A year of ELT blogging, a year of hopes…

A close friend of mine who is now becoming a very successful IT specialist, always says:

When applying for a job and preparing your CV next time, include ONLY skills and experience you really enjoy doing. In this case you’re definitely about to appreciate your future job…

It’s arguable, but, in fact, I take the point. And my today’s post is in no way connected with CVs or applying for a new job, but it is about experience and skills I’ve obtained to date. It is reflecting on my lessons and my teaching practice in general. So the next time I talk about my job and things that I love about it most (a common question I always ask during the first interview with my potential students), I’ll no doubt include blogging experience and share all the pleasant points I’ve encountered so far.

Yesterday I got the announcement about the first anniversary of my ELT blog Enséñame. If I were a hand-made seller, I would probably organize my first give-away and rush into giving presents to my followers. I wish I could… I wish I could hug everybody who I happen to know thanks to my blogging experience. I wish I could at least send a postcard to those who supported me and posted comments on my blog-posts with appealing ideas.

This year has been the best year of my teaching practice: a tremendous lot of engaging ideas, a lot of new ELT-world people, who contributed to my professional growth, a lot of grateful students whose results are inspiring me and giving food for thought.

Thank you everybody!

And .. thanks for stopping by.

Kisses and hugs 😉

A plea for help

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Hi everyone!

It´s been a while since my last visit here, because after the vacation I was in vague feelings about how to stop being still at the seaside in my thoughts and start working. I hope I´ve returned. And I need your help.

In early October I´m going to participate in an internal event for English teachers in the company where I work. With our Curriculum Manager Olga Sergeeva we have discussed the possibility for me to present there and here we are: I am going to be presenting the topic which has become the most important for me over the last months. Blogging. I’ve been doing it since March ’15 and this is probably the most outstanding thing that has ever happened to me. With my teaching reflections being posted here I also have some responses from real teachers worldwide (e.g. ELT Flash Mob) who support me in my ideas and practical things.

I do believe, blogging considered as a process of self-development is very successful for most of the teachers I know. But it does not only deal with self-development, I believe. But what else? For finding answers to this question I need to analyze three specific things related to blogging. Here they are:

1. Why do English teachers blog?
2. Why do English teachers read ELT blogs?
3. What ELT blog is your favourite one and why?

So, my plea for help goes to real English teachers, my followers or those who are interested in answering. If you leave a comment to my post with answers to these questions above, it would be just wonderful! Lots of thanks!!!
I hope they will be very helpful at the preparation stage and I’m sure I’ll gain new ideas and I’ll share them with you.

Thanks for reading!

Hope to hear from you!

Scribbles… or a successful blog?

I remember myself in a rather early age and I always wanted to write. It was not important for me what to write and how, be it a poem or a story about relationship, I always wanted them to be puslished some day. And once I was invited to a local newspaper to write some articles as a part-time journalist. Or it is better to say a newsperson, for I do not want to offend journalists, because my literary trash could not be considered as something outstanding. To be honest, my articles were appraised by the chief editor as something obtaining a personal style of writing, but still they needed to be improved. How? Only by means of writing, exploring specific books, getting in touch with professional journalists, asking them for help. My writing practice almost came to naught when I gave a birth to my son. Writing became unimportant and really impossbile those days.

As for my blogging experience, I want to say I also have some, but in Russian. After my son was born, I was taking notes on livejournal.com about my not very intriguing life. I was writing posts about rare travels, about my very challenging marriage and about how it came to an end one day, about my son, about my charity activities with several guys from Moscow and about our ways of doing charity things with the old. So to tell the truth, I did not have anything attractive to share. A couple of friends were following my blog and that was really it. This March I have made an attempt to start my own blog on WordPress.com and I wanted to devote it to my teaching practice and some reflections. But as it turns out, it is more challenging than I have ever thought…

First of all, I shoud thank those who I had a chance to follow and my associate Olga who supported me in the idea of starting to write my reflections on teaching. I have so much to read and to comment in each blog I came across. Secondly, writing is still a dream for me, though it appears to be very challenging and demanding, and time-consuming as well, and I do not want to share ‘scribbles’ that are competely unwholesome. I do not expect people to comment my every post, and I am honest here, at least with myself. So I will start writing and reflecting on things that happen in my teaching practice. I really want to learn how to write (or to blog) and improve my vocabulary and writing skills.

Thanks for stopping by!