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!

Year 2013: Summing It All Up

Next to the charming X-mas cards, warm and cozy family and friends dinners and lovely wishes for the coming 2014 this nice and sweet December time is all about, one cannot but come across all kinds of reflections on the old year, top-something lists of the best and most memorable moments, varying from sports, the news, television, radio hits to the year’s overview in pictures and events for each of your Facebook friends. And sometimes it does go too far if you ask me, but given the fact that turn of the year has some certain kind of magic to it (at least to me it still does), this summing a year up seems like a reasonable and useful thing to do. As it also just feels good to do so, let me follow my fellow bloggers and all other people who deem this end-of-the-year ritual important and reflect on my 2013 in this very final end-of-the-year post.

This year started out in big uncertainty for me as I quitted my old job in the last days of 2012 and was feeling both sad and excited about it at the same time. As I’m a kind of person who seeks security, it was not quite encouraging to think I’d stay without steady incomes for a while (aside from some unemployment benefits I could count on for some time). On the other hand, all endings mean beginnings of something new, which is why I was elated to a certain extent. And as long as after 3 months of job-hunting I was still unemployed, it made me reconsider how much I disliked my former job and, under slightly adjusted employment conditions and modified responsibilities we got back together with my old employer, which was a great decision after all as far as I can evaluate it now. I’m still working there part-time as a market researcher. This might not be the work of my life and my career has been standing somewhat still this whole year, but I feel productive and get a chance to carry out some really cool things at work from time to time, while still having enough free time to enjoy other nice things in life (and thanks God my boyfriend has his job by the way, otherwise this half-freedom wouldn’t be that very affordable financially). And as to my professional self, which is why I’m writing this blog in the first place, I’m still searching and still enjoying the process…

Another great thing that happened this year was the revival of my blog, the one I started a couple of years back as a means to reflect on my ‘being a late starter on the job market (in a country I emigrated to)’ and then suspended successfully after just one post… Well, this year I had so many career-related subjects I got truly interested in, found out a lot about and couldn’t but share with the rest of the world that I just decided to dust off my good old blogger account and start writing again. Judging by the reactions I received and most of all by the therapeutic effect this revival has had on me, the blogging has got to go on in 2014 as well. One post per month seems also like a frequency easy to keep up with.

In 2013 I also travelled a lot and quite far, like never before, spending most of my savings on trips :). Ah well, you only live once, right? I’ve been to my birth country twice, went skiing in Austria for the first time in my life, flew to Prague all alone, visited two of the Dutch Wadden Islands, Terschelling and Texel, which I never did – shame on me – in almost 8 years I’ve lived in the Netherland, but most exciting of these all was my Grand American Journey along the West Coast of the USA. These trips alone have made my 2013 a year never to forget, full of exciting memories and moments to cherish.

 

My next big discovery of the year – can it still go any further? – was yoga. It’s not like I only encountered yoga this year, but it’s the depth of it I began to discover. Starting with an inspiring yoga weekend in July, I found out there was more to yoga than just an ordinary practice once a week in the neighborhood’s gym. I started looking for an in-depth training or a course and found one. In October I got enrolled in a yoga teacher training that I am still enormously excited about it and have managed to build up my own independent yoga practice so far. I’m not sure yet whether there’s anything I’m going to do with it career- or money-making-wise, but I already gave my first yoga class to a friend of mine and she said to have liked it. To be honest, I found it a pretty exciting experience myself, so who knows what the future in a role of a yoga teacher will bring me…

Though I’ve been job-hunting for quite a while without much success as I pointed out earlier, I have found a new job eventually. I’m starting as a tutor of English for the secondary and high school students on the very last day of this year. And even though it is a small part-time job I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills from, it’s also trying out something new, something I used to be good at in the past and something I hope to again enjoy doing. Boy, I’m thrilled about my first lessons – I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.

As this whole blog is about searching for vitality and most possible happiness one could derive from an occupation, preferably the one that could also make you a proper living, I cannot quite say I’m there yet. But nonetheless, reflecting on 2013 I can say that I’ve done a lot of exhilarating new things, met some great and inspiring people and managed to expand my comfort zone more than in years before. I hope this could be a good example to some: only trying things out you can figure out what’s best for you and not being afraid to let go of the things that are not. Probably the most important thing I came to realize this year is that happiness comes from within and you and only you are the one responsible for making yourself happy. Looking for stuff in life that makes you feel good, being grateful for the nice little things that are already there and concentrating on what’s positive and good rather than on what’s missing makes a huge difference. Absolutely grateful for this wonderful year full of great insights, revelations and experiences that have helped me grow. 

Have you also experienced some great things this year that have made you grow too? I’d be excited to find out! Thanks for being with me in 2013 and I wish you all a great and prosperous, healthy and successful 2014!