Students, Students, Students

I changed jobs and moved to the other side of the world because I thought I wanted to teach. Doing the CELTA (The Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, living for a month with 11 other people at Nugent Waterside, socialising, interacting, learning, laughing, arguing....this experience really cemented my desire to teach.

The CELTA is not easy. There is no final exam, instead you are assessed over the course of a month on physically teaching students. You also have to write 4 essays on teaching methodology that are assessed for your final grade too. The benefit of this and doing the CELTA in Chiang Mai for me was two-fold. Firstly, the students would all be Thai and wouldn't have much experience of English. Sometimes teaching in England, the students are already exposed to the language. This would be less so in Thailand.
Secondly, I'd be staying on-site at the training venue. This meant that we could spread the work and relaxation, not have to worry about travelling everyday and all of the meals would be arranged for us.

The actuality was that the CELTA was ultimately rewarding in experiential terms, but a complete bitch at the time. The pressure to perform well and the intensity of the learning when coupled with the high expectations on the assessments was overpowering at times. The release valve came in the form of having 11 other people around me in the same position.

I have no idea what the TEFL courses such as I-2-I are really like. What I do know is that if you're interested in teaching, the CELTA will confirm it, one way or the other.

So, this brings me to the students that I have taught with EF. I actually had no intention of teaching kids. The CELTA is aimed at teaching adults, but the methodology is essentially the same. The reality is that kids make up aproximately 90% of the market, be that in actual schools or extra curricular learning such as ourselves. The experience has been surprising on many levels.

Firstly, I wasn't sure I really liked kids. The outcome of that is that I do, and understanding some child psychology has definitely helped with this. Secondly, I wasn't sure i could teach kids. I thought I'd respond better to adults, predominantly because of my age. Let me tell you, age is no barrier to teaching. I have taught kindergarten up to adults and each class brings it's own set of challenges. My age has never proved inhibiting for the students or for myself.

The students are amazing. They can be moody, lazy, obstinate and unco-operative. But they can also be enlightening, diligent, inteligent and funny. Their responsiveness is a direct result of how good our lessons are and it's our job to make those lessons as interactive and enjoyable as possible. I don't mean games, games, games...rather educationally responsible activities that are also fun to do.

The downside of being the DoS is that it takes you away from teaching. Because of the administrative duties you have less time. Our teachers have a minimum 23 hour contact teaching hour week (contact hours being the hours you actively teach in a classroom) after this they get paid overtime. As a DoS mine is 14 hours. I wasn't sure that I actually wanted to even be a DoS so at my contract meeting i had a clause written in that said if I didn't like the job and wanted to do more teaching I could go back to my old job! The reality is that I still get to teach, I have great classes and I also love my new role too.