Tag: teaching abroad

Last week we brought you the first installment of our teacher interview we did with Mary McCusker, a teacher that dropped everything in New Jersey to head to South Korea to teach English. Read the rest of her excellent adventure here.

Mary McCusker is currently teaching for EPIK in South Korea through Reach to Teach. She has kindly shared with us her experiences and pictures in an interview. She had so much to say about her experiences that we have made this into a two part interview.

I’m sure we can all remember more than one class in high school or college in which we struggled to keep our heavy eyelids from shutting out an instructor droning on in an endless string of statements. Though the teacher or professor was doing their best to share the information in his/her head, very little of that information was entering ours.

It turned out, though, that the years I spent teaching were some of the most beneficial (and fun!) in my life, and ended up taking my life and career in directions I wouldn’t even have imagined before leaving home. Here are eight ways I found that teaching ESL will help you in life.

The attitude, the rebelliousness, and the constant pushback teachers get from their middle schoolers often leave them with a bitter taste of those classes. I, however, find these classes incredibly satisfying. Here’s why.

South Korea is a fantastic place to start for new English teachers because the country is very welcoming to foreigners, its location in Asia makes it a great launching pad for additional travel, and the pay and benefits are quite generous. That said, many of us first-time teachers will end up at one of the ubiquitous private academies called “hagwons”. While these offer great opportunities, there are a few things you may want to consider before consigning yourself to a year in one of these schools.

Not all disruptive behaviors in your students are created equal. A key to managing your class and keeping everyone behaving is identifying the reason why certain negative behaviors happen, and knowing the best way respond.

Introducing our latest teacher interview. This time we interviewed Alexander Lewandowski, an American teacher hailing from Illinois who took the right steps to teach English abroad in Taipei, Taiwan.