I used to be an English teacher at some middle school here in Connecticut. Not anymore. After taking up Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in all three courses – basic, intermediate and advanced – I received a certificate qualifying me to teach TEFL as well. Each of the courses takes two months long so to sum it up, I endured a total of six months in completing all three. After taking up the course, I immediately surfed the web and looked into reference sites on where I can teach TEFL abroad to any country where English is just the second language. You know, my teaching job here in a rural Connecticut town was just temporary (I was just substituting for someone) and prior to taking up TEFL, I had no job and I really badly needed one. So I humped up my savings and took up TEFL which cost me some amount but I just ignored that. I was optimistic that one day, I’m going to tour the world, learn some foreign culture and teach English to foreign lands.

The first stint that I had was not actually in a foreign country. I got to tutor some Korean kids who are visiting here in Connecticut. Twelve Koreans were having their two month vacation here in the country at the time and they were tagging their kids along. So I used the opportunity to teach them English and they were pretty generous. The stint lasted about two months too. In fact, I managed to buy a used car after just two months of teaching English. After the stint with the Koreans, I happened to know someone from Bahrain who recently emigrated here. In halting English, he knocked on my door one morning and said he was given directions that a certified English tutor happened to live here. He said he’d pay well if he could only learn English in due time. The guy from Bahrain, Al Khalifa, was my real challenge for me. Those noisy Korean kids were a piece of candy. On the contrary, Al Khalifa’s English was very poor so I used every piece of what I learned during those three courses to teach the guy. And I was very happy because the dude was a fast learner. He graduated from my tutorial with joy in his face because he wanted to adjust immediately to American culture.

After that, I researched into some reference sites on the web on where to find English teaching jobs abroad. My first stint in teaching English abroad happens to be in Thailand in the tourist destination of Phuket. I teach mainly teenage girls here who just graduated from high school. Mostly products of public high schools with (I have to admit) inferior English quality, they are eager to hone their English skills and end up mostly as golf caddies or front desk clerks in high-end resorts catering to Westerners. Some who are not that eager to meet foreigners up front end up being American-outsourced phone customer service receptionists or medical transcriptionists. In the end, both the students and me as their tutor are happy.