Being an EFL teacher (by Eva Büyüksimkeşyan) by Eva Büyüksimkesyan · February 8, 2010 When I sat down to write this post, the only thing came to my mind was, ”At the moment I’m where I’ve always wanted to be and this is because I’m an EFL teacher.” Being an EFL teacher helped me become who I am now. It promoted my creativity, enabled me to find different solutions for problems,and helped me become more patient and understanding. If you love teaching, please do it. You need to be self-motivated but the challenge is worth it. Before you start maybe you should know some facts about it. If you are an EFL teacher: You must be a life-long learner because teaching encourages us to learn something new every day. You can bring the real world into your classroom so you should always update your knowledge. If you stop learning, you will be behind your students. You will get challenged continuously and most of the times you will need to motivate yourself for the new challenges, so teaching will become an endless self-improvement journey. You can understand your students better than the other teachers. Language teaching gives you the chance to chat with your students or sometimes view their lives through their writings. Those essays, compositions and other stuff we do in the classroom reveal so many secrets and when they are able to speak about them they will feel more confident. Most of the time, only language teachers allow their students’ mistakes in order to encourage them to write, speak and contribute, and it boosts the students’ self-esteem. You know another language (if you aren’t a native speaker) and you can explore other cultures and lifestyles. Because of this, you can lead your students to another world where they can start perceiving what’s really going on around them. You can be an actor…Language teaching enables you to become an actor, a director, a screenwriter and the students are your supporting actors and cast. You will create a new movie every year. You need to be creative because teaching present perfect simple can be very monotonous, so you’ll try to find new ways, new techniques each year. You will stay young. As I said before, the real world is our material so we need to know what’s trendy, who our students are listening to, what they are watching. We need to keep up with their age. You can be a bridge between your students and the past. History will be more enjoyable in a language class. Your students will learn about the heroes, great actors, musicians, singers and groups of the past because you will use them in your class. You will be very lucky because there are really great teachers around you and they will help you. Whenever you want they will be ready to collaborate with you. No matter where you are, you will be a part of this big community. What I mean is that in whichever part of the world you live, the internet allows you to enjoy the bearable lightness of support from your colleagues despite being far, far away from you. Note: This article by Eva Büyüksimkesyan originally appeared on Teaching Village, and is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 License. If you wish to share it you must re-publish it “as is”, and retain any credits, acknowledgements, and hyperlinks within it. Share this:FacebookLinkedInTwitterPinterestPrintMoreEmailTumblrRedditPocket Related