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!

Keywords of October: Inspiration, Change of Direction and Hybrid Employment

In order to keep up with my internal planning and publish at least one post per month, I need to hurry to still fit it in October. I’ve been long speculating on a topic for this one, and finally things are starting to crystallize. This time I’d like to talk about inspiration, change of direction and a very promising emerging form of employment that has caught my attention lately and was on my mind, before I even knew there was a term for it – hybrid employment. To my mind, these three things have to do with each other, follow me and I’ll explain why I think that.  

Inspiration

As the darker days come and wintertime becomes effective, we are inclined to seek more tranquility and slow down. At least this should be happening according to the logic of nature’s cycles. No wonder, most of us have difficulty getting up in the morning, might have less energy during the day and might even feel melancholy from time to time. To keep up with what you are doing in daily life with the same output you need things to inspire you to get your energies high again.

I get inspired by people who are living their jobs. I’ve come across a couple of great inspirational examples of such people. One of them is Michael Stevens, the founder and creator of the YouTube channel called VSauce. An ordinary, now 27-year-old American guy, who was probably bored with a mediocre office job and at the same time genuinely curious about how things in this universe work, created a YouTube channel a couple of years back and became incredibly popular with it on the Internet. He makes videos relating to various scientific topics, as well as gaming, technology and other topics of general interest characterized by a very authentic and engaging storytelling style. He asks and answers questions – some of them kind of silly, while others getting you really involved – with genuine spontaneity and directness of a child. Just try watching some of the movies if you don’t know VSauce yet – a lot of laughing guaranteed!

Another example of a person living her job, or rather work of her life, is Irina Verwer, a practicing teacher of different yoga styles and a vegan cook, writing blogs and books about yoga and nutrition. I discovered her website by chance some time ago and found her really cool and inspiring, just to find myself sitting next to her – you don’t believe in coincidences either, do you? – during the first weekend of Anusara Yoga Immersion. It is the first part of my two-year’s yoga teacher training that I started following about a month ago. Irina told me how she found it such a gift to do what she really loved and I decided I’d be looking as long as it takes to find this feeling for myself. Thanks for inspiring me, Irina!

Change of Direction

So as I mentioned earlier, I decided to do something less mind-centered than my current occupation and thought yoga was that something I was looking for: it seems to suits me because of the harmony and discipline, the former of which I seek and the latter of which I think to posses. As I also wanted to deepen my understanding of it, a suitable way for this seemed to follow a teacher training as I believe that one can best learn something in case he/she needs to teach it to others.

A kind of future I’m picturing for myself is thus a combination of a nice part-time office job and giving some lovely soothing yoga classes a couple of times a week. Seems like a perfect work-work balance, doesn’t it? More about similar job combinations in the following section.

Hybrid Employment

It turns out it’s not weird I’m thinking of some kind of combined career for myself. While job-hunting, I’ve seen quite some professional profiles of people on LinkedIn and was amazed to find out how many people have two and more things filled in on their company’s line. I thought of it as an emerging trend and I was right. Recently I’ve talked to someone who pointed out an NRC Next article to me where the term ‘hybrid employment’ was used to refer to people having two or more jobs at a time or having a little business of their own next to a regular job.

As individuals tend to get more critical about the place work takes in their lives and want it to have way more meaning than just earning a living, they long for more variation in what they do and want to possibly utilize most of their skills, abilities and ambitions. And sometimes those just don’t fit in one particular job! That is why some of them are creative enough to make up a professional reality that meets those needs.

Google, for example, encourages their employees to work on a project of their own some certain percentage of their time on the job. Another combination of professions that has become pretty common in the last couple of years is the one of part-time teaching next a job in a related industry. It actually seems like a very attractive one, for both teachers as well as their students. As NRC Next article about hybrid teachers claims, one stays more focused if different roles have to be fulfilled interchangeably, while at the same students, for instance, can benefit from the first-hand field-related examples in class.

One could think of quite some great ‘hybrid’ advantages, like enhanced vitality of professionals and lowered risks of burnout as a result of variation in activities. Also building up expertise in different disciplines makes one more flexible on the job market and thus better employable during his/her entire career.

One could also think of less positive consequences of the above mentioned flexibility though. As you spread your focus between two or more different professional roles, you might slow down your progress in each of them. You might have less chance to get promoted for example or miss out on things that happen in your absence. But maybe if hybrid employment becomes more and more the norm in the future, fulltime versus part-time employment will become less a criterion to judge one’s performance and deliverables.

What’s your idea of hybrid employment: a myth as you cannot succeed in a certain aspect of life unless you give it your fullest attention and effort or an enriching and productive way to combine more things that you like doing and are capable of? Let’s discuss!

And by the way: Happy Halloween to all of you!