It might appear that going on adventures is how I earn a living, but I truly have a job. Although if anyone needs an ice cream flavor tester, I’m all in for a career change! Despite my lack of job write-ups, I really do teach 15-20 hours a week. Back home, that’s part-time work. Yet here, with transportation time and lesson planning, it’s considered full time.
Having experience teaching a range of skills, subjects, classroom styles, and learners, I thought it was time to share what has worked for me. There are few resources that I as an expat teacher found to be completely applicable in my classes and even fewer teaching activities that captured modern students’ attention. So many articles boast about teaching abroad being the perfect gig to travel the world and party every day of the week. Sure you can fit that into your plans, but teaching ESL abroad is still just much a teaching job as it is back home.
That’s where B&B Teach built its foundation. It’s a platform built to provide ESL teaching resources for those modern expats who have built an overseas lifestyle. Over the coming months, you will read articles with teaching strategies and advice ranging from all different types of classroom environments. You can read the first post here: 5 Objects Every ESL Teacher Should Have On Hand. You will also see the transitioning of some of my teaching abroad information from this website to that one, with the hopes of making the main B&B website travel and lifestyle-based.
I am so excited to share my teaching strategies and hear yours!
Live abroad. Teach abroad. Grow abroad.
Backpacks & Blackboards 
So many people see teaching abroad as a way to just travel and, while it can provide a way to do that, education is important and we shouldn’t just take it as a joke!
So true! While it might be a means to an end for us, the teacher, that student is relying on us to teach them correctly (even if they are too young to realize it yet).
Great idea! Now that I am a parent and my child is going to an English school in Thailand, I realize
All the more how important the foreign teachers are. I think I was not the most responsible teacher when I taught ESL 8 years ago in Taipei. But I loved it and the kids and they seemed to turn out ok (hopefully) 🙂 I look forward to your posts.
I am sure you were a great teacher! I just posted an article on hands-on spelling stations over at https://backpacksandblackboardsteach.wordpress.com/. There’s actually a great website if you want some summer sensory and tactile activities for Z. The website is http://nurturestore.co.uk/ and I’m always so impressed with the activities. They would probably be very easy to do in Thailand. Today was such a hot day in Taipei, I hope you are staying cool!
Thanks so much for the links! I will definitely check those out!
It’s finally getting cooler here in Phuket… A few rainy days makes it more tolerable. I LOVE the heat usually, but 40 degrees Celsius everyday was wearing a little thin 🙂
Love this! After teaching ESL for so long, I always had the most random things in my bag just to make sure I never had any leftover time in my classes!