i-to-i TEFL Courses & TEFL Jobs Abroad

TEFL has opened my eyes to many things. I come from a family of teachers, with my older sister being an English teacher in a high school back home in the States. I always loved the atmosphere, the team work yet the allowance for creative individuality, and yet I never considered it back home. Then I realized I wanted to move to Europe, to explore my ancestral roots. I figured what better way to do that than teach English, which is a subject I love, and to do it among the people and culture I want to learn about? It has helped me realize what I want to really do in life. My friends and family are excited about how much I truly enjoy all of the TEFL work I've done. I head to Ukraine in August. Then I hope to come back to Serbia to teach. If not, I hope to either progress with the language school in Ukraine or maybe hitting up some of the countries that would give me great experiences and be an educational treat for myself, like Spain, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia.

I don't think I would have made it this far without all the great people that I met while I was in Beijing and through the TTC [internship] program. From the bottom of my heart and with complete sincerity, thank you to each and every person. My first day of teaching is complete, whoa! All the fears that had run through my mind were quickly dispelled. I'm teaching 90 min lessons to college level kids. I have small classes 15 to 25 per class. Mostly 18 to 20 year olds. My first lesson was just an introduction type class. I told them about myself, where I was from and where I had been. I showed them pictures of California and of my family and told them why I want to teach them English. I passed out a student survey with questions about them and why they wanted to learn English. Next I played the song 'Hotel California' and in groups they tried to place the lyrics in order from strips of paper I had printed up with the words to the song. That went really well and everyone enjoyed it. I also gave them some fun facts about the English language...and did you know...you cannot rhyme the words orange, silver, purple or month? Anyway, I really had a great time. I love that I can have such a positive effect on these young peoples' lives. I'm sure by the end of the semester everyone on campus will know me! I told my students that if they didn't come up to me on campus and speak English to me I would chase them down! And for them to not be surprise if yell across campus to say hi to them! I'm gonna have a lot of fun with my students and you can bet on it that they Will be speaking English!!