My Teaching Journey (updated)

In a nutshell

Below is a long read. A journey is a journey, after all. I don’t know how to squeeze it with all its ups and downs in a short post.

But I think I’ll spare the reader and first I’ll give a CV-like outline of my experience.

2006: I entered Moscow State Linguistic University;
2007: I started tutoring children aged 10 and older. Basically I helped them to keep up with the school curriculum and prepare homework, but at the same time I had the first bunch of questions – Which materials to take? How to keep them happy and engaged? How to develop their speaking and listening skills? How to activate grammar? All that started me thinking hard on the process of teaching a language.
2010: I got a job at a language school called Denis’ School. Now the focus changed and I was introduced to andragogy (or how to teach adults) – the company provided English courses in-company. Although the basics were clear, at the beginning teaching adults was extremely challenging. I was very young and had to establish my authority. Their memory and general learning pace were very different from children’s and that confused me a lot. So I had to find an approach that worked better with grown-ups and a new way to organise lessons. I was very lucky to have individuals and mini groups because that made it more manageable.
2011: I graduated from Moscow State Linguistic University with a degree in Psychology with the “knowledge of two foreign languages (English and French)”. (Does the choice of psychology sound surprising? For me it was the same. See a story below about how I got there);
From 2014 onwards: In Denis’ School I had figured out how to approach adults and was now seen as a teacher who can handle “difficult cases” and be trusted to teach B2 and C1 levels. I was flattered and I continued to do my best to establish good rapport with my students. Most lessons were quite enjoyable. At the same time I started getting tired from having to teach in different places on the same day and move between different offices.
2014, June: I got the CPE (the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English) after two years of preparation (2012-2014). For a while I was very proud of myself and then I understood that my knowledge of English was still not enough to give better C1 lessons.
2015: I started thinking of creating a blog to improve my writing skills and organising a space where I could invite my students to keep in touch with them.
2017, August: I did CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, also by Cambridge) and then started working at another language school (or better a chain of schools) – IH BKC. I taught larger groups on the school premises (again in different parts of Moscow). Now I was mostly appointed to teach A1-B1 students because there were natives for higher levels. Nor could I get to teach exam English which I liked a lot. That was pretty discouraging as I could not apply the knowledge I had worked so hard to get. On the other hand, the company provided free seminars for the teachers, had a more advanced placement system and fixed pacings for groups, all of which enriched my teaching experience. It was also easier to meet fellow teachers and talk to them. At Denis’ School I had felt more isolated as I was usually on the territory of the student(s).
2019: Combining working for two schools wasn’t easy so I left Denis’ School. I also created this blog and wrote my first article. But in general I was feeling more and more burnt out. I started considering leaving teaching altogether and starting a new career of a data analyst.
2020: I left BKC, became self-employed and moved all my teaching online. I continued writing for the blog. At one point a fellow teacher and a friend joined me and also published a couple of articles on DELTA (1 and 2) and for learners. We learnt Spanish for a while together. I also studied data analytics hard. Too hard, actually, as it just added to my general burnout and left me with no energy left for any big changes.
2021, January-February: I did a four-week course in Language Coaching, my impressions of which I described here and here.
2022: in February I started a TG channel and a VK group to share my teaching knowledge and attract more readers for my blog. As of November, I’m still teaching and writing the blog.

These are my main certificates (Maltseva was my maiden name).

As you see, not too many of them. It’s always been difficult for me to find a balance between earning money and spending it on professional development. But I’ve leant tons of stuff by trial and error (and analysing both of them).

Now, as I look back at my almost 15 years of experience, I’m surprised and astonished to have stayed in teaching for so long. How did it happen? I have so many other interests, why didn’t they take me away from teaching?

I think it all boils down to

my interest in languages – you can explore them forever, that’s something I really like and don’t get tired of;
my curiosity in people;
my determination 1) to understand how teaching and learning a foreign language work, 2) to “develop my own method that would make learning fun and easy” and 3) to understand “how to make people do what I want them to do at the lesson”. It’s difficult to judge how much I’ve succeeded in these areas but now I sure have my own approach to teaching which is not easy to change. Also I’ve always been more interested in understanding the nature of things by myself rather than being taught something explicitly. In this case teaching has provided a perfect ground for experimenting with my ideas;
the flexibility teaching gives – if I can organise my timetable by myself, I can fit all sorts of other activities into it and explore other things.

