:-)

Dear all,

My name is Jana. When I got my degrees in management and international relations, I found out that working in business isn't satisfying for me. I always wanted to be a teacher, but the status of teachers in my country is really low, therefore I wanted to get some “better” education than a “poor” teacher training when graduating high school.

When I say the position of Slovak teachers is bad, I don’t only mean the salaries (they earn significantly bellow the average wage). Much more serious problem is that they do not get any recognition in our society. If you declare that you study education, people usually ask you “Uhmmm, and what did you want to study before you got a place at the Faculty of Education?”.

It’s true that most of the students take education as their second, third, or fourth choice, and they apply only in case that they wouldn’t get the place at Faculties of medicine, philosophy or economics. The fact that people study education just for getting a degree makes it really difficult for our uni teachers to create a good learning environment, as the majority of their students are not motivated at all. But there are some of us who really want to do this job and are keen on gaining new experience and knowledge. This usually means that we have to look for “western” sources of information on English language education, as our Slovak knowledge base is very restricted (and influenced by 40 years of autocratic approaches).

My parents did not support me when I decided to become a teacher. The reason might be that my mom, after 30 years of teaching, feels unappreciated and tired of living of few hundreds euros per month. I understand her concerns and feelings. However, I think you can always get a whole lot of appreciation and energy from your students when you know how to do the job and when you do it with love.

Future after graduation? I feel I need much more knowledge and experience. I had an opportunity to observe some lessons in Finland and to spend couple of months at a village school in India. Especially Scandinavian educational systems are very inspirative, therefore I’m about to go for an internship in Iceland (starting in January). Then I’ll probably start teaching here in Slovakia. And my long-term aim is to help to change the system of language education in Slovakia, as I think such change is inevitable.