Upon acquiring my TESOL Certificate, I traveled to Mexico to teach English as a foreign language.  While I was there I learned to speak Spanish in the streets of Guadalajara.  I made considerable progress with my ability to present and instruct on the English language in Mexico when I worked at a company called PROULEX.  Although I improved my lesson planning skills with PROULEX a fair amount, I did not learn how to properly create unit plans, as we were taught to work out of the book that we were given, so unit planning was not expected.  However, I made lots of friends in the area and embraced the country.

After having returned to Canada, I worked primarily as a tutor and worked towards being admitted into the B. Ed program of UBC.  I also volunteered as a docent of the Delta Museum and Archives where I took students on walking tours to explain the history of Delta.  Students engaged in scavenger hunts and even cooperated in an effort to wash and dry the clothes of a pioneer in an old-fashioned laundry machine so that they could actively stay engaged in the material being presented to them.

In 2014, I got a job as an ELL instructor at, GEOS, a language school in downtown Vancouver.  There I used my understanding of cultural sensitivity (being a worker who has lived in a foreign country) to make the students feel welcome and at ease when they enter Canada in order to study English.  There I further developed my skills at extending the English language to encompass skills that students need for real-world tasks and functions, such as asking for directions, making phone calls, etc.  The students of this school generally carried out these tasks outside in the streets so that the skills were learned authentically.  Also at GEOS, I learned how to effectively plan units.