Virtually certifable

I've completed four weeks of the five week CELTA course now, just 5 more days of this and I'll be qualified to teach English. To qualify you need to have six hours of assessed teaching, i.e. a trainer watches your class and decides whether it is up to standard or not. I've pretty much got my six hours now. The actual teaching isn't so hard, but you spend a lot of time on preparation and documenting that preparation. There are a few other requirements too. For example, there is coursework that totals about 4,000-5,000 words of written material and a requirement to observe six hours of lessons given by qualified teachers. Other than that it is mainly all about attending classes.

This is the classroom at the Playa Kamala CELTA course. They do things a little differently here.

Hopefully once I have the CELTA qualification I'll be able to get a job fairly quickly. So far the signs are positive. I have sort of already had one job offer, to start full time English teaching next week in Quito. But it is in a language institute, and I really need to get a university job. Otherwise, my CV will look too wonky when I do return to the university job market in the UK.

As I have a PhD in psychology, I also have the possibility of teaching that, however it would have to be in English and most of the university level education here is, as you would expect, delivered in Spanish. It is going to be a while before my Spanish improves enough to teach in it. I've contacted two universities so far, stating clearly in my CV that I can't teach in Spanish. Both have emailed me back asking if I could take on a module teaching psychology, in Spanish. At least it's encouraging that there are jobs out there, and they are still keen to take me on as an English teacher. Quite possibly I'll take an English teaching job at an Ecuadorian university and then get a bit of academic work too. I'll just have to play things by ear. When this course finishes next Friday, I'm going to quickly plunged back into the real world. I have my first job interview at Quito's Universidad de los Hemisferios on the following Monday.