About Me
As a GIS major, I started my career as an IELTS teacher.
Unorthodox. Challenging. But fulfilling.
Back then, the door wasn’t open to people like me. English degree, teaching qualifications, background: I had none of it. But I was hell-bent on getting in. So I sat the IELTS myself, earned the score, and knocked again.
This time, it opened.
I got two good years. Teaching was my dream profession. I could lose myself in original English books, because I knew they would shape my foundation and make me a better teacher. I joined Quora and Reddit, went to language exchange parties. The job kept me learning, and yearning for more.
And the students. Bright, cheeky, sweet, naughty: I loved every version of them. Each day I gauged where they were, adjusted my plan, and made sure they improved. My friends told stories about the cutthroat corporate world. I felt lucky I didn’t need any of it. All I had to do was help my students. I thought I could stay forever.
Then, slowly, the word began to weigh on me.
Education. In Chinese, the old phrase is 教书育人. 教 is to teach. 育 is to raise. The first can be learned. The second can only be lived. Technique gets knowledge across a desk, but what reaches a child over the years is the person holding the chalk: what she has seen, what she holds true, how she meets the world when it surprises her.
By then I was good at the first half. That was exactly the trouble. I could feel the second half asking for more than any lesson plan could give, and I would not fake it.
I had stood on a three-foot platform since I was twenty-one. If a child was going to borrow a bigger world from me, I needed to have one to lend.
So I stepped down, on purpose, to go and earn my way back.
I became a writer. For eight years I read like someone dying of thirst: Google pages, forums, documentation, the whole English-speaking web. Then I wrote, 900+ articles, each one meant to solve the problem, earn the trust, and make the next step feel natural. People finish because they want to.
All that time, fellow teachers kept asking me back. My answer was almost always the same.
When I’ve learned enough.
Now I think it’s time.
