Their relationship had been memorable. Her parents had divorced when she was young, and in high school she had lived with her father for a year-and-a-half in Oregon. She had also watched him battle alcoholism.
Now, she turned to him for advice, and he gave it.
 Nicole McFadden is a teacher and writer currently working on a memoir of her life and relationship to her father while growing up in Half Moon Bay. She does much of her work from San Francisco coffeehouses. Friday she was at Cuppa Joe in Nob Hill. |
But he didn’t stop there. “Then he said, ‘You’re a teacher,’ as if it were completely obvious. He said it was a calling, like being a priest, and that it was inexplicably rewarding ... He motivated me to explore the possibility of becoming a teacher.”
McFadden, who grew up in Half Moon Bay and graduated from Half Moon Bay High School in 1998, followed her father’s advice by building a career in teaching English as a second language to teens and adults in California and around the globe.
Today, by day she is teaching general and business English at St. Giles International, a United Kingdom-based language school with a branch in San Francisco, and by night, working toward an MFA in creative writing at the University of San Francisco. She will complete it in summer 2009 and plans to pursue writing.
It’s a confirmation of her father’s insight. English, she said, “was always natural. I was always a writer, always drawn to language, so it seems like a natural progression.”
She had entered college with plans to study psychology and become a counselor, but instead graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in English and minor in Spanish and theater. It was then that she discovered her path into teaching English — almost by accident, as she wrote in an article for an educational publication.
Still mulling over what to do in life, faced with student debts and fired with a desire to see the world, she considered her father’s words and visited a university career fair. She met a recruiter named Nicole; McFadden “thought that was a sign.” Then she remembered a conversation “with a particularly brilliant Shakespeare professor” who recommended CELTA — Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults.
She enrolled in a course and found herself at home. That feeling continued as she studied teaching methodology, took part in role playing, observed experienced teachers and did student teaching. But that wasn’t all.
“Professor Brilliant had also told me his teaching credo, which came straight from The Bard himself: ‘No profit grows where there is no pleasure ta’en.’ ... In essence, study what you love.”
Through CELTA, she wound up teaching English in Nagoya, Japan, Palma de Mallorca, Spain and Bangalore, India.
She loved the Japanese students. “They are so incredibly respectful,” she said. And she loved India, with its emphasis on family closeness.
Now, her emphasis has expanded to doing some writing herself.
She says she’d like to put her degree to work completing a memoir about her father.
Memoirs, she said, serve a purpose. “You identify with someone, you learn from their experience, and you feel comforted by identifying with the writer.”
Her memoir would recount her father’s recovery from a hit-and-run accident, delve into her childhood and resolve things.
“It’s about distance,” she said. “Emotional and geographical distance with my father. I looked at Oregon and being with my father as a safe haven.”
Her tone turns wistful — “I hope to make my father come alive again on these pages” — then realistic. “I’m dwelling in the past. Writing memoirs allows me to do that.”
She sees her small-town Half Moon Bay roots as a boon that inspired her to travel. And what about her father’s advice?
“I have come to find that he was right; I am a teacher and it is inexplicably rewarding.”
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