Giganomics, Or Being an Indian Call Center

After hearing about the trend of "giganomics" (I heard about it in the way I hear of many global business trends: from textbooks I use with my students), meaning working freelance gig to gig, rather than having a traditional full-time job, I concur that this is definitely the case for anglophone ESL teachers in France. Non-anglophones, too. It's sometimes project based (exam prep, for example) and usually at universities, a semester or 2 is the longest term available to us or in my last job, I had contracts with my ESL school and a private company for blocks of 10, 20 or 30 hours of business English training. It somehow miraculously worked about to about 20 hours of teaching per week and I somehow miraculously was able to pay my rent each month.

We foreigners here usually don't have the French national teaching qualification and some of us (I'm speaking for myself here) are reluctant to invest in it, so we create our own combinations of part-time jobs which don't require these qualifications. Everyone's looking for the combination that's the best-paying with the best working conditions and the least amount of commuting/prep time/galere.

Piecing together part-time jobs to earn a living is easier to do in France than in the States because we have national health insurance. Health insurance is not dependent upon having a full-time job to get private coverage through an employer like in the States.

Talking about the trend of universities outsourcing positions by recruiting vacataires (temporary replacement teaching staff paid only every 6 months-- sometimes over the following year!) rather than full-time permanent positions, inspired me to announce to my teacher friends over cocktails last weekend, "I am an Indian call center. We all are."

Being an Indian call center can also help justify my twice a week Indian take out habit.

From my Indian call center over veggie samosas, I can tell you that I love some of my teaching jobs, some are just ok and some I do strictly for the paid summer vacation.

Here are the highlights of some of the ones I enjoy the most.

I started a new vacataire position last week where I proofread articles for the ESL newspaper and also do a first draft of them, too. It seems like a very big but very well-organised weekly project and I'm a good proofreader/writer, so feel like it's a good use of my skills (in a way that other teacher duties, such as making 5 million photocopies a week and telling my 50-student classes to stop talking and listen to me, are perhaps not...) After my first shift, they asked me if I'd be interested in doing more hours there per week, so I might be there 2 half-days, instead of just one.

I also tutor private students and they're really interested in English and I scored major points with one of the parents for one of the exercises we did today. I had the kids describe the plots of their favourite mangas to practice using the past tense. Today's French teenagers seem to live their Japanese mangas.

We'll see what kind of user problems the call center faces next week.