Online Teaching: The Digital Nomad

Adventure, new cultures, and our students, these are my favorite parts about being an EFL teacher. The opportunity to meet students from all cultures and engage with them in a way that most people don’t get to is by far what keeps me working in this exciting field. For me, becoming a foreign language teacher was to do just that, move to a foreign country learn about the culture and meet people. I had been a teacher in my own country, but the opportunity for some adventure was the greatest allure. Now, as I have started doing the majority of my teaching online, I often get asked – so can you teach from anywhere? And the short answer is yes. I can teach from anywhere, but there are some things...

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Teaching English: Is it really a long-term career?

If you are still trying to weigh the pros and cons of becoming a teacher of English, doubt no more. When choosing a career we are usually guided either by what we love doing or by the financial benefits of a job. In my opinion teaching English can be the perfect combination of both - it is a fun job (you are guaranteed to never be bored) and there are plenty of opportunities to make good money. Another point in favour of choosing teaching English as a long-term career is that there are a lot of options to transition to from teaching per se to other areas within the TEFL industry: you can become a DOS, open your own language school, move into materials creation and...

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Rethinking ELT's Environmental Impact

Globalisation has resulted in many good things. To list just a few examples, it has eradicated diseases that used to be endemic, with most of the world’s human population enjoying rising standards of living and longer life expectancy than any generation before. Globalisation has also resulted in wonderful technological developments, giving us instant access to vast amounts of information. We can communicate in real time with people on the other side of the world, and can travel around it faster and more comfortably than our ancestors could ever have imagined. The spread of English and English language teaching (ELT) has gone hand in hand with these processes, and like globalisation...

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Work-Life Balance in TEFL

It's hard to disagree that everything works best in equilibrium. The growing popularity of ideas such as slow living, mindfulness and hygge suggests that the world has finally woken up to the fact that one needs more in life than work. According to Alex Clark, a researcher from Edmond University in Canada “We need to stop seeing hobbies and work as zero-sum games”, a view that is supported by the findings of  the Corporate Executive Board in the USA, which show that “Employees who believe that they have a good work life balance are 21% more productive”. Clearly, achieving equilibrium between work and private life ought to be win-win for everyone. For a teacher this means having the energy and motivation to work, getting new ideas and being full of enthusiasm in class. This in turn gives students...

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