Teach English in ZhaoshAn Zhen - Ezhou Shi

“Oh, my wind, I wish to go with you, but I don’t know where you are...” Standing in front of the whole class of forty Grade 4 kids, I was whispering to myself, “What should I do with this last horrible 5 minutes …” My heart and soul were empty. I would have dug a hole to escape before the bell rang… But I could not, ten experienced senior teachers were observing me! I had spent a month to prepare the scripted lesson plan. I covered carefully and exactly every single step of the lesson plan. I did everything I could, but it still ended up chaos! This was the first class in my whole life. This was the moment I will never forget. As an English teacher with 17 years of experience, I am quite aware of how hard to initiate a career as English teaching. In 1991, I graduated as a valedictorian from Shanghai Normal University majored in English, and was assigned a position of a secondary school teacher. The same as my childhood education, the choice of whether or not to use a course book was none. All the public schools would have the same books that we had been sticking for over 10 years. A teacher would use the same book for the whole lesson, the whole semester. This meant I didn’t have many flexibilities to create own materials, although the sole textbook was not suitable for each student. I had to cover all the syllabus without considering the needs and interests of the individual kid. As students automatically moved up to the higher grade, we never did the placement test, but full of progress tests throughout the whole school year. We called the unit test, mid-term exam, and final exam, the scores of which were the only way of evaluating both students’ progress and teachers’ performance. Both students and teachers were in the landscape with an infatuation with a culture of one right answer. In order to get the best result, I seldom used the “activate” or “engaged” phase during the class, the “study” phase seemed to be the only functional ESA methodology to get the students memorized the large range of vocabulary and complicated grammar rules so that they could output their correct answer on the test paper. For the teaching methodology, I am quite sure I used “Grammar translation” and “Audio-linguicism”, they worked well only for higher test scores. After working under such circumstances for 3 years, at a certain point, I was not only a terrible teacher but also a career roamer. I determined to change my career as an employee in an international company where I could obtain more opportunities to practice English. The inherent aspire to teach English echoed through my mind. In 2005, I was thrilled and proud to be an English adult teacher in a foreign-owned language training center. And also it was where I came across the most popular methodologies in EFL teaching today. This job triggered my flat-out ideas on how to make the teaching life so contenting and rewarding. When my second child was at his three years old in 2010, I was starting to be curious about parents’ role in education. Particularly, how to assist my own child’s English learning. And the reality of the society that the majority of parents just didn’t have a clue. What I thought I would do was I would start with an English training school myself! Working as a business owner, a teacher and a parent, I embraced multiple perspectives to see my English teaching-oriented career development. Running our English training business for almost 8 years, in the year 2017, my husband and I decided to move to Canada. But the joyful, life-long passion for teaching didn’t vanish. I was successfully to be an online English teacher--work for a Chinese training company who provides English teaching service through the internet. As an online teacher, my teaching styles are customized according to the levels and goals of students. I make sure students feel relaxed and productive in my class. And I found the ways to be creative. In my lesson, students will not remember a long list of vocabulary, instead, I thrive my students enormously to discuss their interesting topics and practice language that they want to use. Even with a simple trial lesson, the student will already feel more comfortable speaking English. While studying the TEFL course, and finally upon the completion of the whole 60 hours I radically realize this is the thing I care about. In retrospect, I have been doing the most rewarding and meaningful work of my life. I taught English, I am teaching English and I will teach English. This is all what life means to me. This is a life true to my dreams.