Saluton, al ĉiuj!

So, I'm re-learning Esperanto, but I'm wondering if there would be any possibility of becoming an Esperanto teacher in the US.

I understand that it would be hard to find a position for this kind of career; however, I want to know what, theoretically, I would need to become an Esperanto teacher. What kind of education (since most colleges don't have an Esperanto major-- or even class), and where it would be easiest to get a teaching job.

Thanks for the help, all!

I've never heard of anyone in the US making a living as a full-time Esperanto teacher. I think that this would be possible only in places like Hungary, which used to accept Esperanto as fulfilling a university language requirement, so they did actually have university language classes in Esperanto. I think this has now changed.

There is a summer Esperanto course in the US that used to last three weeks, now it's about a week and a half. Most or all of the instructors are professional teachers of other languages (Spanish, German, whatever), or at least involved in a teaching profession - a university professor of something or other.

Therefore, speaking totally theoretically, if I wanted to become an Esperanto teacher, I would go to school to get a degree in foreign language education, in some other foreign language. That would be my 'day job', or at the very least, a fallback job if (when, really) I wasn't able to find a full-time Esperanto position.

In a time when budgets are squeezed and 'mainstream' foreign languages with millions of speakers are being forced out of schools and universities, I think the chances are tiny of getting hired to teach Esperanto only. Your best best would be to teach a language in high demand, and moonlight as an Esperanto teacher.

Or, if you wanted to stick exclusively with Esperanto, you'd have to be itinerant, travelling to Esperanto courses around the world and teaching abroad.

There seems to be an ongoing E-o course at the University of Rochester. The person who seems to teach there posts up to date teaching instructions/anouncements. Maybe he can give you some information if somebody is doing that at any High School activities anywhere in the U.S. Or contact ILEI or http://www.edukado.net/ directly.

The course at the U of R is a club, not a for-credit course, and the person teaching it is not being paid for his work.

Forget about money! Do it for love and the money might come later. I reckon a best first step to get it into a school is to get a job as a teacher of some other subject and start up a club. Almost Zamenhofian levels of patience and enthusiasm will be required. Of course, it might have a bit of a stigma at first, so you'll want to recruit some of the footballers, the cheerleaders, etc., to make it cooler.

You'd probably be best off being a teacher with a major in a language or linguistics, while learning Esperanto by yourself, and then if EO teachers are actually in demand, you'll be ready, but more importantly if they aren't in demand you'd still be able to do something relatively similar.

A problem I can see happening is that if Esperanto does kick off, you'll maybe see a more concentrated effort to have it taught through non-speaker teachers, thus to create and demonstrate a language program so easy to teach the teacher doesn't need to understand the target language, making it a more efficient option than other languages where teachers must know a lot about their target language and preferably have a major in it.

3rdblade's summed it well nice I think - most current EO teachers are doing it without much financial incentive and for reasons other than being an Esperanto teacher, simply because it's not at a stage where a career in teaching esperanto is very viable.

Anyway, good luck with whatever you choose to do. The world needs more language teachers no matter what languages, especially in the west. Australia's following America's example rather blindly in cutting back on language programs in universities, thus preventing schools from getting language teachers as there are none or none doing any useful languages (in a country where schools are asked by the govt to do asian languages, we have WAY too many French/Spanish/German teachers, an OK amount of Japanese teachers (but not enough because its "hard"), and a saddeningly small amount of Indonesian and Chinese teachers, who are by far the largest priority!).

The only way that you might conceivably be able to teach Esperanto in a school in the US, as I see it, would be in an unusually progressive private school of some sort. Private schools operate independently of school district bureaucracies, so they have a bit more freedom.

But the "progressive" part is the problem. These schools are typically very expensive, and they depend upon affluent families being willing to spend lots of money to send their kids to them. The people who spend that kind of money generally want their kids to be competitive when applying to first-tier universities. These are not the people most likely to tolerate something as non-mainstream as Esperanto.

So, in the public schools the obstacle is the public school bureaucracy; in the private schools it's the demanding elitist parents.

Even so, there are all kinds of private schools out there, and not all of them fit the stereotype that I just sketched. It's possible that you could find one that would allow an Esperanto course to run.

While there's no longer a dedicated Esperanto department at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, approximately 5000 undergraduates in Hungary study Esperanto each year to satisfy their foreign language requirement. So at least some teaching opportunities exist there.

But Erinja is absolutely correct about the situation here in the USA, and at the University of Rochester in particular: the course we offer is non-credit, and the instructor (me) isn't paid at all. It's a labor of love, so to speak. The situation is similar at Stanford and the other American universities where Esperanto offerings can be found. The sole exception is NASK at UCSD, but that's only a short summer program that pays its instructors *very* modestly.

As to suitable fields of study: ironically, language instruction might *not* be the best choice, unless you're genuinely interested in spending your life teaching some other language. Language teachers are poorly paid, undervalued, and often -- in my not-so-humble opinion -- ineffective. What's more, the methodologies of language instruction are often based more on fads and intuition than on actual science. In the end, instructors don't really *teach* linguistic competence; they merely provide an environment where students can acquire that competence on their own.

So if you'd like to teach Esperanto, I'd recommend doing it as a part-time, volunteer effort alongside some other, hopefully more lucrative, career. You'll definitely benefit if you can work some linguistics and developmental psychology into your education. If you can, try to keep up on major findings in second-language acquisition.

Above all, perfect your skills in Esperanto! Familiarize yourself with the nuances of the grammar and read voraciously to expose yourself to Esperanto's rich literary heritage. As a language that was developed primarily through literary translation, the written word has always played a primary role in shaping the language and determining its stylistic norms.

If you're interested in teaching methodologies -- which are varied and contradictory, yet still a useful toolbox for the instructor -- there's an excellent book put together by ILEI that you can download in PDF form here:

[url=http://www.elerno.cn/elibro/ManlibroDuaeldono_prin... ]Manlibro pri instruado de Esperanto[/url]