Teach English in ZhAojun Zhen - E'erduosi Shi — Ordos

There are number of reasons as to why I enjoy being an English teacher, one of the reason is because it allows me to expand my social environment, to interact with students not just as a teacher, but as a friend outside of the classroom. Another reason is because I relates to lots of students that struggle with English learning, and I enjoy being able to help them to overcome that issue the same way I did. To me, English teaching is not just a job, it is a privilege. However, while I and a number of people see it as a privilege, there are others that see it as a burden, in fact many of them chose this job not out of personal preference but out of financial benefits rather than wanting to help students’ English ability. Therefore, I believe that while programs like Tesol do help one to progress as an English teacher, not everyone is eligible to become one. I believe that there are several personal qualities a person should to have in order to be a rightful teacher. The first quality I believe that is important to be an English teacher is a caring attitude. The teacher needs to have the heart to help students succeed. If the students have questions, the teacher needs to have the patience to answer and needs to know that in this situation, there are no stupid questions. My personal experience with bad professors are surrounded by this very issue, lots of times when I and several other students have questions about the method and format required to write an essay, the professor simply answered with “Just look at your syllabus”, while lots of times the syllabus is complicated to understand, especially for me as an international student where we barely uses electronics to do our assignments in my country, it simply makes the task more difficult to achieve. This discouraged me a lot because I had no other learning environment outside of the classroom, and if the professors do not care about my success and would not help me, there was not point of going to college in the first place. However, a teacher with a caring attitude, it will make the student feel more supported and it builds an environment where students can work on their best potential, and further on, to their success. Another quality that I believe an English teacher should have is a great communication skills, which means the teach should be good with people, enjoy being around them and have a positive attitude. This is an important quality because if the teacher is the other way around, in which he or she is very introverted and shows little enthusiasm in the classroom, students would eventually get bored and not motivated to keep learning. Furthermore, having good communication skills builds a good community within the classroom because it allows teachers and students to interact, and it allows students to feel more pleasant around the classroom. Most importantly, students would not feel intimidated to ask questions, because by having a good relationship with students through good communication skills, it shows that the teacher is easy to approach and it motivates the students to have the desire to learn more. A more welcoming, open and extroverted teacher compare to a more tense, arrogant and all-business teacher, it is obvious to see which one students would be more comfortable to learn under. Furthermore, I believe that one is not eligible to become an English teacher with the quality of a good planning skills, meaning a well planned lesson, materials and classroom management. A qualified teacher needs to prepare well and spend a good amount of time to study the materials before he or she teaches it in class, it needs to be well designed and structured. Not just within the classroom, but the teacher also needs to be available outside as well, that means have communication tools like phones and emails and remembers to check them consistently. Not everyone can grasp the above skill the first day, of course it takes experience as well. However, if a teacher shows up in class not knowing enough about his or her teaching material and just expect to blindly teach it in class, not only is the teacher endangering the success of English teaching, but the success of the students’ learning also. In conclusion, there are still a number of qualities that I believe a person should have to be an eligible English teacher. It is obvious that those qualities are not found in everybody, not everyone has the patience to control a classroom of easily distracted students, or the interaction skills to communicate with students and make them feel safer around to learn, or even have the energy to plan out a lesson and materials daily. English teaching to people that has the right qualities can be pretty fulfilling, because while they are spreading the knowledge of a language, they are also building good community within their classroom. However, ultimately it is that person’s desire of becoming an English teacher to start with, if he or she has the desire to teach English, then lots of the qualities that an English teacher should have are learnable.