Odoo Experience 2024 and the hassle of identifying as a "teacher" 

​I have been asking myself for almost a week now why I was so enthusiastic about this event.

Yes, I heard some interesting presentations - but so did I also in Italy. It was not my first experience like this.

So… what else?

On one hand, it was my first time at an event like this in Belgium.

On the other hand, I hadn’t gone to these conferences for quite a long time and my last experiences dated back to my old job (but where we were organizing something similar and when you’re on the organization side I can assure you it’s not as pleasurable as joining it as a participant).

But there’s more to it.

I always say the same thing: I don’t like saying "I’m a teacher”, first of all, because I don’t teach that much. I prefer way more saying “I help people learn languages” because I never start a class with a plan or theory. I make people speak and we discover the language together. I add some strategic questions here and there to trigger a mistake and deal with a certain part of grammar (am I nasty?) or to simply expand our vocabulary and talk about something, but it is a very different thing from “OK, today we’re going to talk about X, Y, Z…”.

That’s how I learn myself and I hate doing anything else.

The problem, especially in certain contexts, is that saying “teacher” to simplify your introduction means you’re doomed to be considered a person quite cut out of the world, who is quite ignorant about anything not related to literature, typically without much ambition… and if I think about my school teachers, unfortunately, it’s pretty much true.

The typical case is men self-censoring their qualifications because they don’t expect you can understand their job position. Sometimes they do it in a patronizing way, sometimes they change if the woman in front of them looks sufficiently authoritative - which is what I aim at

I still remember a dinner at my university some years ago. I was with my mom, she was already well in her 60s at that time (hope I don’t need to wait 30 years for this), and also an alumna of the same place.

Me? A Law student. She? A chartered accountant and auditor. 

A young boy sits next to us at the table. I ask him about his job.

His answer to me: “Corporate Finance”. No additional detail. I feel a bit intimidated. WTF does it mean? I don’t dare to ask for fear of sounding stupid.

His answer to my mom: “Insolvency procedures”. Much more clear, but also way less fancy 🙂

Several other cases like this happened, the last one was a couple of weeks ago, “I work in Finance blabla it’s complicated blabla” - until when he discovered we went to the same university and said: “AH! So you know what I’m talking about!”.

Ehm. Yup.

If I didn’t say I teach I would get different answers. I’m still figuring out what to say, but I’ll get to something, it’s just a matter of time.

I think that going to this conference was a way to spend some time in another environment where I was just the nth little business owner wandering around. Moreover, I just love knowing about technology and business stuff and now I could do it in an event that was maybe less shiny and cool than certain others in Italy (the Italian Tech Week is on my bucket list for next year), but it was in my country of choice that I love more and more, with the atmosphere that I love the most, easy going, chill, and kind.

In the end, I’ve been brought up by my mom with daily stories about what her clients were doing and how they were growing and so. Her enthusiasm has deeply - positively - affected me. Probably a part of the annoyance I feel when these things happen exactly comes from the fact that men don’t treat her as if she was ‘a teacher’ and I don’t want to be outdone

Let me share also some pictures of it. 

First of all - the badge, because anyway I’m a bit vain and narcissistic. I was so proud - I had to write my name twice because I took the field “Company Name” a bit too literally. I should have put my motto “Language Learning for Busy People” ahah, next time.

I was right behind the Atomium in Brussels - it’s funny that actually I went into another region (Flanders) to eat because it was really at the end of Brussels territory. For the Brussels residents among those who read this newsletter, I bumped into a guy who needed some information and asked me (in Dutch) if I spoke Dutch or English - and I could say “both!”. The pleasure in his eyes at being answered in Dutch was quite unforgettable.

Apparently, the “software” to install was something very similar to installing Google on your computer. Nice to see that these problems are not only in Italy. As far as I’ve been hearing from my brother in Germany for years now, they’re not in a much better situation over there ahah…

And that’s all. 🙂 Thanks for reading!