Not Your Ordinary Teacher

I don't want to say that I am a good teacher. I let my students decide on that and say that. However, I am a teacher who teaches to inspire people to use whatever knowledge they have acquired from me in order to live their lives believing that they have a gift to share and a message to deliver so they can inspire others to do the same thing for the people around them. I believe that our life is a gift and that what we do with our life is our gift to the One who gave it. That's my philosophy in life.

I am teacher Jacob to my students, a Filipino and a Christian, and I have been an ESL Instructor for 16 years. I am a licensed professional teacher in my country, the Philippines, and have graduated with a degree in Chemistry from one of the top State Universities in the country. I have my TESOL certificate in teaching English and I have handled students from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Madagascar, Senegal, and the Philippines.

I can say that my 16-year experience as an ESL instructor has been a mixture of fun, excitement, and challenges. Fun, because teaching made me realize that I am more than a teacher. I can also be, to my students, a friend, a brother, a mentor, an adviser, an entertainer, an actor. The many roles I played while engaging in language teaching made the job enjoyable. However, challenges were also part of this career. I realized that there were different needs to be addressed because we had different types of learners. What strategy worked for one does not always mean that it should work for another. So, as a teacher, I needed to be creative, patient, and innovative because at the end of the day my goal is still to have my students learn everything by heart while having fun. Having said that, this made my ESL teaching journey exciting because I always had to look forward to what is next and what is waiting ahead for me and my students.

As for the experience, mine is basically a combination of Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Learning. I also had greatly used other methods like Inductive and Deductive Approaches, Grammar Translation Method, and Structural Approach. Moreover, I also have a considerable amount of experience teaching English writing which is concentrated in IELTS writing. I used to work for an ESL school that caters to learners who are preparing for an IELTS exam. I have around 4 years of experience training the students in preparing essays worthy of a band score they desire. At the moment, I am doing a freelance tutorial and organizing my own IELTS training program.

Since I have this incredible amount of exposure to multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, and multireligious learning environments, it has honed my social, interpersonal, communication, and teaching skills simultaneously, the very factors that contributed to my fluency and to my expertise. However, this does not mean I should stop and relax now.

While learning is unending, I also believe that the selection of learning materials should be limitless as well. Our current era, the digital age, suggests innovation as the key to further development and advancement and I believe adapting and embracing this idea is equally important in language learning. For this reason, we adopt and maximize what the technology offers to facilitate more effective learning. This is the reason why I am open to using everything that I find beneficial and helpful for my students. On the other hand, since I have been introduced and exposed to various English language learning materials both online and offline for more than a decade, I have secured a list of my favorites such as Raymond Murphys' Grammar Book series and the New Interchange Series which are both from Cambridge University Press. I also have The Good Grammar Book published by Oxford University Press to complete the list. Of course, my list would continue from hardbound books to ebooks and youtube channels like EngVid and websites like BBC learning English but then again innovation is an indispensable part of my style.

In closing, I just want to say that every learner is unique and that there is no "one size fits all" strategy or method, nor is there the best material or the best teacher. However, I do believe that we can create the best teacher-student partnership, one that believes in one another and cooperates in the process, because at the end of the day, both of you have one goal and that is to learn the language or acquire the knowledge you need in order to improve yourself to inspire others to be the best version of themselves and cause that change that they want to see in this world.