Arran Turner
I’m going to start with a confession: I’ve always been quite dismissive of teaching. It probably has something to do with my experience in British comprehensive schools. There, the teachers were overworked, underpaid or had been in the profession so long they forgot why they started teaching in the first place. I just tried to float in a shark tank of 1,500 teens. Fortunately, I managed to succeed academically without much encouragement but the inspirational teachers were few and far between. When inquisitive family friends asked if I had considered teaching, I told them I wasn’t interested, secretly telling myself that I’d do something better in my career.
Funnily, I’ve also always been a great believer in serendipity. I think the more you believe that incredible events are about to happen in your life, the easier it is to get through the challenging times. I don’t think it is just chance that my previous impressions of teaching were soon to be turned on their head.
Earlier this year, I was at a loss at what to do, after having left a job I didn’t enjoy but had trained for. I felt that I should be doing something important by now, aged 25. That I should be more successful. Instead, I decided to do something I thought I would enjoy. On a recommendation from a friend, currently teaching English in Bologna, I signed up to the Via Lingua TEFL course in Florence. Another confession: my aim was personal development, rather than having any grand schemes of teaching English to orphans in Romania. To some people, signing up to become an expert in the English language in a month might seem quite daunting but I studied languages and the idea sounded challenging but exciting. The school even had a drop out and as luck would have it, I was able to start earlier than planned.
Arriving on my first day, I realised I hadn’t wondered what my classmates would be like. It wasn’t on my list of priorities as I was more focussed on what I personally would get from the course. That must be why I was so astonished when I found myself amongst such talented, diverse and inspirational individuals. For example, one was a published children’s author and had taught English already in China to immigrant children. Another had a burning passion to be a history teacher back in the USA and change the world. The majority of the class was extremely enthusiastic about teaching. Any concerns I had about a class full of young Americans eager to travel in Europe and party seven days a week had dissolved like an Alka-Seltzer. The pedagogy taught to us somehow managed to stimulate the confirmed teachers and inspire the rest of us. I suddenly started to notice my role in group dynamics after we talked about personality types and attempted to take a back seat in group discussions more, sometimes focussing my efforts on encouraging the most introverted of us to talk. We learnt that fostering a supportive and open environment is crucial for the classroom if anyone is to learn anything, including the teacher.
It was only when we had reached the final stretch of the course that I realised our classroom environment had become the one we had been learning about in our pedagogy lessons. We shared stories and gave each other encouragement. There were tears and laughter, just as there might be in our classes in the future. The short weeks I spent at Via Lingua serve to remind me of the atmosphere I want to foster in all my classes.
I’m sure that many of you have seen that viral video of a teacher doing a special handshake with each of his beaming pupils before class. Just like him, I’ve learnt that teaching can never be about you. If it is you’ve got the wrong end of the stick and are creating a personality cult. It’s about how you can make other people feel about themselves and their capabilities. You can similarly be the most knowledgeable person in the world but until you encourage your learners to be enthusiastic about you as a person specifically and learning in general, you’re up the creek without a paddle. I’m disheartened to realise that respect (or lack thereof) for teaching, both from students and higher up, is what gave me a negative impression of it at school. But I feel that there is still hope left for teaching. As long as there are people that can get inspired to inspire, teaching can still be used as a catalyst for change. Let’s hope I put my TEFL qualification to good use.
Arran has a BA Honors from the University of Warwick, an MA in Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies from the University of Leeds; she completed the Via Lingua TEFL Certification course in October of this year.