About Me
Inspiration
My journey as a teacher has certainly not been a steady stream of progress. There were no well-defined nor permanent paths, and they certainly didn't naturally flow on their own. My experience, as many other growing teachers come to realize, was much more like the sea; there were ebbs and flows, waves and sometimes landslides, but it was also deeply comforting to know that there was never a shortage in the endless directions of learning opportunities, resources, and experiences that I could fish out whenever need be.
My first brush with teaching was when I was in second grade, watching my mother teach an ESL class to a group of female adults. I had lived in Saudi Arabia at the time and having experienced public education there for a few years, I can say that many of the schools were not equipped with the right tools for teaching students. As a result of this, it was difficult for students to navigate academics or figure out what kind of learner or active participant they wanted to be. I knew, however, that my mother must have been doing something right in her classroom because as I watched her students share jokes and speak up comfortably in her class, I noticed they were all active and enthusiastic participants.
My mother later told me that when she first started teaching there, her students had not shown up to her class with any classroom materials, so the next day my mom brought in a stack of pencils and passed them around to her class to take notes with. She did this every day after that and brought her own books, pictures, and other materials that the school had not provided. It was a very simple gesture, but I think it meant a lot to her students to see that she was ready to support them with what they needed to succeed, and a pencil was one way to start. She also told me that she had connected with each one of her students by sharing her own personal road towards her professional life; women in Saudi Arabia were not always afforded the most opportunities with education and professional life, so it resonated with them a lot to see a successful female teacher at the front of the class whose goal was to inspire and empower these other women in her class.
My mother now owns her own preschool in my hometown, Kuwait, and continues to inspire me every day to want to bring educational opportunities to the Middle East that will be a springboard for students, wherever they end up - especially Arabic L2 learners of English who continue their higher education in North America.
Early Childhood Education
With the goal of expanding educational opportunities abroad as well as the motivation from my mother driving me, I decided to get a job at the Children’s Center of Boston University. Although teaching children is significantly different from teaching adults, it was probably the greatest leap in my growth with teaching– which also was driven by the fact that it was my first real job teaching. I expected the job to be one that I could easily get a grasp on, but even though I trained there for around three months, I learned new things every day. I quickly discovered that this was no laid-back job and that I had to have my eyes and ears on full alert 24/7 because while working with children, you could easily miss something that could be a dangerous situation. I also learned that I had to be on my toes and constantly think of new ways to keep their attention or keep them engaged, especially when we were doing reading time. I dealt with this by giving every student a task while reading, whether this be holding the book, turning the pages, making sure their peers were listening etc. so that they each felt like they had a responsibility and were active readers.
I am now an assistant teacher at Columbia’s Preschool, the Rita Gold Center, and have worked with both infants and toddlers. The empathy and patience I have learned to have working with preschoolers is one that I am constantly harnessing, even as I go on to teach adult learners. The students I have worked with have come from cultures and backgrounds that are independent of their lives here; learning English and being part of an English learning community is their way of accessing an entirely different world; "A different language is a different vision of life” (Federico Fellini. I want my students to know that as they are making leaps in their education, they’re doing so with all the resources, knowledge, and space they need to see that vision– even if that means just starting with having a pencil in hand.
I met my first English student in my sophomore year of my undergraduate program at a subway shop. He was a middle-aged Italian man who hands down made the best sandwiches in town. After getting to chat for a few minutes, he learned that I was pursuing my studies in Education, specifically teaching English as a second language. Upon hearing this, he excitedly yelled out, “I need to learn English!”. He had explained to me that it was integral to his business, which brought in many English-speaking customers and business partners, whom he sometimes had trouble communicating with. Within a few minutes, we were exchanging contact information and I had agreed to tutor him in English. I was ecstatic about the prospect of having a new student to put my teaching to the test, but I was conscious of the fact that I had never really had an adult student or held my own private classroom. I had spent hours before I started teaching him creating lesson plans, Powerpoints and communicating with him back and forth to hear more about his goals. Even before getting into Teacher’s College, my goal as a teacher has been, and will always be, to get my students to the point or close to the point that they strive to be at.
Now, teaching in the CLP at Columbia University, I have come to understand so much more than I had in those days holding zoom meetings from my room with PowerPoints I had made from scraps of research. I have had the opportunity to work side by side with both experienced and emerging teachers of English, as well as my professors at Teachers College, who have all brought their own unique lived experiences into their teaching. My class in the fall semester of 2022 was an Upper Intermediate ESL class, which consisted of 6 students from diverse backgrounds including China, Japan, and Mexico. It was the greatest honor to get to teach these students and learn and grow with them. While the progress we had made in the class was clear, the best part was by far, hearing about how this small English class had allowed them to meet people, pursue personal goals or bring the tiniest bit of joy to their busy lives.
