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                     I have always held a lot of respect for teachers. I believe raising the next generation of thinkers, socially responsible and emotionally sensitive humans is one of the most important jobs you could do. Qualities that make a good teacher include caring, patience, intelligence, and encouraging making good decisions, and these are qualities I aspire to share with my own students. Living overseas for 2 ½ years and working with students from young children, to teenagers, college students and now fully grown adults has led me to encounter a range of techniques I employ in my lesson planning. Throughout my language teaching, I have always relied on my strong foundation of technical linguistic knowledge acquired through study of foreign languages and technical coursework. I often relay anecdotes on etymology based on knowledge from my Latin and Classical Greek classes, fostering lexical curiosity. Other times I’ll cite typological features of world languages like tone in Cantonese or word order in Romance languages. This knowledge helps me provide insights into a learner’s native language that may help them better understand aspects of English.

                     My motto is to meet students where they are. In other words, if a student comes to me and explains how they tried really hard on a writing assignment but are still struggling, that’s okay. I’m happy to chat with them over a cup of hot tea and let them walk me through their idea and thought process from the beginning. If an ESL student is excelling in grammar and listening but wants to work on more natural sounding conversation, I’m happy to plan more purposeful prompting targeting more nuanced interactional situations. And students often do come with vastly different skill sets. Balancing my own book smarts with street smarts, I will work with students developing literacy skills and pronunciation skills alike. My own positionality involves attention to sociolinguistic contexts of learning, such as different social contexts a student hopes to use English, e.g., with friends, family, at work or in public settings. I also prefer to use immersion techniques to reproduce naturalistic language acquisition. In my mind, there’s no substitute for a student working with authentic materials and getting real world experience and so I incorporate media clips and writing from contemporary sources in my lessons. My nightmare scenario is for a student to drill a grammar focus without any applicable context outside the classroom, eventually forget the lesson, and then feel like learning the technique was a waste of time.

                     Finally, I also greatly value inclusivity and diversity in and outside of the classroom. I live the values I espouse in the classroom and dearly care to preserve diversity in thought because I believe in the insights different voices and cultures bring to the table. Anyone who is willing to learn will have my support. Especially in the language classroom, where people can come from all walks of life with contrastive educational goals, it is of the utmost importance to be tolerant of differences in thought. Differences in culture, gender, sexuality and age are all welcome in my classroom and I believe embracing these differences makes us stronger. My syllabus will always include a note on classroom expectations, including holding respect for each other classmate and for the teacher. Should students bring to my attention an extra need, for whatever reason, I am more than willing to accommodate so long as they let me know. Open communication, more generally, is the only thing I ask of my students. If I don’t know what’s wrong then I can’t always help you – and I want to help my students become smarter learners and master the subject matter.

                     As a skilled and experienced educator, I offer flexibility in helping students achieve their desired learning outcomes. Chatting with students over email or after class, I am pleased to hear their own perspectives on what’s challenging in the course and what types of additional support they need. Integrating my classroom experience with technical expertise, I leverage theoretical frameworks like Task-based Language Teaching and fundamental linguistic theories to give students the best possible experience. Combined with my training, I also have several years of teaching students of all ages under my belt in a variety of workshop and classroom settings, including lesson planning. When my students succeed, I succeed. Nothing makes me happier than hearing from a happy former student about how they were able to use my lesson in the real world, with friends and family, or in the workplace.