What being a self-employed teacher has taught me
In the 8 months I’ve been working as a self employed English tutor, I feel like I’ve become a new person; I’ve gained an incalculable amount of experience and knowledge about student behaviour and learning style, interacting with potential new students and even about the material I teach. Here is just a small selection of things that I’ve learned.
You need all the help you can get
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one tutor can’t work on his own. Of course, I’m responsible for planning lessons and finding my students, but the tutoring community has been invaluable in providing me with advice, tips, tricks and resources.
When I first started, I thought I could make everything work with my connections and marketing research I did in my own time, but it wasn’t until I talked to an incredibly experienced tutor that I learned a lot about using social media marketing to my advantage to build my brand and find new students, giving me the leg-up I needed to start properly picking up steam.
Another teacher who I work with (if you’re reading this, you know who you are!) has provided me with an abundance of resources and advice and has by far been the most helpful person in my career.
Teaching something can help you understand it better
I think most programmers are very well versed in rubber duck debugging — by explaining your problem to a rubber duck line by line, you realise what the problem is and how to solve it. Of course, I’m teaching a language that I’ve known since before I can remember, but you don’t realise how intricate it all is until you see the building blocks (i.e. grammar, vocab etc) and how they all interact with each other. I have plenty of grammar books and even did a grammar course as part of my qualification, but having to come up with different types of examples to help students who are struggling to understand a concept gives you a new appreciation for the way things work.
No two students are alike
There are many different types of learner, auditory, visual, logical etc. and you have to be prepared for all of them. Of course, everyone knows that the best way to learn a language is to speak it, but languages are full of rules, exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, and giving students a foothold on a language’s building blocks will pay tremendous dividends.
But how do you get students to understand it? Simply reading grammar rules from a book doesn’t really cut it, demonstrating their uses through examples and guiding students through their own discovery of the language works much better. However, some students can still struggle to pick it up, and each student has their own reason, maybe they feel disengaged, maybe they simply can’t get their head around it, or maybe they just need that one missing piece to help it fall into place, it’s the teacher’s job to find out how best to help.
There will always be more to learn
Teaching is full of unexpected challenges, there’s no way to plan for every eventuality (although lesson planning is key!), it’s important to think on your feet and always look for new and exciting ways to engage students. Don’t be afraid to backtrack and start again, pay close attention to your students, and never ever be afraid to ask for help. I hope that even if I keep teaching for 10, 20, 50 years more, I’ll always find something new to learn.
