making some kind of progress things going in the right direction, I think it gives you purpose. It makes you feel like you're making a difference in somebody's life, and you're doing something that matters. I didn't always feel like I was helping people. Sometimes when they came into my class and said they didn't want to learn English, and I was wasting their time, that was a little bit demotivated.

They're being very blunt about that.

Yeah. But I think it was really good for me to be confronted with the reality of learning for some people, which is, they don't always want to do it. When you're living with a disability, sometimes you're trying to make the best of a bad situation. Therefore, in order to come and complete our course, they had to learn English. But really what they were interested in was getting a job so that they could support their families. And of course, as a young student with none of these kinds of responsibilities, I think, I thought everybody was going to want to learn with me and some of them didn't. And I ended up respecting that because I understood their motivation a little bit better.

Yeah, I think being a teacher or trainer, if you are exposed to people with very different needs, very very different background, is actually good for a teacher or trainer because then you start to realize that you get out of your own. You got...

It's humbling.

Your comfort zone. You sort of start to see the world as it is. I think that's one of the great things about adult education, adult learning for mature students, especially in your situation, it's even more complex because of their disabilities, their specific situations. You said that to see them actually progress. I would assume that some of these progress meaning that after they got the training, they actually went on to find a job so that they could live a better life, they could improve their quality of life?

Yeah. In many cases, the kind of benchmark of success was being able to get a job, but with people who had come to the organization with more severe kind of difficulties. Often when you're living with certain disabilities, you may have social issues as well. So you may be living in unsuitable or unstable housing. You may have difficult relationships with friends and family. You may be very isolated. So for some people who had maybe, been out of kind of society for a long time, just getting them back in talking to people, getting them into a routine, looking after themselves. That was a great success for them. And we obviously love sharing this success with them as well.

Sounds almost like a support group kind of setting.

I think when you're working in vocational rehabilitation, you have to want to support the people that you're working with. It's not only the hard technical skills that they're trying to learn. It's a lot of soft skills, emotional managements and things as well.

Also very important for people in this particular group to regain confidence, especially if it's something like accidents or like a sudden illness likely degenerative. By the way, I could imagine there are lots of challenges in this, not only as a language teacher dealing with all your usual challenges of multi level, multi sort of different age group. But it's also like you said mental disabilities and also people with physical disabilities. Many of them will be confronted by psychological issues or stress or things like depression, anxiety and all that. And how did you cope with that because obviously you were not trained in mental health support and all that. I'm assuming you had professionals there to help with this.

In this setting, so with regard to having professional care available, we had a doctor and a psychologist who worked on site, so they supported us a lot with regard to how best to teach and work with different trainees whilst respecting their privacy. So they would obviously not give us any kind of medical details. If the trainee wanted to share these details with us, they were obviously welcome to, but otherwise we were not given the names of the conditions they were suffering with. We were only given guidelines with regard to how best to work with them. And any warning signs that we should look out for. Maybe a professional needed to be contacted.

So you were going into the classroom, unless it's directly visible, you don't even know what everyone's disabilities are.

Yeah, we didn't know.

I see.

But the thing is that can be a good thing and a bad thing, a bad thing because you don't know what to expect.

It does sound like treading on thin ice.

A little bit, sometimes.

Because you don't know will be a trigger, especially when it comes to psychological issues.

Absolutely.

Mental health issues.

You have to be, I think what I've learned is you've got to try to be quite careful and you have to learn to read the room. You have to constantly be watching people's body language and notice that they react when you do something or you say something and also encourage people create an atmosphere where people feel safe. So that if they feel that something did not go well in the class or that they feel unhappy about something, they feel comfortable enough to come and talk to you and tell you that there is some kind of negative trigger that you're doing unintentionally.

I think to have a safe zone, safe space in your classroom is, it's a good general rule for any teacher, especially language teacher. But in your situation I would imagine it is a must, lots of respect for that.

It was very important.

But are there any other specific challenges that you find apart from tending to everyone's psychological needs? What else did you find to be particularly challenging?

And I think another one of the specific challenges for me was working in a very technical environment because everybody was an IT specialist. The most of their educational background was in IT and as well as their professional background. I felt a little bit isolated as I was only one of a small group of trainers who did not have a a technical background. I knew how to use Word and Excel but I didn't know how to take apart a computer, I didn't know how to troubleshoot any issues I may have. So that was quite difficult as well. But through having to teach technical English and support trainees with their technical writing etc., I ended up learning a lot about technology and about these specific jobs as well. I didn't know anything about the technical job market and I learnt a lot about that as well.

Sounds great. So I think it's really interesting to hear about unique experience to see your perspective and to see how things are done in that kind of setting. To summarize, to wrap up today's discussion I would love to ask you what feel like you have learned from the experience or to put it in a cliched way. How did you feel like you have grown or developed in terms of yourself?

I think the whole experience taught me to listen a lot, to not be judgmental. Do not assume that you know what's going on in somebody's life because most of the time you don't know what somebody is dealing with. That taught me a lot, made me grow up a lot and learn about people's priorities in life. And that's something that is a priority for you is not necessarily a priority for others. And just try to be kind and respectful to other people and encourage them to do the same towards you and others. I think those are the main things I've learned.

All really valuable lessons. And I think that's also why you're a great teacher now. And all of those are lessons that all of those are qualities of a great teacher. Thank you Sarah. Thank you for sharing with us this experience and maybe next episode we can get into more the technical side of things and to talk about to compare the UK and France in terms of how government or regulations or legislation or general attitude are like towards people with disabilities.

Yeah, I will be looking forward to talking about that too.

Thank you Sarah for sharing with us your unique experience. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

I'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye bye. See you.

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