Good Things Happen When You Least Expect!

How did a teacher of 20 years of ESL teaching experience in Toronto and grandmother of two girls uproot herself from her forever life to wind up becoming a Consultant to Chinese English teachers in China?

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In the summer of 2005 at the age of &*, I stashed all my belongings of my house in Toronto in storage, and I went to Beijing with a 1-year contract in my hand as an International School Principal.

And wound up staying for 15 years.

When I think back at that, I am amazed that I could do that.

The people surrounding me were too! They were surprised at how courageous I was. Their grandmothers would never have even put the thought of such a challenge in their minds.

Several years after I moved there, I met up with the office manager that had hired me.

She told me how much all the staff had laughed over all the questions I asked about the notoriously bad the washroom facilities of China.

But what I learned was how resilient I could be, and I became a very excellent problem solver.

When I travelled around and outside of China, I would always be on the lookout for the most beautiful 5-star hotels with 5-star restrooms.

That’s something you must learn if you are a foreigner, and you want to survive most of the Asian countries I visited.

When I think back at all that experience, I am amazed that I could do that!

I was so happy to be able to give all my knowledge and experience back to my teaching profession, a profession that I treasure...

At weekend-long workshops where the auditoriums filled with 200-300 ESL teachers, they were sometimes standing room only!

I would sprinkle my presentations with Chinese expressions and give them everything about how to bring back the joy in their teaching lives.

The schools had restrictions limiting what ESL teachers could do about what they taught, but I showed the teachers the things they could inject into those bland and boring textbooks to liven things up.

Teachers went away with a huge “teacher’s bag of tricks” to put the enthusiasm back in their jobs. ….

Teachers got the message.

How brave was that to travel halfway around the world and share my knowledge.

How brave was I to make it work!

How brave was I that I could leave the comfort of my ‘normal’ western life to make a life in a completely different culture!

…. Well since then, COVID forced me home in March 2020 and I am now fully repatriated back in my hometown.

I must tell you that today is the icing on the cake!

Chinese English teachers and I chat on social media.

One was so excited to tell me that she was promoted to the Head of English in her school because of the lessons I had taught her.

Tears of joy formed in my eyes when she said thank you to me!

And then she put me on cloud nine to be invited to come to China to do a 10-day camp for ESL teachers in the fall of 2024!

It doesn’t get better than this.

Have a great day! Roz??