1st week out

I literally just finished my first demo class at the IELTS training center - one of the three branch schools that are currently open for the group I am working for now. I taught the teachers, thank God i’ve got drama skills and a year of teaching experience or I’d probably be visibly shaking right now.

Im sitting in the board room at the head of the table staring at the opposite side of the room where there is a large statue of one of the Buddhist deities... who is most definitely the coolest looking with his full armor, beard and sword on a stick. Well... he doesnt factor into this much, so lets move on.

This job is not quite what I’d call ‘teaching’ in the strictest of ESL senses. It seems I’ll be teaching some classes most definitely, but I’m also being moved around a lot as a means of trying to boost the quality of teachers in the various schools. Thats cool stuff. I’m by no means “super-teacher” but I think it would be a lot of fun to help other teachers along in their growing process.

I was given a book yesterday called, “How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher.” I never thought I’d be reading books on education! Im an ESL teacher dangit! Hahaha

Its funny to me to be reflecting on all of this, coming at it from the angle of “I never wanted to do this, but here I am.” Even though I have absolutely no desire to teach in anything but a post-secondary institution, or Language Center back in North America (not that that is even all that high on my priorities list...), I think that learning about the education field is absolutely valuable - and not in a money sense. I am turning back to an idea i’ve written about before regarding teaching. Like I said before, its not my passion, but I think that in every realm that deals with human interaction - there is an element of teaching. All teaching is on the bottom line is the trafficking of information. The primary difference between a teacher and a spy in my point of view is that a spy tries to conceal information and deposit it, whereas teachers have the much larger task of making sure that people can actually USE the information (usually...).

Wherever I end up after this, I know that i’ll have learned a lot about how to cultivate understanding in other people, and that has a thousand and one uses in its own right.

Now to try and get some work done for my two hour English corner tomorrow evening... Evidently I was very highly rated by my “students” on a scale of 1-40 the majority gave me 32-34 according to my headhunter.