Hi!
I am happy you’re here reading this. Let me introduce myself; I’m Michael Masse, the founder of the TEFL Teaching Hub and I started teaching English over 20 years ago.
Way back then, I was fresh out of college and wanted adventure in Japan. I wasn’t sure how to be able to stay a long time, though, as I didn’t have a lot of money, and I figured I would want to stay a year or two. Thankfully, this was the early days of the internet, and I read about teaching English as being easy and well paid. It sounded like just what I needed. Eventually, thanks to the internet, I was able to find a job as an English teacher at a very small private language school and flew over, and that was the start of my own personal Odyssey, both in living abroad and in teaching.
In retrospect, I was incredibly naïve to believe that teaching English without any sort of training or education would be easy, but everyone had made it sound that way. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, I was really bad at it. I didn’t know anything about how to plan a lesson, manage a classroom, or anything else related to teaching. I was so green that I didn’t even know what questions to ask so I could start to learn! I also knew nothing about living abroad, and adjusting to a life in a foreign country had difficulties of its own.
So I did the only thing I could; I threw every idea I had at the wall to see what might stick. Over time, enough things stuck that I was able to gradually get a feel for what I was doing. After about a year – a dark, soul-crushing year where I couldn’t seem to do anything right – I still wasn’t really good at teaching, but I was starting to see that it was possible that I might become good, and that I was starting to enjoy seeing students learn and grow from what I was doing.
I was hooked, and I decided I wanted to do this not as a way to stay in Japan, but because I could see I was helping people, and I just kept going.
Now, with two decades under my belt, I have taught in a variety of settings and encountered a lot of different situations, and I want to pass that on to the next generation of people looking to teach English in a foreign country.
So if you have any questions about teaching English as a Foreign Language, or about living abroad (particularly in Asia), drop me a line at contact@teflteachinghub.com and I’ll be happy to answer.
