Have you always taught kids?
Pretty much yes. Since I started working, I’ve been working with kids since five years ago, probably. I used to do business, marketing especially, marketing management, consumer products, and other stuff. And then I decided to travel for a bit. Then I started teaching. I started volunteering. I started to volunteer. Then I just moved straight to education and got certified and got some experience. And then got a different post-graduate degree in education.
I love it. Actually. It's really fun for me. I really like it. It’s much more dynamic than working at an office.
You now take it as a career.
Yeah, actually it was like a career shift.
Why do you like teaching kids that much? You like it so much that you wanna make it a career?
Why do I decide to make a career out of it? Somehow I started liking it because I used to work with adults all the time, you know, office corporate jobs. I used to work with adults all the time. And somehow, I started not liking adults that much after a while.
Because we, including myself, as adults are a bit too complicated sometimes. And it's like, when you were with children, they don't have that and they have that. They might be cruel because they have no filter when it comes to saying stuff. And I like that. I like people who are straightforward. The thing is that I just got tired of working with adult for that long.
As I told you, I started volunteering and I started working in Thailand first, after Thailand I moved to Cambodia. And I started just working in poorer communities and stuff. And the way I started relating to kids and connecting to them was just like, I don't know, I somehow start finding it really amusing.
One of my friends I actually made in Thailand, she was like, you know, you're very good at working with kids, so would you actually consider working for school? I was like, you know, I don't want to do something that I'm not prepared of. So let me just think about it. I mean, she started like introducing me to that world. She was like, you need this kind of certification, you need this, this, that. I think you would be actually able to make a good career as an English teacher. And I was like, you know, I didn't consider it before. But I like it. I’m really into kids. It's like one of those hidden talents that somehow you find that you have along your life. And suddenly you find yourself doing something completely different than what you thought you would actually be doing. And when I used to work in corporate, I never thought I would have the patience to work with children for that long. Somehow it just changed my life.
Have you been fed up sometimes, you know, upset because the kids might be too noisy and they just don't understand you?
There's the saying that says that there's no bad students, there's only bad teachers. You can not teach one kid. You are gonna teach one kid the same way others actually learn. As a good teacher, you wouldn't be able to deliver only one lesson to a full classroom full of different kids. There's 40 kids, and they all have different ways of learning. That doesn't mean that you're gonna make 40 different lessons for the same class. But still, the approach you are gonna have with each one of them must be different in order for them to actually learn and understand you.
So if you have a very naughty student, it's not the students' fault because she's eight or six or five or whatever age she is. And it's more about the teacher. The teacher wants to put them all in the same box. There's kids who’s gonna say like this box doesn't fit me, so I'm just gonna make noise, and I really don't care about your class, it's not interesting, I don't like it, whatever. It's not like getting engaged with the class. I think that comes more down to the teacher more than actually students.
So yeah, of course, I got my days where I'm like, oh my god, it's hard. This kid I just wanna quit. But honestly, it doesn't compare at all with the frustration I had when working with adults. For me, adults are way more complicated than kids.
