Hello,
I was born and raised in California, in a small multicultural town centered around the agriculture industry, where my family was very active in the community. I was fortunate enough to be raised in a literary home, and always appreciated literature and language from an early age.
During my childhood my mother taught English as a second language, and I was introduced to many of her students from many different backgrounds. I also participated in trips to Mexico volunteering for charitable organizations, and thus I was exposed to numerous cultures from throughout the world at a young age. I studied, lived, and worked in this environment for 18 years before I left home to try my hand at life before attending colleges in Northern California in Humboldt and San Francisco. After meeting even more people from diverse nations at these schools, I chose to complete my BA by studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary at McDaniel College, a sister campus of McDaniel Maryland (formerly known as University of Western Maryland). I believed that living and learning in another nation would broaden the scope of my education, and offer all the options of a new world, and I was pleased to gain these experiences and many more.
My acclimation to living and studying abroad provided the opportunity to discover my calling, as from the beginning of my time in Budapest I was encouraged to begin teaching conversational English with professional adults, which led to more involved classes with friends and family of my students, of all ages and proficiency levels. I found that I really enjoyed teaching and based on feedback from students found that I teach well and make it easier for them to learn, so I then pursued this career more earnestly by conducting proper grammar classes at schools with students of different ages and backgrounds, which eventually led to regular employment teaching students during English Project Weeks at various schools throughout Austria and Slovakia. These weeks entailed traveling to public schools for a weeklong period of extracurricular lessons to kids between the ages of 8 to 18, or the occasional 19 year old. In this environment, the native-English teacher presumably has no ability to use the students’ mother tongue, thereby erasing the option for the student of falling back on it. I taught these Project Weeks for six years, and as time went by and regions changed from week to week, teaching these students with varying styles and interests proved to be an invaluable training that was completed as I finished my BA in communications and went on to earn a TEFL certificate. In the meantime, I continue tutoring private students and companies, as well as hosting conversation groups. However, I am now looking forward to the next stage in my career; I believe that my accumulated multicultural experience would be a valuable addition to any level English education program.