I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and go two types of responses: 1. People who completely agree with the idea 2. People who don't No surprise, I guess 🤣 What's your take? Should we call students "students" or "learners." Does it matter? Should we reflect on our role in the learning process, and that we don't necessarily "teach" a language like other subjects? These are takeaways from our interview with the legendary researcher Bill VanPatten. Here's the post below: We shouldn't call them students. Call them learners. What they learn is beyond our control. These are some of the takeaways from our chat with the great Bill VanPatten this week. We'll have more posts and snippets coming out shortly, but this one caught my attention. He calls this the "Atlas complex." Where teachers feel they must do everything and anything to help students. And this is wrong. After all, in a language classroom - or via your own courses if you're selling them - the students' brains are equipped to acquire knowledge beyond our control. Hence the switch from "student" to "learner." They learn with or without us. Which also means we aren't the "teacher," but rather an "interlocutor." Which reminds me of what Paul Nation said when we interviewed him: "As a teacher, you've gotta believe that by NOT teaching, people can learn." And this really is it, isn't it? TL;DR: 1. Don't call them students; call them learners 2. Don't call ourselves teachers; refer to ourselves as interlocutors 3. We have very little control over what learners acquire

It's been a while since I've been here. Life got busy! But I just wanted to share some recent wins. I'm on track with some goals I set for myself as a result of some of the courses on here. I've resigned from my job and will finish there at the end of June. I have also left the underpaying TEFL platform I was using. My list of contacts is growing and I've managed to successfully receive payments from China. I even increased my price. Looking forward to being able to take on more private students from July onwards and make this my main source of income rather than just a sideline. I hope everyone is also enjoying some wins and keeping on track. Anyone else want to share some of their wins?

Have you also waited for the perfect moment? Do you resonate with what we experienced? Are you trapped in the consumption wheel?

Big thanks to @Carolina Vecchio for the incredible presentation today. Here's the recording for anyone who missed it or wants to relive it. As we say, you can't teach 1:1 forever. So if you have your business running and want to move on from exclusively selling your time in 1:1 lessons, Carolina's story, journey, and insights will help you immensely. We had a great Q&A at the end as well. We're happy to call Carolina a client and are so happy to see all her success. And if you want support creating your own courses, book a chat with us to tell us about your vision and see if working together makes sense: https://learnyourenglish.net/schedule

So I had a big "imposter syndrome" experience last week, where I'd prepared lesson plans for a class that meets for four hours. Late in the day prior to the class, the school emailed me and said the course would be taking a different direction and that I would need to prepare four new hours of lessons for the class. Well despite the time crunch I was able to do it and it went just fine. However, my first thought on leaving the school building was, "Looks like I fooled them all for another day." If any colleague had had this experience and told me about it I would be super proud of them and impressed. It's such an absurd dynamic!