It’s been a while since my last career update and a lot has happened in the meantime. Among other things I’ve got a new job, have been meeting new and exciting people and acquiring new experiences, but most of all I’ve been exploring quite some new skills and also applying those to making a living.
In
order keep one’s employability high,
which is becoming a must in these times of an overall job market flexibilization, one
needs to stay flexible too and keep training those adjustability muscles.
Literally, this means to continuously develop various sets of skills and not only rely on those capabilities that
proved to earn you some money once and for a while provided some financial
security. Following this idea, I’ve tried not to get rusty and changed
the field of my expertise a bit, which would mean utilizing different skills
than those I used in my previous job.
Though
I’d certainly need a different set of skills in my new marketing and sales role
than those I needed as a market researcher, it’s not those skills I wanted to
talk about. As mentioned in my previous posts a while ago, I’ve been re-exploring teaching on a number of
occasions and in different forms and couldn’t but notice how rewarding it was.
That is why I decided to write about it and explain why I thought so.
My
attitude to teaching as a possible occupation
varied considerably at different periods of my life. Next to the fact that I’ve
had some amazing teachers to learn from, starting with my high school mentor,
my English teacher from high school and university and my yoga teacher as of
late, there were people who wouldn’t recommend becoming one based on their own
experiences. My diseased grandma, for instance, an elementary school teacher
herself who’d been teaching for more than 40 years at a Ukrainian village
school. Upon hearing that I started a teacher training at a university, she
persistently told me to, if at all possible, become something else but a
teacher. Not good for your nervous system, she said. But then again, my poor
granny had to teach like all the subjects on her own, to the first and third
graders at the same time and in the same classroom too! No wonder she’d get
some overwrought nerves
issues after all, given the circumstances.
So
I listed to my granny and didn’t become a teacher back then. I’ve studied some
more and explored market research as an industry later on. But as an advocate
of the so-called ‘hybrid employment’ I wrote earlier about, at
some point I decided to see for myself what it felt like to teach. To find out
that teaching could actually be great! Training my successor-to-be at an old
job, giving yoga classes to a couple of friends and then to a group of 10 and
finally becoming a part-time English tutor for secondary school students I’ve
been in quite some ‘teaching’ situations to find out.
Not
sure whether I’d still be that enthusiastic about teaching if I made it my
fulltime job, but for the time being, combining the above-mentioned ‘episodes’
of teaching with a part-time office job I’ve been more than enjoying it. For
those who might consider teaching or are doing it already I came up with a list of 10 reasons why I find it rewarding. Here they are, explained:
1. If
you want to learn something really
thoroughly, you’ve got to start teaching it. Having to teach something makes you the best student you can be of the
field in question: that’s when you’ll really get to the heart of the matter of
whatever you are trying to grasp. Just ask me why I decided to take up a yoga
teacher training? That’s why!
2. Seeing
people you are teaching have progress
gives you a kick. Like your students writing a composition in English with only
minor mistakes while they couldn’t put down two sentences just a while ago? Indescribable!
3. Usually
it’s not only the subject specific knowledge you are providing, it’s much more personality building what you do than
you might think. You cannot teach English well without teaching someone the
discipline of looking up every unknown word he or she comes across. The same
applies to yoga: discipline here is the key.
4. While
teaching you are observing yourself
at the same time, noticing skills you miss to become more efficient. Just think
of the best wording to explain a grammar rule or talk your yoga students into
an asana. It’s comparable to holding a mirror in front of yourself, a great
self-reflection practice, no doubt!
5. You
are training your listening skills a
lot and those might come handy not only to a teacher, but to a successful sales
person, a project manager or a HR professional as well.
6. You
develop patience and that one is
considered common good in our fast moving ‘action-reaction’
society, where ‘instant’ is rapidly
becoming the new ‘good’.
7. Trying
to find a right approach to different people you are becoming more open-minded. Another great quality and totally
in line with the idea of training those adjustability muscles.
8. You
are not only teaching out there, usually you are learning from your students a lot too. How do you think I found out
what Snapchat was or the latest Dutch slang? Right, from my English students!
9. Money
you earn teaching might not be as much (or it might also be a lot, depending on
what it is you are teaching), but it’s gratitude
and progress of those you teach that
are most pleasing.
10. Teaching
is rewarding, just because it is! Go and try for yourself if you haven’t yet.
Teach an older relative or neighbor to use Facebook or a smartphone
application, lead a teenage soccer team or train your colleague to use the
software you know well. Enjoyment
most likely guaranteed!
Do you recognize the points I
highlighted here or did you have any of these experiences while, either
formally or informally, teaching something to someone? Please do share your
thoughts in the comments: I’d be very excited to find out!
