Answers to a students questionnaire about how I got into English language teaching .. What made you want to become an English teacher in a foreign country? South-East London in the rain. Did you face any discrimination at any time during your hiring process or while you were working? None that Im aware of. I guess I was just lucky they were willing to give a young white, English male a fighting chance. How often did/do you teach? Are you tutoring or teaching? I heard that Rome has a number of vantage points from which one could gaze longingly at Italian girls, So I took the southbound train out of Waterloo one February. It turns out they occasionally have winter in Rome too. Snow on the Coliseum. Cold and broke with no work. I came for a starring role in La Dolce Vita; ended up as an extra in Bicycle Thieves. Tramp, tramp, tramp till I wear a hole in my shoe. But two months on and things are looking up. An old guy in the homeless shelter fixed my shoes. And then I get private lessons with an actress who rings a bell for her maid to bring us lunch. And I score a gig pontificating about Romantic poets to uni students - yeah, thats right, talking literary bullshit in the piazza with real scooter-riding, sunglass-wearing Italian dudes. Sorted. Do you work with a specific company/contract/school district? Ive worked for the good, the bad and the ugly. Generally, at the same time. Did you have a CV or resume with special experience? Did you have no experience? I had a pretty strong CV from the word go, even if I say so myself - stuffed with employment skills like Anglo-Saxon translation, Practical Criticism, Essay Writing - the list just goes on and on. But, you know, the market is a strange beast - and somehow none of the vacancies in Lewisham Job Centre quite fitted my particular skill set. Eventually, my dad managed to get me a start pushing a barrow on a building site for a few months. And so my career was up and running. Did your first teaching job have perks? Lire. Beautiful Lire. Thousands of them - enough for a whole cappuccino. Which reminds of one London school I worked in for one interminable week in the mid-eighties. The owner explained that teachers received five tokens for the coffee machine at the beginning of each week. After my induction, he counted out my five and then took one back, because hed remembered Id had a coffee during the interview. Last of the big spenders! How did you handle the first few years if youve stayed for a longer term? I relied a lot on the coursebooks - that and memories of pushing a barrow.
Posted on: Mon, 12 May 2014 10:30:38 +0000
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