This is great info, but can anyone who's used their cert. tell me how teaching is? I know you can teach at all age levels, and I would love to do this, but I think I would be slightly intimidated as I am not good at speaking in groups! (much less a large classroom of adults...) :unsure2:
Was it fun? Boring? Was it relatively easy to form or follow lesson plans?
I taught in South Korea for five months (kindergarten & elementary) and Palestine for three (teenagers) before getting certified. Then I got my CELTA in Prague in May and I'm now an English teacher in Istanbul with a private academy, teaching adults.
There are benefits and drawbacks to each age group. With kids, you can loosen up and have more fun with the lessons- but on the downside, you HAVE to make it a constant parade of fun or they'll get bored in a big hurry. Adults are much better at buckling down to doing exercises or whatever. Kids are less shy generally, and you'll often have an easier time getting them to speak English- but on the flipside, usually the younger the students, the more discipline issues you're going to deal with. Another issue is your own age. I'm 23 and almost every single one of my current students is older than I am, many by decades. More than one coworker has recommended pretending I'm at least 25 (which is hard because I look about sixteen) because some people will find it difficult to respect a teacher who's barely out of their teens. I prefer not to lie about my age, but I definitely do feel extra pressure to know my stuff inside and out when I'm working with adults. Kids don't care how old you are- as long as you're at the front of the classroom, you might as well be eighty.
Overall, I do prefer adults. I'm pretty calm by nature and not up for clowning around with my students all the time or trying to herd 20 eleven-year olds into their chairs.
As for the public speaking issue... I've never been good at giving presentations or anything of that nature. I turn red and stammer a lot. For whatever reason, teaching is not like that at all. I'm always nervous the five minutes of the first day, but after that, for whatever reason, it's no big deal. Can't explain it and can't promise it will be the same for you, but I expect it would, if only because I've known some awfully awkward people who make wonderful teachers. Shyness or hating public speaking, oddly, seem to have little bearing on how you'll feel in the classroom. Seems counter-intuitive, but that's been my experience.
Lesson plans... breeze. After CELTA- I haven't taken any of the other courses obviously, but I highly recommend CELTA because it's recoognized everywhere and it's a great course- anyway, after CELTA, you'll be able to lesson plan in your sleep. I learned a lot on the course, even having taught before.
Teaching is a lot of work. It's not like a desk job where you can daydream for half an hour at a time if you want (not to disparage desk jobs)- when you're working, you're WORKING. There's also lesson planning and prep time to factor in. Still, it's hardly slavery. Most places, a "teaching hour" is 45 minutes rather than 60, so you get paid for an hour but only work 3/4 of that time. On top of that, a full-time teaching schedule is rarely more than 30 of these "hours" per week, in recognition of the fact that if you're any kind of decent teacher you're probably putting in a lot of time outside the classroom photocopying, planning, cutting up bits of paper, grading, etc etc.
Hope that helps
