Trying out teaching

One of the highlights this year was discovering I loved teaching.  I did a CELTA course from October to December 2009 to learn how to teach English as a secondary language.  The main thing that attracted me to teaching English was the fact that it was a change from the corporate world for a while and it would allow me to travel and work at the same time.  When I returned to Sydney after Cape Town, I decided to try it out in Sydney and see if I would enjoy it or not.  And I soon discovered that I had a passion for it.

Here are some of the things I loved about teaching this year:

• teaching adults who are extremely eager and motivated to learn
• meeting students from all over the world - the classroom is a veritable melting pot
• really feeling like I am contributing to people achieving their life dreams.  For most, being able to speak and write English provides a gateway to all sorts of opportunities back home 
• receiving some positive feedback from students that really touched me
• the other teachers in the school - I have never worked with a nicer bunch of people, except maybe for Volvo.  The teachers at Kaplan come from an amazingly diverse range of different backgrounds and they are all happy to share ideas and experiences
• the creativity that English teaching afforded me in being able to create my own materials and class content including special themed lessons for the Melbourne Cup and Halloween as well as my own written stories (including stories with a twist, stories from school and stories re Mack)
• having a captive audience to photograph including student portraits and class portraits
• the ability to experiment with the use of the Internet in teaching - including the use of a class blog
• creating my own site for teachers which provides access to information and resources I would have loved to have when I started teaching
• some hilarious studentisms

The only real drawback to teaching is that the pay is very low and for that reason, it's not a viable long term career.  But it has opened my eye to the fact that I love teaching and training, so I can start to look at other rewarding options like corporate training, for example.