I've pinched this picture from Cidne Wallace. She's an artist who creates inspirational pieces like this. You can buy her stuff at: http://www.artisanartsonline.com/servlet/Categories
Tomorrow I take a huge step backwards in the hope that it will get me back on track. I return to EFL teaching at a Summer School in Sussex, a job I haven't done for over 4 years. So what happened? How did I come to stop SummerSchooling and why am I going back to it after what, in EFL terms, is a huge absence?
I've taught in Summer Schools since 2003. I had spent six months in Athens teaching at a Frontisteria (private afternoon school) and was back in the UK preparing to start a PGCE. Every year I went back, always a couple of weeks late because the state schools I taught in always broke up a little later than the boarding schools we took over. I'd bring the kind of skills rarely honed in EFL teachers who generally work with adults or in environments where, to children, the teacher is King. Summer School takes huge numbers of teens and pre-teens and mixes them all up together in an exciting and challenging environment far far away from their parents; it takes a certain kind of "classroom practitioner" to reign them in. Discipline aside, I had a greater academic understanding of learning and although no better a teacher, I was able to explain a lot of the theory. My final Summer School posting was in 2007 when I reached the dizzy heights of Director of Studies. I loved it.
I had been able to perform that role because I could be available for the entirety of the Summer. This was because I had turned my back on teaching here in UK secondary schools. That's a story for another time maybe. When the course ended, I went back to temping jobs until in April 2008 I began work as an e-learning consultant for a web 2.0 firm: another job I loved completely. It did mean my Summers were no longer my own to do with as I pleased and since then, I've not been available to set up school in global villages buried deep in the English countryside. A harsh compromise but one I figured it was time to make; we can't live our lives afraid to let go.
Yet tomorrow I return. 4 years since I last heard myself referred to as "Teacher 'Elen"; 4 years since I played tennis barefoot because flip flops just don't work on court; 4 years since I pulled on a branded polo shirt and marched a string of students along Whitehall; 4 years since I last had to emergency-cram the conditionals into my brain so I looked like I knew what I was talking about. It's not been the smoothest road: 2 redundancies in 12 months and a couple of freelance opportunities which kept the wolves from the door but me firmly locked behind it. There was an event which knocked me witless and made me more grateful than I can express for the opportunity to batten down here in my little flat and tap away on a keyboard in exchange for money and my independence but now, July 2011, I'm ripping those battens off my windows and stepping out into the sun. It will be hard work and it will be exhausting but my word will it make me feel alive again.
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