A year ago, I completed my MA in TESOL from the New School University and graduated with a diverse crowd of people teaching all over the world. This was my first experience learning online, and it definitely changed my outlook on e-learning. I met some incredible people (both faculty and classmates) every semester, and found my courses to be more demanding and engaging than my preconceived notions of an online program had me believe. Thanks in part to having taken a couple summer courses onsite, I got to meet in person the classmate I admired the most: Adriana Picoral. Each one of her posts were always so well thought, full of good examples, and to the point. I also met one of the funniest, brightest teacher friends I have to this day, Katrina Schmidt. A year later, we still communicate via Facebook and email, and we continue to share our work online. Last Saturday, the three of us submitted a proposal to present together at the next TESOL Convention. If we get accepted, this will be our first presentation at an international conference.
Because this year I’ve decided to focus on embracing professional challenges little by little, I’ve decided to try and do a poster presentation at next year’s TESOL conference as well. A poster presentation appeals to me because I’ll have a chance to interact with other teachers one-on-one and hopefully learn more about the subject matter: using flash cards to teach vocabulary.
As usual, I’ve been procrastinating writing all weekend long. This blog post is in fact the cusp of my procrastination (I think I have a few more hours left to submit it because of the time difference). Writer’s block, insecurities, self-corrections, ADHD, and too many tea breaks are all to blame for my half-written proposal. Then came Katrina’s email this morning right after officially submitting our proposal online. Her confirmation message to Adriana and I read, “…my horoscope said that something i do early this month will be very good for my professional future SO YOU KNOW THAT MEANS WE WILL BE ACCEPTED AND THEN WE WILL BE FAMOUS AND RICH TEACHERS, right?”
A funny comment turns into a somewhat serious reflection and the perfect excuse to continue procrastinating...
While it does infuriate me that many teachers have to have two jobs in order to make a decent living, and it bothers me to no end that our profession is generally underpaid, I do have to say that I feel extremely lucky to love what I do. I also feel fortunate to have the chance to meet so many motivated and engaging teachers all over the world and to work doing something that always inspires me to keep learning and asking new questions.
Since I have been trying to access corpus tools to improve my understanding of language and help students learn vocabulary, I thought I'd do a quick check about teachers being rich and famous by looking up the most common adjectives used to describe a teacher.
For your viewing pleasure (or corpus-based reality check), here are the top 100 collocations of "teacher."
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