About me

I originally studied Agriculture and was interesting in development projects, but some work at the University of the South Pacific as a crop researcher quickly persuaded me that this wasn't for me.  After a couple of years backpacking around New Zealand and Australia, I ended up on the hippy trail through South East Asia and absolutely fell in love with it.  I was so bowled over by the culture, the people, the food (!) and the 'otherness' of it all and didn't want to leave, so when I ran out of money, I got a plane to Taiwan, where I had been advised I could get a job teaching English, just because I could 'speak it'.

I quickly found work, and luckily in a very supportive school, and it was such fun, I couldn't quite believe I was getting paid for it!  I was very green, and I'm sure I made lots of mistakes.  Looking back on it now, the material we used was very much in the tradition of the worst excesses of meaningless grammar paradigms and substitution drilling (although the course book we used 'Side by Side', I note is still for sale over 20 years later  in its third edition).  We knew it was silly at the time - we'd regale each other in the bars later with the conversations:

A: Why are you washing your dishes in the bathtub?  Do you usually wash your dishes in the bathtub?
B: No, I don't usually wash my dishes in the bathtub, but I'm washing my dishes in the bathtub today because my sink is broken.

and other such nonsense.

Over the next few years, I used teaching to take me to all manner of places including Spain (very briefly - horrid school!), Australia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Kenya, picked up a Cert TESOL, a DTEFLA (pre-DELTA - shows how old I am!) and a PGCE along the way, dabbled with primary school teaching for a couple of years and ran screaming back to Adult Ed, and finally met my husband in Kenya in 1998 and came back to the UK when our first child was born.

Having never stayed in one place for more than a couple of years since I was 18 and despite many years of living abroad, suddenly with a family, my life has become very stable!  I now live in the same road that I grew up in - I put it down to hormones; as soon as I had children it was like a salmon coming back to the spawning ground!

I've worked at Solihull College for the past 11 years and I still really enjoy the work and my colleagues' company, so I guess I'm lucky!

This is the (lovely!) building I work in:

Although I've been in the same place for a while, the job always seems to be changing and there have been lots of opportunities.  I've taught all levels and prepared learners for all sorts of exams.  I've seen our student population change from largely Chinese students hoping to study in the UK, to a large influx of Eastern Europeans when the EU expanded, to a much higher proportion of migrants and asylum seekers, and especially young people fleeing conflict zones.  All of this has involved learning new ways of teaching, especially where basic literacy is an issue.  I've also had the opportunity to become a teacher trainer and have been involved over the past 10 years in CELTA, Module 2, PTLLS and DTLLS training and I've collaborated with two colleagues to write an IELTS preparation coursebook, published by Macmillan. So it hasn't been boring!



Along the way, I've also had three gorgeous children, and I'm currently studying for an MA in ELT at Warwick University.  As you can see, I like to be busy!