That’s it for the facts. If you want to read a story with a bit of drama and all that, read on =)

Preamble

As a child in primary school, I was fondly (almost obsessively) in love with a blackboard. I would take every opportunity to write nicely on it and clean it very, very properly. I even used a bookshelf at home for the same purposes (and nicked small pieces of chalk at school in the absence of the ability to buy them, the right ones). But I don’t really think this counts as wanting to be a teacher.

Being an archaeologist looked much more enticing. When I thought of it, adventures came to mind, together with dinosaurs from my encyclopedias. That clearly couldn’t compete with working at school. But I couldn’t imagine how archaeologists earn money (I guess I was a very practical child), so I gave up on the idea. Other than that, no subject looked interesting enough to be considered as a future job.

So before my last year at school, I did a career guidance test to get some help. The result surprised me: I had an aptitude for languages. Languages? Well, Russian was never a problem (not especially exciting either), but it had never crossed my mind that I could study English or other foreign languages at university. No one spoke a foreign language in my family and we didn’t go abroad on holiday. So languages were something of a distant and completely unknown world to me.

On the other hand, why not? At that time it sounded way better than the other suggestions like economics, engineering, or seemingly boring IT subjects. So I started looking at language-related university programmes. The ones that seemed interesting were translating and interpreting, but there was no way I could have passed the entrance exams – my knowledge of English was too poor for that. Then my mum found Moscow State Linguistics University whose policy was to teach students two foreign languages in all faculties. That seemed to be a good bet.

I still had to choose my subject though. So, translation and interpreting were not an option. I didn’t quite understand what kind of work I would find being a linguist. Being a teacher didn’t look fun. Then, of all the other subjects, I suddenly chose psychology.

It wasn’t a rational choice. I accidentally heard a lecture given by the psychology department head on the day of open doors, and it was so unlike and outside-the-box compared to anything else in my life that it won my heart immediately. My curiosity was shaken wide awake from a deep sleep and nothing could change my choice.

I’m forever grateful to my professor, Nikolay Nikolaevich Nechaev, who showed us how to think outside the box and never take ourselves, our knowledge and understanding too seriously. He taught us to keep searching for new perspectives when looking at the same thing. I did my diploma work under his supervision and I guess it was one of the most original in the faculty, to the point that the commission couldn’t come with questions to ask me. (I tried to apply Galperin’s theory of the systematic formation of mental actions and concepts to learning flamenco dance.)

I never worked as a psychologist after university. But I’m grateful I studied this domain, rearranged my thinking and learnt more about how a human psyche works. I think this is a very useful knowledge. It helps to understand people better and get into contact with them. Another great lesson was “it all depends on the perspective you look from”. That generally helps to manage conflicts and disagreements (or not or get into them).

First steps

In my second year at university (in 2007), I started tutoring as a way to have more pocket money. My first English classes were to 5th form schoolgirls. To find them I had to go around the neighbourhood and post up my little advertisements on building entrances. Well, at least one person got interested. (And my mum never tires of reminding me how she picked up the phone and spent almost an hour (?) persuading the lady to “try my services”).

I remember how frightened I was at my first lesson, but we hit it off with my first student and her mum was charmed. I’m not sure how I did it, but I tried really hard to understand the girl (I was a future psychologist after all) and to get her interested in the subject.

In other words, I wanted my lessons to be fun and engaging, unlike those I had at university.

Our teachers still believed in the power of the grammar-translation approach and the necessity of memorising and reciting tons of vocabulary (lucky us, they had already come off the idea of learning whole pages by heart). We didn’t work much with authentic materials, neither texts nor audios. Why? It is still a complete mystery to me because isn’t this the exact thing advanced students are supposed to do, a lot and most of the time? So at the time I was quite disappointed by that approach. No wonder, I wanted to reinvent the wheel and come up with something else for my students.

What’s more, very soon into my own teaching, I found myself fascinated with English. For me it was like opening doors to the world of language, to the beauty of it, to the world itself and I wanted to share it. It seemed the career guidance test had got it more than right.

With my older students we also did a lot of listening and I came to like the sound of the language (before it was more like “nothing special”, I was under the spell of French). Suddenly I understood that I enjoyed sitting next to to the student and finding a way to explain complex grammar and hear them use it. I just fell in love with exploring the language together. It didn’t really matter that I wasn’t very fluent or that I wasn’t sure of some rules. We were in the process together and my students liked it.

