In this issue we have included teachers who write for us, review materials for us, are regular readers and potential contributors. Will your story be next?
Damien, Thailand
I’ve been in the teaching game for close to twenty-five years now. I’ve worn many hats over this time: first as a teacher, then as a programme coordinator, and now as the director of studies at my school in Thailand.
And, of course, we can’t forget about my vlogging job for MET!
I am in a one-of-a-kind situation where I can run my school remotely in Australia.
How did I get to this point?
Well, to tell a long story short, I met my wife in Melbourne Australia. A few years later an opportunity came up to return to her hometown in Trat, Thailand and open a language school.
In my naivety, I imagined that a large portion of my time would be dedicated to island hopping and admiring the sunset. It wasn’t.
Funnily enough, building a school from scratch doesn’t leave you much time for anything else. But the school we built together, Trat English Community (TEC), is a special place. We have a real emphasis on a love of reading and developing that love in our students. In my past teaching contexts, I’d only get a quick snapshot of my students’ English journeys – teaching a class for a period of ten to twenty weeks only. At TEC, I’ve been with our students across their whole English journey. They were just four-year-olds when I first saw them arrive at the school, brimming with excitement and little English. Now, they’ve transformed into confident teenage speakers of English, ready to take on the world. That’s something pretty special.
This year, my thoughts have been consistently drawn to artificial intelligence and its potential implications for the teaching community. It’s hard for me to not get caught up in another tech hype cycle, although tools such as ChatGPT constantly impress and unsettle me.
A major advantage of this tool is its remarkable speed in analysing essays and providing in-depth feedback within seconds. From a pessimistic standpoint, I think the internet is going to become a poorer place, a more inauthentic place with a deluge of substandard AI-generated content.
It’s going to be harder to tell what’s real and what’s not in teaching, with broader implications for society too.
