10 Reasons Why Teaching is Rewarding

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!