The word of mouth worked well and soon I had four students who then stayed with me for several years.

Going professional

In my fifth year at university (in 2010), I felt it was time to find a more serious job and applied for a language school, Denis’ School. The world of work was all new and frightening to me (again). It was one thing to tutor and quite another to “teach adults in-company”. Probably I didn’t sound too bad during the interview, so they took me in. But before I could get any “projects” I had to undergo the company’s training to know how to teach adults.

In general, the training gave us a nice framework to use. We were introduced to the communicative approach, the necessity to make lesson plans and understand students’ needs. We were told how adults were different from children (and how important it was to keep them happy and motivated). We then were put through a mini exam where we had to present a lesson plan and give its rationale. The approach was clear: engage the students, structure the lesson and focus on developing speaking skills.

I mean, in theory it was clear. In practice, it was nowhere near it. When I heard I was appointed to teach Intermediate students, I nearly fainted. I was so pale in face that both the lady in charge of the projects and the coordinators had to calm me down and reassure me I’d be fine. Well, I am very thankful for their support. They believed in me and I think I lived up to their expectations. We remained in very good relationships till the very end of my work at the school.

I will probably never forget my first adult student. He was a man in his fifties, very serious, very punctual and very scared to speak. With a military background, if my memory serves me well. The best approach I could think of, being a shy, unexperienced twenty-one-year-old girl who had to pretend to be a professional, was to listen and to encourage him with never-ending “why?” and “really?” and the like. We also thoroughly did the coursebook and analysed some language. Somehow it worked. He later signed up for a second course with me, considered me to be the one and only teacher for himself and even brought souvenirs from his business trips. I think I still have the spoon from Prague =) Well, that was an important lesson: never underestimate the importance of keeping your month closed. And ask follow-up questions. Still works like magic, actually.

So I started to acquire the skills of working with adults. The main obstacle I faced was that my lesson wouldn’t go according to my plan. The students often got stuck with exercises and texts in the way I couldn’t understand or predict. Plus, with groups, I never knew who would turn up and whether we’d be able to take new material or we would have to study the same with a different part of the group.

Oftentimes I left the lesson disappointed and upset. Why wasn’t the lesson logical enough? Why didn’t we have enough practice? What went wrong? What was wrong with my instructions? Why did that activity didn’t work with my students? Why did it take so long? What should be changed next time?

I’m not sure that my students noticed those internal struggles – our rapport and relationship were good (and much better than later when I worked at BCK). I was so used to learning languages that I couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for adults. Why they were so slow and disorganised in their studies. Why they forgot things so quickly… So I thought hard. I experimented with different activities. I looked for solutions. I learnt my lessons and wrote them down.

Probably, I should have consulted with the school’s methodologists and trainers but I was terrified to show I was incompetent (which would cause me to lose my job, I was certain of that). There was no practice of teacher observations at Denis’ School so no one really knew what I was doing in my lessons. They only relied on the student’s feedback, and, it seems, that was good enough.

Oh, and I was also keen on some ideas from psychology about different types of learning (Galperin’s theory), in which I believed and for which I was very eager to find application in teaching. So I continued to analyse my lessons and experiment.

At my disposal was the school’s library. I have a soft spot for books in general, but when I saw the variety of coursebooks presented in all levels, books on grammar, vocabulary, games, methodology and what not, I was convinced I would find my way and tame my lessons. We could also use the coping machine as much as we wanted and I remember making tons of copies both for myself and for my students. Lots of them are still in a huge folder under my table, unused but intriguing =) For now, I’m unable to bring myself to throw them away – they carry such good memories.

Soon I found a fun and effective way to learn grammar and was super excited about it. Later it hit me that a lesson became much more manageable when the material was 80% (and more) familiar to the student. It also left enough time for speaking practice and new language was better memorised. From that moment on (2014) I became more confident and mostly in control of my lessons (or so I thought). I was noticed at school and given the projects I wanted, mostly B2-C1 levels. Some of those students later came for private lessons to me. And one of them is still with me. It’s been 8 or 9 years, can you imagine?

Overall, I learnt a lot about teaching adults in those years. I am also incredibly grateful for the freedom and trust I was given. I didn’t abuse them. I rarely cancelled my lesson. I prepared for them. I felt very responsible for my students’ progress (probably way too much responsible). But I was also free to explore different books, change the level, take the material I liked and adapt the pace of lessons to my students’ needs.

