We’ve been offering plenty of tips for new teachers over the past few months, but what if you’re not a teacher yet – if you’re just thinking of taking the plunge and changing your career? We turned to experienced – and enthusiastic! – teacher trainer Deirdre Cijffers to offer some advice for anyone considering a career in language teaching.
I’ve spent the majority of my career as a teacher or teacher trainer and frankly, it’s pretty brilliant so I can see why other people might want to get involved!
I ended up teaching almost by accident. I started off doing Linguistics, Italian and Ancient Greek at university. I thought I wanted to be an interpreter (which is why I went for Linguistics) between English and Italian (so Italian) and I like a challenge (and other alphabets so I chose Ancient Greek). Linguistics was fascinating, but it wasn’t long before I discovered quite how much history is involved even in a modern language degree (yawn) and what a lonely job interpreting can be – not what I was expecting!
So, as a fresh graduate at 22 in some uncertainty about what to do next, I did my teaching certificate and headed off to Italy. I was just buying time, trying to make up my mind about my career, but it turns out that teaching was right up my street – it’s all about people (I love people!) and language (I love language!). It’s really creative, but not without boundaries, so there’s guidance on how to direct that creativity. There’s tremendous variation between higher and lower levels, exam classes, Business English, children (eek!). It’s a passport to everywhere but – if you don’t fancy moving – can still be used wherever it is you live now.
Making a difference
You’ll find a lot of articles online that suggest that people go into teaching ‘to make a difference’. These articles are usually about teachers in state secondary education and why they eventually burn out and give up teaching in the end – not so encouraging!
To be fair, when you are struggling your way through intensive summer courses in schools with rolling enrolment where you have to get to know your students really fast and say goodbye to them really soon, it doesn’t always feel like you are making much of a difference but, as @edutopia tweeted this week ‘They will remember you’.
We teach English in a very ‘touchy-feely’ way. By this I mean that we talk about how we feel about things a lot and think critically about our experiences. As teachers, this helps us get better vocabulary and finer expression out of our students. For students, this can be a radical departure from how they were ever taught before. Many students only have access to lectures, rather than interactive lessons, so when they come to class and are asked about their own lives, it is a much more personal experience for them. Their connection to you and what they learn from you is therefore very personal as well. There’s plenty of research that attests to the value of emotional engagement for learning and I’ve seen it lots of evidence for it myself, so while we may not be bringing about world peace, we are making a difference to individual students and how they learn… so maybe they can do something about world peace!
Of course, it’s not all roses… and Rachel Daw has given some great tips on how to survive the first month.