My teaching experience

Ugh! My first draft of this post looked more like a CV (which I've refused to submit for years).

To summarize, I've taught in a variety of locations and situations.

I started out teaching Sciences, at high school level. Then I moved to India to teach Maths (or Math). That gave me the ability to speak Globish 15 years before it was invented ;-)

I worked as a Research Assistant at a medical school. As well as cleaning cages full of mice I came up with useful ideas that were included in published medical articles.

Later I had the opportunity of taking up a sister-city assistant English teacher post in Japan. That gave the push to train in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) back in New Zealand.

I was able to follow my intuition and teach from the gut for a decade and a half at a time when there was no set syllabus. Then, when everything became too much fill-in-the-box, I moved to student learning support and helped everyone with literally everything.

I was the first person at my institution to apply computer technology to language learning. I also had a spell providing online student learning support at a distance, but unfortunately my ideas to promote the concept met with resistance from my colleagues.

Finally, I gained some experience working on my own and for several firms in Japan trying to teach English to the Japanese. I could write a book about it:

What I Learned in Japan about How NOT to Go About Learning Another Language!

In short, I feel that my teaching background uniquely qualifies me in the area of language acquisition (see also my Language Background).