Conclusion: Why I've become and teacher and whether I'll become more stupid

I didn't start teaching full-time until two years ago. There're a lot of contrasts inside me, especially the feeling of old and new.

OLD AND NEW
If you talk about just teaching, I'm not new to it. In 2006, I first started teaching part-time, accidentally. I just left a crazy yet high-paying job which required everyone to work around the clock with an i've-to-work-overtime-into-midnight-even-if-it's-my-own-birthday sort of attitude. All of a sudden, I had lots of free time after work with the new job and simply didn't know what to do and I just searched on mingpao jump by chance and got two part-time teaching offers, with one just 20 mins' walk from my office!

General English, Business English, Elementary Japanese, Intermediate Japanese, Advanced Japanese, Business Japanese for Project Yi Jin... I taught a number of courses. I did all that at first to make myself busier and do something different for a change.

At first it was very difficult. I didn't get any teacher's training and I forgot how secondary teachers talk to their students in English. Some of the housewives told me that I was speaking too fast, but when I tried to adjust my speech and dumbed down the course, the students around my age started to drop out. Teaching wasn't that enjoyable until the school invited me to teach another language, Japanese. 

The students taking my Japanese course came from all walks of life. Instead of burdened with the pressure that they had to learn the language well in order to survive, these students were there mainly for fun, wishing that one day they can travel to Japanese and communicate with people there in Japanese.

I started to design my own speaking activities and got my students to do some writing in Japanese only a few months after they started learning the Japanese characters - but they were excited about all the hurdles that I put in front of them. Month after month, the 8-week short course finally became an 18-month regular course. I was still pretty inexperienced but there was one student, who turned out to be a famous writer who I respected very much, kept telling me that I was entirely different from all the teachers that she met in the past, that I was very engaged as I taught and made her feel very interested in the language. At the same time I spent a lot of time in the university library reading books about education, which gave me a lot of stimulation for teaching ideas and helped me improve my English lessons a lot... and I started to think about switching to teaching.

A few years later, I got offered a full-time GM teaching post, accidentally. When I thought the previous part-time experience would help me become a good teacher, I actually started to panic when I got the textbooks and course outline the summer before school began. I spent the last two weeks in August staying home preparing for materials and turned to friends for advice. In big panic, I asked one of my friends, "how would you teach this chapter if you were me?", while showing the textbooks to her. The intense preparation did make me feel slightly more secured, but during the first week of teaching, my heart was racing before every single lesson.

Having taught part-time for so many years, I still felt rather nervous when I started to teach full-time. The difference? One, I didn't get any pressure teaching part-time. The courses were often short and the students didn't have to come to my class if they didn't feel like doing so, whereas for full-time teaching, I'm often with the students the whole year and I'm accountable for what I do. Two, I didn't have to take care of any administrative work. Things were all ready for me but now I've to entertain lots of different parties and do many new things. Three, I've switched to teaching intentionally and I think I've the responsisbility to do it well.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM TEACHING

In one of Dr Paul Sze's blog entries (http://paulsze.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/do-teachers-become-more-stupid-after-teaching-for-a-few-years/), he mentioned the issue "Do teachers become more stupid after teaching for a few years?".

After keeping this blog for two months, my response is both positive and negative.

Positive - teachers WILL become more stupid.
- Unlike a random office job that sends you to different places at home and abroad (or across the border to mainland China), teaching often takes place at the assigned place at the assigned time with the assigned students using the assigned curriculum. Physically most teachers are confined in a complex, learning little about the things outside the school. The exposure is limited.

- Teachers mark the same assignment for over 30 times over and over again as we assign the work to students. We're trained to cope with the similar and familiar, and it's possible that we gradually forget our own creativity. It's lucky to have some students who have original and great ideas and communicates their ideas clearly, but unfortunately they are often the minority.

Negative - teachers WILL NOT become more stupid.
- If teachers try to approach the students and talk to them (despite of our already busy schedule), teachers can actually learn a lot from the students, especially about what is popular these days, their travel experience, and the latest technology.

- Even if we don't have extra time for the students, if we're reflective enough, we can pick up something every day. It can be simple like "asking specific questions", "being thankful to others" and "becoming a benefit finder", but these are not easily learnt unless we "defamiliarise" our routine and make the effort to think back on what happens to us. I made myself update the blog every day, and honestly there were days when I hardly remember what I did during the day, but once I took the time and thought about what happened in that day, I could still come up with something.

The answer to whether we'll become more stupid lies in our hands and varies among different people. I would say it depends a lot on whether we're willing to reflect on our practice and improve.