My Name's Serendipity, What's Yours?

I can see that there'll be several benefits to my TEFL class. Certainly, I'm glad I decided to take it, despite the non-negligible cost of doing so. But one thing I didn't expect was to meet someone else intent on teaching English abroad at the same time as me. We're two of only three university (soon-to-be) grads in the class. The other one wants to teach English in China so that he can be with his girlfriend, who lives there.

Anyway, this woman I met is a psychology major, interested in grad school but also interested in some time away from academia. I can relate to that, definitely. We're both the same age. And we're both set on going, alone or not, but we'd both love to have company. It's a bit premature to make plans now, but we talked about it a bit today, and things might work out well. We'll see. Employers love to hire two people who know each other because it reduces the risk of homesickness, which leads to broken contracts, which cost them money. So we'd have that going for us.

Ethics Is Hard

I began a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Intensive class on Monday. Today we had the opportunity to observe some TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) classes. (The difference, by the way, is where the class are taught. TEFL classes are taught in non-English countries and TESL classes are taught in English countries). Awesome experience. I loved it. We get to tutor some of these students later, and I absolutely cannot wait. Besides the practical experience, though, we have classroom time, which tends to include lots of exercises. These mainly act to reinforce the theory in our texts. This, too, I find valuable.

Today, we had to match teaching materials with the appropriate skill level. One of the reading materials centered around ethics and moral philosophy. There was a brief description of the subject and some etymology of its terms. Apparently this stuff is tougher than I thought because I underestimated the classification of its difficulty, which was at the highest level; the others were lower, and I guessed all of them correctly. Everyone else, of course, not steeped in moral theory, correctly assessed the difficulty of the ethics material. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? Well, apparently, so is a lot of knowledge.