Back at it

Yay! Today, I had my first class. It went so well, I didn't want it to end. The student is preparing for a presentation he'll give at his company's conference in Chicago. He works for an HR consulting firm and his topic is talent retention -- that is, how do you keep your good employees engaged, satisfied, and working for you. Goodness knows, I have some opinions about what NOT to do. The companies needn't be named ... they know who they are.

Fortunately, his English is really good, so I'm mainly helping him design the presentation (he had 13 slides for a 20 minute talk -- yikes!), work on vocabulary specific to his line of work, and fine-tune his pronunciation of certain words. He's delightful to work with and we had a great time talking about presentation strategies along with the content. I was surprised when our coordinator commented afterward that he was very shy. I didn't notice at all -- he was very confident, energetic, and outgoing during the class. I like to think my personality helped bring it out in him. :-)

In fact, I feel so good about teaching -- the human interaction, the creative thinking on my feet, the instant feedback, the value of my sense of humor, blah blah blah -- and wonder why I ever tried to do anything else. I don't think I'll teach English forever -- in fact, I'd like to go into the business of helping people develop presentations and public-speaking skills (just thought of that one today!). But I can't imagine going back to data analysis. I've found something that taps an entirely different skill set. I'm good at it and I enjoy it. It's so cool!

I'm meeting with him five more times before he heads to the States and I'll be very surprised if his presentation isn't anything short of excellent. Then, I have another student starting up this week, and four classes starting next week. A teacher who's leaving has me picking up a group of private students (three young Japanese girls), too, which is better money than the classes I get through the institute. So, all in all, I'd say the anxiety I had was unwarranted. I'm REALLY glad that I limited myself to only a little. Things work out, even when I can't see how.