Class trip to London, kids tripping over the stairs of the Canterbury Cathedral.

Context

One of the scariest things I’ve ever done was to move across the world for 8 months, immersing myself in a completely different language and culture, to teach in a public school for 8 months through a exchange program called TAPIF. There were days, especially at the beginning, where I wondered what I was doing, but over the 8 months, I made amazing memories I’ll keep for the rest of my life. Here are moments from my classroom.

Preparing to introduce myself to different groups of students with a powerpoint about Life in Canada!

Homework! This was just some of the pieces of work my students did. I tried to adapt my assignments depending on the age group and the English proficiency, and to put them in fun situations where they would use English. For e.g, I would take the upper years outside and do improv when the weather was nice, or use a quiz show format to get students to answer questions. When testing spelling, I would move the desks away to the side in the classroom, split the kids into groups, and have them run to the board to write a vocab word or say it in a sentence.

Scribbles on the board. This was one of the quiz show themed quizzes - American or Canadian! Students were split into teams and came up and read the question (and draw one thing on the board - I found that fun usually teased the English out of them.) The teams would “buzz” to guess, and points were given or taken away depending on answer and diffculty of the question.

An email one of the students sent to me - emails like this warmed my heart.

A drawing a group made for me, while filling out for a lower grade class, around Halloween.

I would sometimes go out for lunch and play basketball with the seniors. This is a screengrab from one of those times, where he showed me “Chinese rizz.” He falls on his knee, and says “oh my knee, wo ai ni (i love you).”

Strikes happened all the time! Subways, schools, and parks would shut down, the city would be lit on fire, public bikes tossed everywhere, and the trash would be abandoned after the government raised the retirement age!

Coworker at a 8th tier English football game. The atmosphere was electric!

More nice messages from other teachers and students :D

Picnic with my friends the day before the my flight out of Paris :’)