Longest Work Day Ever!

Amman & Aqaba, Jordan

We started before 6am, didn't get home till half past 11 at night, and spent 10 of those hours on a very uncomfortable bus!

Somewhere in the middle we gave placement tests to about 90 bank employees. I'll be heading back to Aqaba in a couple weeks to spend a month or two teaching about 60 of those bankers, so stay tuned for posts from the beach!

I'm really looking forward to these classes, and the opportunity to strut myself as something of a free agent. I've learned a lot in the last year at Bell Amman. As I kept saying during our inspection last week by Bell Cambridge, I'm a completely different teacher than when I started a year ago.

Without Nina and Rula's belief in me after the professional and psychological abuse I suffered at the Modern American School (more on this to come), I might never have had the confidence to teach again.
Without the CELTA that Nina, Rula and Rebecca fought tooth and nail to get the Luminus Group to pay for, I wouldn't have recognized how good my instincts as a teacher already were, or be putting nearly as much thought into lesson frameworks and unifying lesson objectives.
Without Peter and Rebecca's teacher training and phenomenal support, I wouldn't have known about task-based teaching, or have had the guts or imagination to try it in an ESL setting, and this methodology has completely transformed my classroom in the best ways.
I've learned a great deal from full-time and part-time teachers, and others at Bell.
My extensive involvement in the months of preparation for inspection also taught me a lot about the big picture elements of education and curriculum design.

In the next two months, I'll be putting the new "Teacher Maryah" to the test in Aqaba, and I can hardly wait to begin!