The only problem was low pay. So sometimes I had to take more classes at the expense of rest or professional development. Then teaching seemed relatively easy – make sure the student does exercises correctly and don’t forget to develop speaking and listening skills. Basically, just follow the book. But, on the other hand, in 2014 I still didn’t have any teaching qualifications and that made me feel insecure, as if I was just pretending to be a teacher and I wasn’t a real one.

At least I got my Certificate of Proficiency in English. That was the first step to a “brighter career”.

Getting the CPE

I heard about Cambridge exams in 2012 and immediately set my mind on taking the most difficult one. At those times I was an achiever and couldn’t miss the opportunity to take up another challenge. That seemed better than immersing myself in English by reading books or listening to the radio or looking for opportunities to practise it with natives.

Now I think I got the whole idea of the C2 level terribly wrong. It’s not about the test and the certificate. It’s more about massive exposure to authentic language, interacting with it and taking pleasure in the variety and complexity of it. My mind, instead, was fixated on getting the certificate and “proving” I knew English well.

As a result, I felt constantly stressed while ploughing through notoriously difficult practice tests and kept asking myself how on earth it’s possible to remember all those collocations, phrasal verbs and nuances of meanings… Or read those texts fast (especially without reading much… Good question!) Writing was simply a nightmare. But I was a determined soul and I managed to get a B.

Overall, it took two years to prepare and I did it with courses at BKC. It was also the time when I was constantly learning from the highly qualified teachers I had, who, by the way they taught, unknowingly shared important lessons and techniques on what to do and even not to do with students.

From one teacher I learnt that it was OK to answer students’ questions by consulting a dictionary right at the lesson. Before that, I’d always thought a teacher should know everything. Simply know, not just be ready for a particular class. Another one, who was a CELTA trainer as well (and this was how I learnt about CELTA), was amazing at lesson preparation, classroom management and simply everything else. Her lessons were so fun and pure pleasure that at times we had close to twenty other students at the lesson, who themselves were teachers (just for comparison, with the previous teacher there were only four or five of us). And with still another one we almost had a personality clash when she couldn’t answer my spontaneous questions and suddenly started to get angry at me for this. So it was also OK not to know some things or ask for some time to clarify them later. Yes, I learnt and learnt from them.

And now I also had a new goal in mind: CELTA.

Going for CELTA

It took me another three years to come close to it. Had I done it earlier, my teaching style might have been different. But by the time I joined the CELTA course I had acquired my own understanding of how language is taught, which, unfortunately, worked against me during the course.

I opted for a month-long full-time course of CELTA with BKC (which after my preparation courses I saw as a “real” language school with true professionals). Somehow I believed it was better to dive into it and invest a lot of effort at once. For that I took a holiday at work so that nothing would distract me. I thought it all was very important, like, there I was with “real” teachers learning best practices from qualified trainers. I needed proof to myself that I was a real teacher, too. And, given the importance I attributed to this whole CELTA thing, it’s no wonder that I completely stressed out as a result.

Almost from the very beginning, I started to complicate things. I got stuck with finding original ways of presenting material instead of learning how to present any material within the necessary framework (which is what you’re supposed to learn at CELTA, as I was explained later). I would try to come up with my own ideas instead of using the input materials we were given. I would spend hours searching for nice pictures, texts and videos, compiling exercises using several books for my teaching practice and leave doing the paperwork and preparing handouts till the last moment (I remember a couple of teaching practices where I finished cutting the handouts 5 minutes before going to the students). Or forget to do language analysis. And I couldn’t get the timing right. Because I was stressed and anxious, my mind raced and I wanted to do the maximum, which the students couldn’t. I often wrote my teacher talk for myself, but still forgot to mention some important things when I was in front of the students…

So when I got almost Below Standard for my last teaching practice, it was the last straw. Especially because I thought it was one of my best teaching practices. It was an Upper-Intermediate writing lesson – writing a review. So we watched a trailer for Inception and analysed a review on it (I wrote it by myself and spent three or four hours on that). Then we worked with some useful vocabulary (which I gathered from several books) and then I understood there wasn’t enough time for writing. So I decided to do speaking instead: the students still could practise the language and do writing as homework. They did their talk and we finished nicely.

