Paving the Way for a Teaching Career Abroad
Midway through college, Nick Pandolfo looked around at his classmates. What he observed at that time launched him on his career path as a teacher. "I saw people not caring about their education," he recalls. "I realized the importance of education in peoples' lives, so I took it up as a major."
From that point on, Nick worked to hone his professional skills, volunteering, while still in college, as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at the Fortune Society, a not-for-profit organization that works with prisoners, former prisoners and at-risk youth. That work, and a friend's recommendation, got him interested in the School of International Training's (SIT's) TESOL Certificate Course.
"My ex-girlfriend took the course up in Massachusetts and absolutely loved it and raved about it," Nick says. After evaluating all the certification programs that were available, Nick enrolled in the SIT TESOL Certificate Course at Rennert in New York City. Looking back, he believes he made a good choice.
"I got a whole lot out of it," Nick says, explaining that the course augmented the degree work he had done at the New School. The program, he says, was "very interactive, with a lot of feedback, a lot of discussion and a lot of writing."
The four-week intensive course "got me deep into my thoughts about the experience of a language learner," Nick says. "I had done a lot of thinking and writing about that subject in college but what was different about SIT is that I had never thought about it in relation to learning a language."
Nick was hired as a teacher at Rennert's English school after he got his SIT certificate. "I loved teaching," Nick says. "It's great. The students make it all worthwhile. They are wonderful. They are eager. We have a lot of fun while learning. And I learned a lot from them -- I learned a ton from them."
In April 2006, Nick left Rennert to take a job teaching English to students in Shanghai. He will be working mostly in the evening with adults who come to class straight from work. He will also teach in middle schools and high schools in Shanghai. The prospect of living in China is a bit daunting, but Nick is finding inspiration from the students he taught at Rennert.
"I grab a lot of my own strength from seeing how they did it," he says. "It's a little bit scary to think I'm going to China and it's totally new. But that's what is exciting, the fact that it's totally new and I don't know what to expect."
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