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Is anyone an ESL teacher (here in the US)?
I have been a high school English teacher for the past four years, and while I love it I have been feeling very burnt out lately. I spend several hours each weeknight, and a good majority of my weekend writing lesson plans and grading papers, but other than the ridiculous time commitment outside of school I love what I do.
I also work part time at a hotel/restaurant where the majority of my coworkers are immigrants. I really enjoy working with them and hearing their stories, and a number of them have asked me to help them learn English. I help them with various tasks (for example, translating paperwork at work and helping them write things in English) and I feel very fulfilled and honored when they ask for my assistance.
I think teaching ESL would be the perfect combination of working in education, and helping students who are very much in need. Also, I am hoping this would mean a reduction in my workload (especially in the amount of work that I would need to take home) since I would have a small caseload of students rather than 115 freshmen like I have now.
Since I am already a licensed English teacher, all I need to do is return to school for approximately fifteen credit hours, and pass a certification test. The job market looks very promising for ESL teachers, and DH and I would be open to moving to a bigger city if that would lead to more job opportunities.
Can anyone give me any advice or more insight into this career? Thanks!
Re: Is anyone an ESL teacher (here in the US)?
Thank you both for your feedback.
I sincerely hope I did not come off as lazy at all, in expressing my wish for a lighter workload. I am simply becoming burnt out on the excess repetitive grading that comes with being a high school English teacher, and I thought becoming an ESL teacher might be a good change of pace. I sincerely like to be busy and I don't mind paperwork, and I am used to high stakes testing as this is very common for all students in NC.
Basically, I am hoping for a job that is the best of both worlds so to speak. I love working in education, and I love helping people who often don't have the resources to help themselves, but I don't love spending my entire weekend grading freshmen essays and homework every weekend.
I didn't even realize that high schools still had ESL. Here, we've moved to a shelter model. Every district that I'm familiar with in my area (and it's quite a few) follows SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocal). So, particularly for high school, you would still be teaching English, just with modifications to allow for language development. It's a lot MORE work than just teaching English.
We do still have ELL Specialists but it's really competitive and there is only 1 per campus. I am not in your state, though, so your experience may be different.
This is so interesting because I'm also in Texas (much further West, though) and we have both sheltered English classes for ELL students as well as actual ESL classes for recent immigrants. We also have two full-time ESL teachers and four others in the department who are certified in both English and ESL.
To the OP, it sounds like your problem is less that you're looking for a content area change and more that your workload is overwhelming you. I teach Junior and AP English Literature and can't say that I've spent every evening and weekend grading papers since I was a first year teacher. Perhaps it might be helpful for you to elaborate on how you use your conference time (and how you go about grading essays--I've become an expert on effective grading strategies for essays since I have so many from my AP classes) to see if some of the teachers here can give you feedback on using that time more effectively. Regardless of what you're teaching you'll wind up leaving the profession soon if you don't get your work/life balance back.
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I'm not an ESL teacher but I have worked with ELLs before and have a couple friends who are/want to get jobs teaching ESL. I think it would be a great idea for you. If anything, it would be a change of pace for you and you'd get to do something different, even if it is still a lot of work, as teaching is. You would get to make more personal connections with kids because you'd likely have many less students. Those students really WANT to learn English - probably unlike some of your English class students.
Our HS does have a full time ESL teacher. I know more people who want ESL jobs than have gotten them because they are scarce in my area, not necessarily because of need, but because of cuts. A friend of mine was burnt out, like you, being in the classroom, and she just changed jobs and LOVES it.
I say go for it! If you do it and don't like it - you can always go back to being an English teacher.