Image: Dave Van den Eynde
Well, it's been more than 18 months now since I returned to Australia after close to 10 years abroad working as an EFL teacher.
To be quite frank, the local ESL teaching sector here in Australia was rather unattractive when I arrived home, and I can't say it has gotten much better! Full-time jobs are scarce, wages are abominably low, and I'm often left with the impression that ELT Down Under is a rather insular affair by world standards.
Considering some of those things, I avoided local ELT and worked hard on developing my online teaching business. Over the past year in particular, the online 'school' has become a roaring success - to the point that it is actually sustainable and rewarding on both financial and educational innovation fronts.
But now it looks like I'm headed back to classroom teaching - as a result of some of the motivation and goals explained in my recent Change we can be leaves in post.
After a third kind offer from a local provider of English programs to migrants and refugees, I realised I miss the classroom like crazy, and really miss "teacher talk" around a teaching staff room. I also got the sense that, with Australia's rather perilous position at the moment with international students, it probably wouldn't be a great idea to keep saying "thanks, but no thanks" to offers like this. They may dry up considerably over the next couple of years...
It's interesting to me personally that I haven't decided to do this for the wage, which is - with all due respect to my soon-to-be-employer - rather paltry. I make more than enough now from online teaching to actually give myself the luxury of spending some time in a physical classroom with learners again. I'm sure for a lot of teachers out there, the opposite relationship may be a whole lot more applicable!
I'm going into very modern classrooms with great tech resources, which was definitely an incentive. I'm really looking forward to going on with a variety of blended learning initiatives I first started using in Korea as a university teacher a couple of years ago - but now in a setting with mixed nationalities and different learning objectives.
The approach also appears to be very loose/open, and this makes it a very fertile environment for me to go on with some of my initiatives in unplugged language teaching.
I'm also taking this opportunity to upgrade/refresh some of my teaching qualifications (which are more than a decade old now and could do with some fresh shoots). To teach locally, there are some new little pieces of paper required, some of them annoying at first glance - but I've always figured that you get out of training and qualifications what you put in. I'll be trying my best to make "glass half full" the governing perspective on my part.
So, some changes of scene and some new challenges for the Raven...
Can't wait!
See you in front of the whiteboard, shall I?
:-)
