Being a teacher for the first time. Moments we won’t forget.

Today I decided to share my amazing experience being an English teacher. Although we have all taught our younger siblings or other family members before, this experience was really different. Language bridges program gave us the opportunity to be teachers and teach people that wanted to learn for their benefit. It was not to get good grades in class. The real reason that the students we had attended classes was to be able to help and guide the people in they interact with daily in their career life.

Since the first day of classes we realized that these people are serious about learning and want to make the best of this opportunity. This made us as the group of teachers put in the best effort to try to come up with different ways to have useful yet engaging and fun classes. The classes did not only consist of us lecturing and making sure they take notes. It was the complete opposite, we would usually ask the students to give us the right answer and explain it to us, which would assure us that they understand the material and are not just answering correctly by luck. Another thing we used to do is let the students help their friends when they had some difficulty. This way allowed the student with difficulty to understand things clearly and the other student to interact in English, which is good practice for him.

Our students were motivated to attend classes as I mentioned to be able to do a better job in their careers. What motivated me and my fellow CMU-Q students in my group to attend and look forward for these classes was the great that we saw it as a great opportunity to give back to our community.  It was something that we believe will have a direct influence to those students and the also the people they interact with. An example would be one of our students who’s current job is a security man in the pearl island. Seeing him learn and him personally telling us that these classes are useful to him made us happy because he learned and was able to use this knowledge straight away. This is why we believe that there is a direct positive influence given back to the community.

<ending last class with a group photo filled with smiles>

It was great having this opportunity and I will be looking forward to join similar programs in the future where we can give back a little to the community that gave us everything we have.