But, according to my trainer’s feedback, the lesson was very weak and “we would expect a better one from such a strong candidate as yourself”. The change of writing to speaking turned out to be wrong: reading should be followed by writing, listening by speaking… Some other things were missing as well… However, I still didn’t get what made the lesson so bad because initially my tutor hadn’t given any comments at all, just handed me the assessment. And when I asked, the reply wasn’t convincing. So that was it. I was on the verge of tears, hurt and deeply disappointed.

I think, psychologically, I got into a sort of retraumatization. That’s why my tutor’s words felt so bad and my reaction was so exaggerated. I’m not sure how it happened or what was the trigger exactly, but it felt like the end of teaching. If I could have, I would have quit teaching forever right at that point. I got my Pass but it was like a total failure for me after all that effort I had put in.

Doubts and a new place of work

Anyway, I didn’t have sufficient funds to back me up and quit, so I stayed in teaching. Right on the last day of CELTA I applied for work with BKC hoping to get a higher pay and an opportunity to work in one of its schools (and decrease the amount of commuting between different places). If only it was all so easy…

First I found out that in order to be appointed to one school I’d have to teach children (which was not at all in my plans). Otherwise I could only get a part-time contract. OK, I agreed to that. I knew the company provided Intensive classes so maybe I could get some of those groups and simply teach for longer in one place. Next I was given the rate which was, I suspect, the school’s lowest – it seemed my previous teaching experience wasn’t taken into account at all. It hurt.

Administratively, the company turned our to be a complete mess. There were several timetable managers but soon I had an impression that they either didn’t have a single database, or changed all the time, or didn’t talk to each other…

From the very beginning I gave the days I could work on (I was on a part-time contract after all, so I had a right to choose) and I mentioned several times that I didn’t teach children at all. Yet I was asked again and again to take a children’s group or cover a lesson. Or I was offered groups on the days I was busy. Or I was offered only A1 groups while I was asking for higher levels or exam classes. Or groups on the other end of the city. Or I wasn’t given any groups at all. Or I was given wrong information about the group’s or individual’s level or what to do at the lesson. Or the salary was not calculated correctly. Overall, during the first year it felt like the company just didn’t want me working there. And I wasn’t the only one to complain.

On the other hand, not everything was bad. Many of the senior teaching stuff were real gems, very professional. The company also provided good teacher support and free seminars for professional development. I participated in two projects. One was preparing activities based on an authentic text and the second on starting a blog. Both were for free with some feedback, encouragement and support.

Now there were more opportunities to meet colleagues. It wasn’t easy to fit in but I even made a couple of friends. I was given a mentor, a very nice lady who observed me every six month and gave feedback on my lessons (I never got Above Standard for them either). I also learnt lots of useful stuff on testing students and creating pacing/ curriculum.

When I calmed down, I went back to my CELTA notes, revised them and used them for preparing lessons. But deep inside I lost my place in the classroom together with my motivation to be the best teacher I could. Teaching didn’t feel like vocation any longer; it became just a job. I did what was asked to do according to the pacings. I tried to build rapport with the students. But I couldn’t revive my enthusiasm for transferring the knowledge I had and I was getting more and more tired.

Also I understood that I didn’t see any professional development in teaching: I didn’t want to teach all levels and all ages, nor did I want any managerial positions. Going over the same books according to the same pacings looked dead boring to me.

Two and a half years later, in February 2020, I sent in my resignation note and decided to start moving away from teaching. I signed up for a 6 month course in data analytics and thought and I’d start the new academic year working in an IT company. For the transition period I just hoped to keep my private students who were smart guys and who I liked a lot. So teaching them was not a problem.

Going online

However, soon the pandemic hit. Three of my students, who I liked a lot and who paid well, left. I was extremely worried about the upcoming economic crisis and took several students with very low pay (which was better than nothing). I didn’t understand the nature of online classes and couldn’t determine the right workload. Before I’d spent a lot of time commuting, now I didn’t have to go anywhere and I thought it was OK to have 4-6 hours of classes almost in a row.

The course also took a lot of time and effort. Twice or three times more than it was said in the description (10 hours a week against 20-30 I spent). As a result, when I finished the course in September and prepared my CV/ LinkedIn profile/ github projects in October, I understood that I had no energy left at all for looking for a new job let alone working 40 hours a week. Worse, at some point in November my head could barely keep up with the teaching workload, to the point that I couldn’t remember what my student said two minutes ago. I got scared. It was a burnout and it was massive.

I understood that I needed rest.

