I’m at 62% with my TEFL right now.
It’s going by faster than I thought, largely because it’s honestly just super fascinating? I know it’s nowhere –I tried being a teacher my freshman year and I just wasn’t in the right place, mentally, to take on that task– but I feel like I’m becoming a teacher. A good teacher, and a really good facilitator. Even in my present exhaustion, I genuinely feel like I have value for myself and that my work is good. I want a break because I’m just tired, but I don’t feel tired of my job. I hope that even on the final day when I leave Narita in 2021, I’m not tired of my work here. I want to keep this feeling of making a change by a student’s choice in my heart.
Anyways, the TEFL is really changing my approach to my work and how I help students. I’ve stopped drenching the page in red ink: I get what the teachers mean when they ask me to correct. I look for the goal now: did the student understand? Did they summarize and contextualize what they learned? Even if there’s minor mistakes –a “the” missing here, a dropped particle– I ignore that, and at most, underline words that have been misspelled so that they know to look them up and self-correct.
My TEFL is also doing : it’s inspiring my future in a different way. Towards more interaction with language, and specifically towards translation.
I never wanted to translate: well, let me correct myself. I never took translating seriously. As a child, and a teen, I looked at it as something that happened to my favorite manga and video games. It was a means to my personal end.
(I won’t say that was right or respectful of me: I’ll just say that I was also 10 and 12 and 15, and at times, 18 and 19. Change happens over time, when we are aware and let it.)
Now, I want to use it as a tool of advocacy and of helping expand the available literature and research done in Japan in predominantly English-speaking countries. (I’m looking at you, peer-reviewed texts!) I think there’s a lot of value in letting myself become the Swiss Army Knife that people need: the kind of person that can use my skills and education to advocate on behalf of a group’s needs.
JET actually offers a translation course but it’s aimed at N2 and N1 speakers. I like to think that by the time my five years are up, I’ll be able to attend it. I’d really like to be able to translate as a job in the future, as whimsical as that may sound. Perhaps it’s not whimsical though: who’s to say I won’t be saying yes to a week long course on translating? Who’s to say you won’t be seeing my name on books or in footnotes one day?
I won’t say it ain’t so, certainly.
I had the passing thought today that perhaps my future will include three core elements: freelance writing, translation work, and museum education, specifically with SHS, College, and Adult learners. I even pondered doing literacy and English lessons back in the states on weekends: I really want to continue to help people with English, and want to qualify myself enough that understand comes second to having fun learning.
For the first time in months, that felt really, really good: I think perhaps I’m letting myself turn the right corner, and face a positive future.
And so much of it is in part to getting my TEFL.
