Teach English in Chahe Zhen - Xuzhou Shi

I had great English teachers at my middle school when I was growing up in Turkey and I used to dream about becoming one. I tried to talk like them and act like them at home after school. I remember being very happy whenever I understood some of the lyrics of my favorite songs while I was listening to music on my cassette player. Finding a book in English felt like finding gold in those days and I tried to take every opportunity to learn more and more. Everybody had great amount of respect especially for the English teachers in Turkey because it was not very common to run into people speaking good level of English at those years. Speaking, reading and understanding English was a big privilege and that made me admire English even more. At the end of high school, all students had to take a university exam and the result of that one exam decided on each student’s career path. To make things even worse, the system at the time made students select their preferred schools and faculties before the exam without knowing how they performed. Unfortunately for me, my performance landed me on the landscape architecture faculty. It was a choice I had made without much thought having been influenced by my friends although most of my selected schools were related to English language and teaching. Years passed, I graduated university and started working as a landscape architect at one of Turkey’s largest construction companies. However, I wasn’t happy or enjoying my profession. After few years of working at my landscape architecture job, my life took a different turn when I got married and moved to US where my spouse was studying on his master’s degree. This allowed me to rekindle my interest in English. Through self-study, I was able to get a good result at English proficiency exam and got accepted to Georgia State University’s Master’s of Business Administration program. Through two years of university and six years of professional experience in United States, I gained native level proficiency in the language. Upon permanently moving back to Turkey, I paused my professional career and focused on the upbringing of my daughter. Leveraging my English has been an idea lingering in my head but I didn’t know how. This changed when a close friend from US moved to Izmir and started teaching last year. She showed me that with proper certification I could become an English teacher as a US citizen. After two decades, life brought me the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted. I take great satisfaction and pride in sharing my knowledge with young learners and mentoring them. Pursuing a career in teaching English, as a second language will provide a challenging opportunity to utilize my creative and detail-oriented personality. I believe my strong determination and willingness to excel are some of the qualities that can put me on the path to becoming a great teacher. I’m a hard worker and I will push my limits in my pursuit to become an inspirational role model for my students. I understand that one of the most important areas in teaching is effective classroom management. This is where I am planning to benefit from the TEFL course the most and improve myself in a way where I can become more helpful to my students. I’ve already been working as a private English tutor and these lessons reconfirmed my thoughts about teaching. I find the dynamics of teaching very interesting. Each student is unique in his or her own way and finding the right method to have him or her learn in the most effective way is similar to solving a puzzle. It makes me very proud to see my students’ development in their second language and their achievements in and outside of the classroom. Teaching English one-to-one has given me a fresh perspective. It also helps me establish a strong bond with my students because I also learn from them as well while they learn from me. They have different personalities, age groups and family backgrounds but ready for you to play a role in molding their future. Observing how they improve day by day is priceless and in my opinion is one of the most satisfactory feelings one can experience. Becoming an English teacher will give me the opportunity to allow my students to fulfill their potential and making them realize their own strengths. In the words of our great leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk “A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.”. I take these words as my guiding principle and will hold myself to his standard.