I'm no native (English speaker)

I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't fascinated by languages.

My favorite doll scared the hell out of me when I first met her because she spoke, but she eventually became my favorite doll nonetheless.
She. Not it. I'm Italian, I treat objects as people, get used to that.

I spoke "stuffed animalese" for years; it involved speaking Italian but using just one vowel out of five, and which vowel depended on the region the stuffed animal was from, on the stuffed animals' planet. But that's a different story. I'm just saying that I was an eager linguist at a very young age.
I started translating song lyrics around the same time I started learning them by heart, and singing my heart out with "Back for Good" by Take That and most importantly "Hero" by Mariah Carey, which was my first attempt at translations.
I had never studied English before, and the incoherent result is still hung on my wardrobe door, next to Leo Di Caprio's and Nick Carter's pictures from 90's magazines - an eternal reminder of where I started from and how long a way I've come. I even used to write my acknowledgments and fake interviews, which would end up on some famous artist's album cover or in magazines - because translators deserve their own recognition.

But when the time came to choose a high school and then a major, I chose Italian. Because English for me was "just for fun", I couldn't imagine building a career out of it. And even when I went on to earn a Master's Degree, it was in Teaching Italian.
Then a private tutor - a native English speaker, because I didn't want to waste my time with Italian tutors - suggested I tried the CELTA. Me? Teaching English? I'm no native English speaker, how could that work out? "You know the grammar, you're already three steps ahead."

As it turned out, she was right. But as I was training to become a certified English teacher, my inferiority complex started to emerge. I even cried my eyes out with my insensitive tutor asking why would any student in their right mind want to study English with a non-native speaker. I wish I had some super inspirational words of wisdom to remember about that interaction, but I don't. And I kept struggling with that feeling for years, every time someone asked if the teacher for that course was a native speaker and every time I had to fake it. Because that's what happens to a lot of us: we just fake our way through, either with employers or with students, or both.

Now that I've run my friends' and my own language school for more than five years, it doesn't hurt anymore when a student refuses to have classes with me because I'm no native English speaker. I just feel sorry for them, and I know they'll eventually regret their choice 90% of the times: I know grammar, and that's a huge advantage apparently.

But never in a million years, I would have imagined being in the position I'm in right now. For a lucky series of events, I've ended up working for LinkedIn Learning as an author. It meant challenging my inner voice way too many times, when in the back of my mind I could hear the old refrain "why would I be the right person for this job, I'm no native English speaker?!!" or when, during the shoot, that voice would be screaming "YOU TOTALLY SCREWED THAT WORD UP!! ARE YOU SERIOUS?? HAVEN'T YOU PRACTICED IT A THOUSAND TIMES??"

It was a voice that came from years of teachers diminishing us for our pronunciation, insulting our writing without providing any useful correction; years of students doubting our teaching skills because of our birthplace, years of parents refusing to let their children in our care because of that same reason. It was the voice of years spent being told, "Since you're no native English speaker you're not good enough, you're not worth it."

Now that voice is still there, but I've learned to ignore it. I've learned to listen to people who told me my writing skills were great, and that I needed to practice some of those words, but it really wasn't a big deal if I screwed them up; to people who insisted I was the right person to talk about relationships with other cultures, because I've lived that kind of experience.

We're all natives of one or more places, one or more cultures, one or more languages; none of that should define us as people, and that's the bottom line of everything I do in my job and in my daily life. And that's what I also brought to my experience in LinkedIn, which was one of the destinations of a journey that began at 8 years old, trying to understand the meaning of a song.
I can't wait to see what's next.

CELTified

"In looking for ways to move forward as a teacher,

you will also find ways to grow as a person.

Good luck. I hope you enjoy it all."

Jim Scrivener

My story begins more than one year ago, when my English teacher said: "You really don't need these lessons anymore. You should actually do the CELTA and teach English, not learn it. And you're also a foreigner, therefore you know the grammar, which we don't. Think about it."

As weird as the idea might sound at first, I started thinking about it and almost one year later I sent my application for the CELTA course in Toronto. From that moment on, my experience is similar to that of 9 other people who were applying for the same session and who went through pre-course assignments, interviews, pre-course tasks and so on, and who were asked the same question at one point: "Are you sure you can do it?!" The answer we gave was almost the same: "Hell, yes!! Who do you think you're talking to?!" Little did we know...

The first day wasn't so bad, I thought I would have had a tough month but I wasn't worried at all; I started defining "tough" from day 2, and consequently started crying and never stopped for the next 4 weeks. Because I wasn't prepared for the work load the course required, nor to be in front of a class while my peers and tutor were observing me, and pretend I know what the hell I'm doing here. I learned how to manage a class while teaching something useful (and feeling like an idiot when asking ICQs...), I learned how to write on the board, I learned how to plan a lesson in English and how to try to meet the criteria to pass a teaching practice... and I also decided not to give a damn about the criteria sometimes, and teach the people to try and see how real life works.

During these weeks I questioned everything about myself: am I a good teacher? Am I a teacher at all or should I change career?? Why should somebody pay ME to learn English, rather than a native speaker? Do I have the real-life-knowledge that I need to teach English culture? At this point, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then I started staging my breakfast: "toast the bread - 3 mins; spread the Nutella - 20 secs; feedback: is the Nutella evenly spread?" and after that, listening to Eros Ramazzotti sing "life sometimes cheats you, because it tests you before teaching you the lesson" I thought it was a perfect example of TTT... yes, I was on the verge of a nervous AND emotional breakdown.

But I'm alive, quite healthy and proud of what I achieved. And if I were to answer that question again "are you sure you can do it?" I would know exactly what to say. I'd say no. Unless you give me back those wonderful people who made this possible. I could write about a million things, about the unfair judgements and the incomprehensible standards, about the tutors, about the feedback, about the resource room and the printer that never worked... but I won't. I will write about the amazing Half-Italian girl whose laughter I already miss; I will write about the Aussie girl who speaks a mysterious language of her own that I pretend to understand; I'll write about my Tiny-Beautie that's always overanalyzing everything and never realizes what a beautiful person she is, and an amazing teacher as well; I'll write about the two Mothers in the class, that the students love because they're calm and confident and make you feel as if nothing could possibly go wrong; about the Half-Finnish guy that rehearses his lessons in front of the mirror, and everybody could tell how much he's improving; about the Clownish guy, who's the most entertaining teacher ever and spent time correcting my assignments and asking me why I put commas everywhere -because, I'm, Italian, of, course; and about the Actor-Teacher, who's not at the board - he's on stage performing his lesson, and the students love it. In this group I've been called the "Native-Italian-Positive-Vibe-Grammar-Book" and yes, as my teacher told me, I knew grammar better than anybody else. But they were all there when I was falling apart, and in their special way they gave me the strength to go on and never give up... and this is not something that you can learn from a book. So in the end, I learned a lot during this month, especially about myself. I learned that I can teach English as well as Italian, that students like me and don't give a shit if I'm Italian or not, that it's worth trying challenging myself because I never know how much I can achieve, that I'm generous and love to help other people... and I learned about friendship in the English-speaking world, where there's no distinction between love and affection, there's no "ti amo" vs. "ti voglio bene", there's only "I love you" and the idea that you will cherish a person for life.

I also learned a phrasal verb. It's a very special one indeed, because it's the only phrasal verb we used every day throughout the course and the only phrasal verb I definitely like. Whenever something went wrong or someone had a bad day, we would say to each other: "Hey come here, let's hug it out." And whenever I'll have a bad day and start questioning myself, I'll know I can just call a friend and hug it all out.