Trainers
Kate Randell
I went to Brazil as a student, and was hanging around one day when an acquaintance
offered some work teaching English classes. It turned out to be a fantastic
experience, it was another way to be immersed in the local culture; my
students taught me how to samba during coffee breaks and I spent time
with some wonderful people at a fairly chaotic time in Brazil.
I returned to Australia, got a degree, and then I started sending my CV out to just about every teaching job I could see advertised. Eventually, I accepted a job at a university in China and ended up in a “small town of four million people”, which I thought had to be a typing error, until I got there and I found it really was a small town which just happened to have a lot of people. I finished my contract in China and headed to the Philippines to work in an International School, and then to India to work with an NGO. I spent a few years in Australia to revive my Australian accent and to go back to university, and then headed off to Indonesia to work in a language centre before going to work at a university in Shanghai.
Now, I’m working part-time with adult migrants in Australia, which is a completely different challenge; I’ve got 12 different nationalities in my class, and most students had very little education in their own language.
I’m happy I discovered a job I love, and it’s a job that means I can travel all over the world. I’ve been incredibly lucky in the places I’ve been able to go and the things I have been able to do in different countries; I’ve lived on a tropical island and have been scuba diving on my local beach, I lost a snowball fight with a gaggle of novice monks (they might have been wannabe monks, but they weren’t pulling any punches!), and I saw orangutans most weekends for a year. For me, the really special part of teaching overseas have been my friends in each place I’ve worked; working in another country is a completely different experience to going as a tourist, and it was the people around me who made each place magical.
