So Where Does a Housewife Work?

I guess you could call today the eye of the storm that is my visa situation. Ruby, Eve, and I never discussed it today. Which is just as well, as I had a new class start bright and early at 9:30 in the morning. Two housewives who live in the building have enrolled in AE01, which is what we call "elementary beginners", or what in EFL-speak are known as false beginners. A false beginner is someone who had a little big of English, a long time ago, and needs to revive it before progressing.

Our lesson this morning was basic getting-to-know-you expressions: What's your name? Where are you from? Where do you work? When we got to where do you work, and an exercise asking students to match up, say, a businesswoman to an office building, and I put "Where do you work" on the white board, I could sense a bit of uneasiness. How does a housewife answer the question, "Where do you work"?

In the house, I suppose, would be the pat answer. But these days, I think the answer could just as well be, at the supermarket, at my child's school, or in the minivan. Sometimes it seems the modern housewife would be better called a chausewife--half chauffeur, half housewife--for the amount of time she spends shuttling kids between home, school, and soccer.

I suppose the question must at least be less offensive to today's housewife than "What do you do?", the answer often being, in society's misguided opinion, nothing. But it was nonetheless interesting to contemplate.

My new students found me a little fast, which I suppose is not surprising. They had so many questions! Our textbook had an illustration for "school" that was a teacher in front of a blackboard, with some multiplication tables on it. So I ended up teaching them all the basic math words I figured they might use with a child--add, subtract, multiply, divide--none of which was on the roster. But it was nice to be able to do this, finally. To do something that isn't rigidly in the book. To use my own creativity.

This is definitely the field for me.