Everyone knows that it needs a good amount of hard work and perseverance to teach.
However, I never appreciated these qualities until I started working in a British school.
I obtained my high school degree in languages in 2007.
My wish to keep on learning languages made me enroll at the University " l'Orientale" in Naples to study both English and Chinese for my bachelor degree that I finished in 2011.
In July 2015 I got my MA degree in "modern languages and literature", and I was looking for a job when a colleague from the University just called me in the November of the same year.
One of the teacher of the school she was working for had to move to another city, and the principals were looking for someone to take her place.
During my university career, I made "One-to-One" lessons for high school students to rehearse grammar, to prove my teaching skills and to make a living.
However, I had never had a class of my own to teach until that moment, so I wished to put myself on the line for the very first time with a real class.
I started with a class of 12-13 years old who needed to get the Cambridge Movers certificate.
I realized soon that my duty was not just to provide them the vocabulary and grammar contents.
Those children were all Italians and came from different social backgrounds.
Some of them felt ashamed of using their English knowledge to speak in public because they feared mine and their classmates' judgment.
So during the lesson's practice time, I encouraged them to use their personal experience to make sentences useful to strengthen what they learned during the "presentation time." Moreover, I took advantage of my students' competitive side both to maintain their motivation and to challenge their memory at the end of the lesson.
I used to split them into groups to play Word games, such as the classical " Hangman" or slightly modifying speaking activities such as " Guess where or who?" to let them show up not only their English skills but also their general knowledge as well.
Later, I started to work as an English teacher for an accounting school, and another challenge that waited for me was to face with dyslexic students.
I had never taught to one of them, and my universities didn't provide any course to teach students who had special needs.
Nevertheless thanks to my principals' suggestions I started to experiment some techniques based on " Visual skills" development.
I used the method of " flash cards." to help them learn the vocabulary without writing anything at all.
Also, I let them use the same flash cards to make them arrange their personal sentence, to get a proper feedback of what they had learned.
Now I am trying to find out how to make macros with visual basic to create more interactive exercises for dyslexic students, but since I am not good at learning things by heart, my memory is struggling to remember the correct codes to use to make the macros work correctly.
In conclusion, I believe to be a suitable candidate to apply for this position because I am a methodical person this is true, but I am not afraid of trying new teaching techniques if they help my students to gain confidence in their abilities.