But, if you’ve been working a lot for a long time, it cannot be so easy. What is rest? Isn’t sleep just enough? How to relax? How to understand I’m rested? You just don’t notice when it’s time to take a break because being tired is a normal state. At least, I didn’t. I didn’t feel how profoundly exhausted I was, mentally and even physically.

Actually, I thought a couple of months of rest should be enough, so in January 2021 I’d come back to the job application process.

Language Coaching

Needless to say, it didn’t happen. I still couldn’t find the energy for a big change (and working 40 hours a week still terrified me). Moreover, I was stuck with the idea that I need to bring my teaching experience into order. After all, after all those years… it would be a pity to just throw it all away. How could I? I loved languages. I couldn’t leave my students. Especially because one-to-one lessons were actually fine and quite enjoyable. And it was so easy and convenient to give online lessons. I wanted to stay at home longer.

I couldn’t imagine not speaking English every day and doing some boring analysis instead (I was impressed by Data Science and Natural Language Processing but for that I didn’t have the knowledge of maths; data analytics as described in the vacancies I saw seemed boring – banks, insurance, sales, ads…). And my new knowledge of analytics wasn’t good enough to look for a job from a foreign company.

Obviously, there was a serious conflict that didn’t let me move on.

As I was looking for ways to solve it, I found a course on Language Coaching. What an interesting idea, I thought! Isn’t it what I want? Well, in short, it wasn’t and it seriously messed up with my own teaching (especially by the idea that one can call oneself a coach and charge 3-4 times more than a “regular teacher”) and left me with lots of questions instead. In detail I wrote about my impressions here and here.

Then it took me almost another year (and many, many pages and hours of writing) to redefine teaching for myself and find my place there. Honestly, I don’t know why it was all so difficult and time consuming. Maybe I think too much and too deeply. Maybe it’s my personality. Or some traumas in the past. Or all together. But it’s interesting that with all this drama I never left teaching. There must be something in it that’s dear to me. I’m not sure what it is – the language itself, that miraculous feeling of wonder when I hear my student getting more mature in speaking or the opportunity to endlessly learn about the world through language, but I’m sure that teaching has made me a better person.

Aftermath

Anyway, I’m glad I took the pain of analysing my teaching experience in such detail. I’ve learnt a lot.

I’ve learnt to appreciate my experience. Not to devalue it, but to accept what happened to me as a teacher and learn my lessons. I’ve come a long way. I have definitely had tons of practice. I’ve had my ups and downs and I’ve come to terms with me as a teacher. Now I feel better, more stable and confident. I don’t feel lost, or stressed, or terribly tired, or disappointed. I’m fine and it feels good =) And I think I’m a good teacher with a lot of knowledge of both the subject and how it should be taught. I’m still fascinated with English and never tire of exploring it.

Teaching has definitely changed me a lot. It has taught me to be more flexible and creative, think on my feet and adapt to the student. I’ve acquired good people skills and I understand people both verbally and non verbally pretty well – this is something I lacked as a teenager/ young adult. I know how to hold an engaging conversation and direct it in the way I need (to meet the learning needs or apply my language skills generally in life). I’ve become very patient and an excellent listener. I’ve become a better speaker and taken my shyness under control. I’ve learnt my limits as well. I’ve found how many hours I can teach comfortably and how to rest after them. And I think it’s very important to know this.

I’ve also learnt to give my students more autonomy and more space to find what works for them, to trust them more. After all, I think it’s an illusion that a teacher may know exactly what her students should do to learn a language. There are just too many different ways to do it and my students never cease to surprise me at what works with them when they’re given the opportunity to explore their own preferred way of learning. Now we share responsibility for progress and success, and I adapt better to their pace of learning. I’m still interested, though, how to make the process of learning more effective, so I’m still learning.

At the same time, I’m ready to share my experience. I’ve finally got to developing my writing skills (and this blog) and liked it a lot. In February 2022 I started a Telegram channel and a VK group where I write about different learning strategies and techniques that can help people become more autonomous learners. I can’t figure out how to post on a very regular basis yet, but I hope to find a way.

And now I think I’m closer and closer to launching into a second career properly. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to leave teaching behind. After all, it’s not a bad job =)

That’s it for my story!

if you’re still with me, you’re incredible, thank you so much for your interest. The journey has been long. The article has taken ages to write and I’m not sure my storytelling skills are enough to get my reader through it seamlessly. So I really appreciate it if somebody takes the pain of reading it all. Chapeau! =)

Cover image by schaeffler from Pixabay