Читать книгу The English Teachers - RF Duncan-Goodwillie - Страница 30

Setting the scene: Some interviewees hated the idea of being interviewed at their workplace. Luis insisted on a coffee shop with a special kind of friendly resolve Spanish speakers are so good at conveying. We sit next to a window overlooking a busy mid-afternoon Tverskaya Street with the sun catching Luis’s well-groomed hair.

We are not alone. Despite having a population in the millions, it’s still possible to “bump into” people you know in Moscow and a colleague has plonked herself down with us while waiting for a Cambridge Exam Re-Certification. It is not looked kindly on to reveal the identity of examiners, so we will refer to her simply as Elizabeth in her contributions.

LC: How far back should I go?

I laugh – we only have 60 minutes and Luis has a lot to say.

RFDG: Try to be brief and give me a general picture!

LC: Oh God! OK, about 25 years ago I needed a little bit of pocket money so I decided to go into teaching and I’ve been doing it ever since. I fell in love with it about a year and a half into it. I started buying books about professional development and CELTA related stuff, and methodology and different techniques.

I was living in South America and I couldn’t get any CELTA training or any kind of training there. I had to wait for a long, long time before I got my CELTA in 2003 and I kept doing the same things only a little better.

RFDG: Is that why you came to Moscow? To do your CELTA?

LC: No, I came to Moscow in 2004/5 the first time because it was my first international job and I wanted to test myself with speakers of a language that wasn’t Spanish.

RFDG: You could have gone anywhere, why here?

LC: I applied for three or four different posts and Moscow was definitely the most interesting. I got a job in Turkey and another one in the Czech Republic before they joined the EU. But then the school didn’t sound as promising as Moscow. I remember telling my colleague I was very excited about and proud of being a teacher in the school I was going to work in. She looked at me and asked, “What the hell are you talking about!?” That was back in 2004. She didn’t share my enthusiasm. She knew how the school worked.

RFDG: What’s so interesting about Moscow?

LC: The other schools were IH and one of the things I fell in love with before I did my CELTA was the history of CELTA and how the whole certification came about. I went to the British Council, which was based in Bolivia, and got this beautiful folder that explained all of that. It was IH which was involved with it and I thought one day I’d like to teach for them. That was back in 1998 and I got my wish granted in 2004.

I came here for a year and then I left. I went back to South America for about eight or nine years and came back here. I figured where else would I be able to do my DELTA and work at the same time. And it was a place I knew about in terms of how to survive the weather, the culture, the many differences that come with a different location.

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