Summer Job Presentation – English Teacher at TryCamps
I took one last look at the pine trees of Helsinki just a few days after our Kaledonistit road trip through Finland ended and prepared to start another journey. I was about to start working as an English teacher, but there was a catch. I would be teaching overseas in England, away from the friends I had just made and away from Finland. I had a different experience than many past alumni, but I would not have changed it for the world.
I caught a ride up to the Helsinki Airport with fellow Kaledonistiti Sandy to meet the Finnish students that we would take to England for a month. We met up with TryCamps’ principal, Petri, who gave us each a Rukka backpack filled with TryCamps shirts, hoodies, notebooks, pens, and games, and then brought us up to introduce ourselves to the students. The students got some English practice with introductions right away, and then we were off to England!
An average day for me looked like this: I would wake up to a beach view from our Sandown hotel and grab breakfast. Most days we would eat with the students and talk with them, especially on the days where we asked them to try and only speak English. I later learned that Finnish students and teachers eat lunch together in a similar manner. Then Ashleigh and I would walk up to the old church where we taught our lessons.
After lessons on grammar, pronunciation, or writing, we would take a break before playing beach games or running fear factor, featuring many flavours of Pepsi Max and even Marmite, in the evening. Some days we would take trips to places like Carisbrooke Castle and the Needles on the Isle of Wight, and then in London to the Monument to the Great Fire of London or the London Dungeon, a history-filled haunted house near the London Eye which I came to know quite well after I brought three different groups of students through it.
My favourite spot, though, was a row of trees in St. James’s Park near the cottage, where the park’s resident pelicans would show up for a daily feeding. I never got tired of seeing the awed looks on the students’ faces as they watched the pelicans swallow fish whole, their giant throats expanding and shining in the sunlight.
We spent the next few weeks together on the Isle of Wight learning and trying British cultural staples like fish and chips and cream tea in reading comprehension activities. Ashleigh, an English teacher from northern England, even introduced us to the proper way to prepare a scone: the clotted cream goes first, then the jam. The Finnish students were more familiar with my southwestern Ontario accent from watching American shows, but many of them liked British English’s vocabulary better. We got laughs when Ashleigh and I used words like ‘zebra crossing’ and ‘crosswalk’ or the ‘trunk’ or ‘boot’ to refer to the same things, or when we debated whether an oreo was a ‘cookie’ or a ‘biscuit.’
The most challenging and rewarding part of my job was adapting my teaching for English language learners. My teacher training in the MA CSE program was geared for primary and junior grades in Ontario, but these students were 12-18 and Finnish. The program was fast-paced and so required me to dig deep into the particulars of my native language to teach concepts like countable and uncountable nouns, complex sentence structures, and conditionals. I started to speak slower and more thoughtfully, and gave lots of explicit instruction and activities. There were also always new faces coming and familiar faces going, so I got lots of experience welcoming new people, taking stock of their skills, and adjusting lessons on the fly.
Here’s a snapshot of our lessons: we spent lots of time on prepositions, as the Finnish language deals with prepositions like ‘from’ or ‘in’ by adding them to the end of the word: ‘from Canada’ becomes Kanadasta while ‘in Canada’ becomes Kanadassa. I learned this when my Finnish Duolingo started correcting me when I typed ‘mehu’ for juice instead of ‘mehua,’ or some juice, without explanation. Even so, there are many specific rules for which word to use, like when you ride on the subway, at the subway station, in the city of London, and we got lots of practice.
Beyond grammar, it was most rewarding to see the students grow more confident in their English speaking. Our whole team, from our principal to the activity organizers and the teachers, worked to motivate and support the students in expressing themselves in English. I got a great feeling for sisu, an untranslatable Finnish word which refers to great courage and determination in the face of challenges, when they kept practicing, learning, and growing. The students also liked that I spoke some Finnish, and they challenged me with tongue twisters like ‘Mustan kissan paksut posket’ and ‘Kokoo kokoon koko kokko! Koko kokkoko? Koko kokko.’
Now that I am back to school and work, I realize that I am taking many things back with me from my summer in England and Finland. I returned with a new interest in languages and in English second language teaching, which I hope to pursue further in my career. I returned with skills in building connections with students from day one, which will help me as I start working as a supply teacher. And I returned with knowledge of the world-renowned Finnish education system, reminding me that schools can be run differently. Finnish schools, for example, have had subsidized hot lunch and snack programs since 1948, which has only recently been federally supported in Canada. I am so grateful to Kaledonistit and TryCamps for this summer of learning and teaching abroad.