Welcome to the Blog

It took me a long time to figure out that I wanted to teach adult ESL. In college, I majored in philosophy and was sure I would do about the only thing you can do with a philosophy degree: get a PhD and teach. When I went back to school for my master's degree in linguistics, I had a similar plan. But somehow teaching kept intruding. The year after college, I spent a year in Debica, Poland, teaching English to high schoolers. To be honest, at that point teaching was mostly just a way to get overseas and support myself while I traveled, made friends, and experienced a foreign culture. I was way out of my league, both in teaching English and in managing a classroom full of teenagers. So when I returned home, I got an administrative job in a synagogue and started searching for something else to do. I knew that there were aspects of the teaching job I didn't want to leave behind. I loved thinking and talking about language and seeing the world through the eyes of non-Americans. So I decided to study linguistics. During the course of my degree program, I again took a teaching job as a way to make some extra money over the summer. I was teaching incoming foreign graduate students how to organize an oral presentation. The content was not my favorite, and some of the students were difficult, but I was starting to get hooked. At the same time, I realized that pursuing theoretical linguistics further was not something I wanted to do. And slowly, it became clear that teaching English to adults was something I not only wanted to do, but also something that I might have a bit of a knack for.

Of course, I finally reached this decision at a point where I had no time or money to start on another graduate degree, this time in TESOL. I was also preparing to move overseas with my husband, who works in the shipping industry. I continued to teach part-time as we planned our wedding, got married, honeymooned, and moved to Geoje Island, South Korea. Here I've been lucky to find a number of foreigners interested in learning English, and I've had the eye-opening experience of working one-on-one with beginning English students as they steadily take on the complexities of English. I decided to start this blog as a way to record my experiences as I watch language learners close up and gain experience with teaching at various levels. It will be a place to record my worries, my successes, my could-do-better-next-times, and all the funny and enlightening moments that language teachers have. It will also be a place for me to share interesting articles and websites having to do with language and language teaching. I hope that curious friends and family will enjoy reading about my work, and perhaps other new English teachers will find something familiar and interesting in my experience. Thanks for reading.