Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,

I know this is a very open question, but would anyone be able to share a few key ideas on why do we teach EFL? (from the viewpoint of both teacher & student)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, just for a small EFL research project.

Thanks,

Chris C.

Why do I teach?
Probably the same reason many other people teach ESL. I started when the economy went bad 6 or 7 years ago.
I had just come back from a bit of travelling and didn't fancy spending 6-12 months unemployed and looking for work (despite having degrees and diplomas coming out of my backside).

An old housemate from university had recently moved to *beep* to teach ESL and he suggested that I give it a shot. I applied for work in Tokyo and got the job. Basically, I took up teaching due to a lack of any other positive options. (a story I have heard from quite a few other teachers)

Little to no training (as is usual with McSkools in Asia) and I was enjoying it.
6 years later, I've grown to be pretty damn good at this teaching malarky. I'm now DoS of a couple of schools and I'd like to think that people actually learn things when in my classes. To be sure, during my first 2 years of teaching, if anyone ever learnt any English, it was completely by accident and had nothing to do with me.

Why do I keep doing it? Well, I did return to the motherland about 2 years ago and tried to have a 'normal' job in an office. 3 months later I was going insane and sending applications out to every school I could find. It seems that 'normal' jobs are just not for me anymore. It appears that I enjoy training and teaching people.

***Note*** Dear Dave's ESL Cafe.
F.u.k.u.o.k.a is not a curse word. It is the name of a city in Japan. Why it's being automatically censored is beyond me. I mean, does ever word containing an F, a U and a K get censored?