Dear Mynglers,

today in the spotlight we have our English teacher Aniya, newly certified! Besides having her in the spotlight, we would like to wish her a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Here she is wearing her Myngle T-shirt…best wishes from the whole Myngle team! Together with all our certified teachers, she has a spotlight on our blog.

“Firstly a huge thanks to Myngle without them I wouldn’t be here…

Teaching became my vocation by chance, I didn’t choose it and looking back it would have been the last thing I would have thought of doing…Although my father knew many languages from Arabic to German the later which he taught himself  in 6 months, and my brother a London University professor who teaches African history, I was really the black sheep of the family…

I did a business course after leaving highschool, and apart from the typing I wasn’t really interested, only to leave as I wasn’t much of a scholar (don’t tell my students that). I entered into the fashion business as that was where my heart lay and went on to working for a furier in London’s Mayfair..I then crossed the channel and moved to Italy at a tender age as I was so ambitious and continued with my dream in the fashion world shortly after only to meet my husband, and ending my short career to have a family…Bringing up my children turned out to be a real struggle when I found out my youngest now 17 was autistic, in some respect this was when I started ‘teaching’ hours on end of patience just to get the minimum result.

Several years ago through a friend someone was looking for a native English speaker to teach a university student with poor grades. I was hesitant about doing this as I had no previous experience of teaching, but took on the challenge. This was my first experience of actually teaching anyone. Although I enjoyed doing this I didn’t feel I knew my ’subject’ well enough. So after teaching privately other students I decided to get some form of teaching training and opted for the CELTA Cambridge course, and did a 6 month course via the British Council in Milan, oh boy was that intense, but it gave me so much insight and confidence to conduct teaching whether privately 1 to 1 or in the classroom…Before the end of the course I was offered a job to teach Italian army officers, this was a great experience, hard work but very rewarding..I still work for the private school that hired me (The British Institutes) I teach adults of all levels on-site going to
various businesses.

Now to Online teaching, I am a real technophile when it comes to computers, internet etc., perhaps I have the business course to thank for that even though I didn’t finish it..Word processing, shorthand and typing came in handy, and when I got my first pc over 10 years ago I just took it out of the box and set it up not really knowing what I was doing, but taught myself everything I needed to know, and to eventually get online. A few months ago a close friend mentioned online teaching and thought that it would be something I should do, I didn’t really know much about it and wasn’t even really contemplating it, but soon found myself becoming more and more curious about the whole aspect of online teaching. It wasn’t until I came across Myngle that I became inspired by this whole new world.

This has now become part of my life, and I realize that  this is something that will get even bigger in the future. It gives so many people from around the world and from different cultures  the chance to learn a language in the comfort of their own home. It’s so rewarding seeing my students make progress in such a short time and I have been blessed with teaching the nicest of people and learning about their cultures too.

Thanks to you all!  Aniya”

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 1:36 am and is filed under In the spotlight, Teaching a language. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.