My Experience as a Teacher

 


Teaching is hard and I have always known this. Teaching requires patience and a deep understanding of the subject.

I teach English as a private tutor. It was a job I was hesitant to accept because I was not very confident about my teaching skills. There is a reason people like me struggle to teach. We have an instinctual understanding of what we teach rather than a deep understanding of it.

If I look at a sentence, I will instinctually know whether it is grammatically correct or not. This is because I learnt English through a practical medium: books, movies, series, YouTube etc.,

If I was asked to explain why a sentence is wrong then it would take me some time to break it down and understand why it is wrong. This is because of the lack of exposure I have in theory, that is, grammatical rules.

In stark contrast to this, I am well-grounded in Japanese grammar – until the intermediate level – and I can explain why the sentence is wrong even though my vocabulary is limited in Japanese.

Eventually, I took this job after being persuaded by my friend. My student is fifteen and he is autistic. Teaching him is a challenge but I am learning alongside him. For him, I have to break down and explain everything. It made me learn grammar properly so that I can explain the rules to him. It helped me get better at reading comprehension because every line has a connotation that must be decoded before I can give him the answer.

When I started teaching him, I started learning English in an academic setting. Learning the literature part of English is different from learning the language part of it. The former, I learn from my professors – who are all well-versed – and the latter, I learn as I teach.

 


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