If you are looking for a rewarding experience where you get to meet interesting people, hear stories of traveling adventures, and of what it is like to live and grow up in foreign countries, then I can highly recommend spending some time as a TESOL teacher.

It was coming to the end of 2016, and I was coming to the end of the studies that I needed to do for my big career change, or so I thought. I hadn’t really planned to become a TESOL teacher, and was about to start looking for teaching jobs in the main stream secondary schools, when the university that I was studying at sent an email to let me know that they had given me some bad advice, and that I would be unable to complete my course until early the following year.

I was left with an issue, I needed to find a workplace where they would take me on with the knowledge that I was going to take a month out early in 2017 to undertake the final practical component for my uni course. This precluded undertaking any type of professional accounting position, as the few jobs that were available were all looking for a minimum of six months. 

Fortunately, I had undertaken a TESOL certificate through the legends over at ITTT back in 2014 as a way of making myself a better language exchange partner. I found this course highly enlightening and well structured. It gave me valuable insight and made me look at the English language in a whole new way. So I dusted off the certificate and started applying for positions at various English schools around Brisbane.

My first big call up came from a bloke by the name of Trent, who was the director of studies at ICQA, as it was known at the time. I attended my interview and then Trent tossed me straight into the deep end with a pre intermediate class comprised mostly of Japanese and Colombian students. From the outset I really enjoyed the work, I was teaching students who were not only highly motivated to learn, but for the most part were also well educated professionals in their own right. In many instances I was working with university educated engineers, dentists, lawyers and teachers. I was also working with other TESOL teachers, who were on the whole dedicated professionals with vast amounts of experience, and some really interesting stories from their various travels.

I started in December which was a great time of year as all of the holidays and festivities provided stacks of authentic material and language to study in class. It is also the start of summer which means all of the summer activities like barbecues, swimming and parties give the whole place a festive relaxed kind of vibe. I was on hand to help the school move to new premises closer to the heart of Brisbane and the Queen Street mall. The school also underwent a name change to become SPC Brisbane which is affiliated with SPC Cairns and part of the SPC Group.

Having taught fairly consistently through December I was given my first Japanese tour group in early January. These guys were a stack of fun and all around my daughter’s age, so I was able to organise for Paige to give a presentation on what life was like for a teenager growing up in Australia. This gave the students a chance to listen to Paige’s accent, see what her life was like and then practice asking questions and listening for her responses. This really helped to reinforce the vocabulary and grammar structures we had been practicing in class over the proceeding two weeks that they had been here.

During my time as a TESOL teacher I met a lot of great students and had some excellent adventures taking them on various excursions including our whole school trip to Dreamworld, as well as many smaller excursions in and around Brisbane’s inner city, and of course the customary Friday afternoon BBQ’s at Roma Parklands and around the Southbank pools. I also learnt a lot about the various cultures and countries from which the students came, and now have a stack of extra places on my must travel to experience list, and who knows, perhaps I will even get the opportunity to teach English in some of those places.