Welcome, students, colleagues, friends, readers

The start of something new

Dear readers,

Welcome to the first post on my new Substack page. Some of you might be loyal readers of my ramblings on my previous blog(s), others will be new. Welcome all, and I hope you find my thoughts and reflections as enjoyable to read as they are for me to write. I trust that this new project will prove to be an invaluable resource for all my readers, language learners and otherwise.

Who is my intended audience?

I started my first blog in February 2009, just after I arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Friends had been telling me that I should start writing more about my travels and experiences, especially within the realm of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Tefl). I started teaching in April 2005 and nearly four years later, I had piled up a handful of interesting tales and I figured it was time to start sharing them with anyone who cared to read or listen.

But who was my target audience? It was aimed at a handful of friends in particular, but to everyone that I was either too lazy – shame on me – or just couldn’t quite find the time to keep in touch with. It almost sounds offensive or disrespectful to be admitting this, but the reality was that keeping in touch with as many people as I would have liked became hard to balance with making the most of my experiences and truly embracing the new places I was living. I reckoned it was a convenient and efficient way to tell my stories to as many people as possible and manage my time at the same…time. The proverbial killing two birds with one stone approach.

My first blog combined stories from inside and outside the classroom. When I left Bishkek in August 2009 and then started a Post-Graduate Teaching Certification in Secondary School Social Studies – history, civics, economics, etc – I thought that was the end of my teaching English career. It was certainly the end of a period of adventure and wild stories from Central Asia. I was trading that adventure for a quiet life in rural New Hampshire at a university called Keene State. What was I going to write about now?

Once my student-teaching placement ended in May 2010, I set off on another adventure, backpacking around Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland. I was due to start teaching at an International School in Tbilisi, Georgia in September 2010 and wanted to have one last adventure before my summer teaching job in the UK, and before I got down to real, ‘proper’ teaching in the autumn.

But the job fell through.

And I was at a loose end in August 2010. I thought I was done teaching English.

Evidently not. My first full-time job was in Lviv, Ukraine in 2005. I returned to Ukraine at the end of August 2010 to teach English again, this time in Kyiv. This wasn’t the plan, but then, when do plans ever work out?

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promis’d joy!”
Robert Burns

(Translation: plans often fall apart, and…oh well.)

But at least this meant the resumption of my adventures, right?

Sure – that was some silver lining to it.

I had tried to separate business from pleasure. At that point, I hadn’t told any of my students or colleagues about the blog. It was intended for friends and family only. It wasn’t that I complained about work (though I did, and about so many other things). I just wanted to keep the business side of things separate.

But a colleague chanced upon my blog and didn’t take too kindly to some of my moaning and groaning about work.

And so I ditched that blog and started a new one exactly two years after I started my first.

This time I said, ‘to hell with it’, and opened it up to everyone. No more secrets, no more things to hide, let’s just make it completely transparent, open and as honest as possible.

And that blog still continues, but with a different focus.

Here we are, over 12 years later, and it’s time for a new direction.

So, wait, who is my target audience here?

Right, in my rambling and waffling, I didn’t actually answer this.

Obviously, everyone! But my primary goal is to make this a teaching tool for students, in matters related to learning English but also to tell a few more stories. Perhaps stories I’ve told before, but in a new light, with years of reflection and experience under my belt. And plenty of new stories, many of which I have yet to tell. Some stories will have valuable lessons in them (I hope). Others will be just for the pure joy of it. I’ll offer as much useful advice as I can. I’ll tell stories that will entertain. There will be lessons, I trust, that can be applied inside and outside the classroom. Life lessons, if you like.

I read a lot and one of the most dreaded questions I get from students is, ‘What do you recommend I read?’ Or ‘what are your favourite books?’ And ‘Are there any good books you would recommend reading?

I don’t know how to answer these questions. Reading is so personal. I’ve read plenty of great books that I’d recommend and much of my answers to these questions will depend on whatever’s fresh in my mind, or whatever I’ve recently read. I honestly forget so many of my favourite books and oftentimes a good recommendation will pop into my head when I least expect it.

On these pages, so to speak, I will try to share some of the most valuable and salient insights I’ve gleaned from years of reading, years of travelling, years of teaching, years of interacting with people from all corners of the globe, and like a good cup of coffee, I will try to distil all that knowledge and expertise into a convenient little package so that from now on, whenever a student (or colleague or friend) asks for a good reading recommendation, I can say, ‘Hey, why not read this interesting Substack page by a teacher who may or may not know what he’s doing called Teacher by trade, mentor by mistake?’

I hope there will be something useful, educational or even just entertaining to be found here.

Thanks for reading.