Jade Arthur is an English teacher and member of Elevate. Let's meet her
Where in the world are you?
I am in the United States. I live in the South in a state called Tennessee.
And is that where you're from? You were born there?
No, I'm from Florida, even more south. And so, I grew up with, you know, the beach around me and yes, and we moved to Tennessee when I was about 12.
And so, how long have you been an English teacher?
Well, I've taught ACT and SAT English, which is a college entry exam here in the U .S. I've taught that for three years. And I've just kind of finished a month or two ago, I finished my first year of teaching ESL online, and I absolutely love it. I've taught kids, I've taught adults, but I my passion is adults. And it's, it's something that has, you know, you know, builds upon my interests, evokes my creativity. And it's just so so much fun. I mean, I get excited to help my students. That was great, even with exams. Oh yeah, I love exams. Yes, exciting.
What made you decide to focus on the ACT and the SAT and those things?
Honestly, it was my first way into teaching. I was looking around for jobs that would be a good fit. I had a bachelor's degree in English, didn't know what to do with it. Originally, I wanted to become a writer and I knew how hard that was. So there was a new tutoring center that opened up where in the city where I live, it's called Murphysboro and they were hiring tutors and I decided to apply. To my surprise, I ended up getting the job even with really no formal teaching experience. And I have been there ever since. People have been great. And I've loved helping kids be able to improve their ACT scores.
So you're online now. Who are the main people that you're helping? Is it adults with the exams or do you do more than that?
So the ACT and the SAT are tests for high school students. I've been teaching them for three years. I've moved primarily online with them, but I still go to the center on occasion. As far as the adults I teach for English as a second language, those are really adults, business professionals, helping to improve their interview skills, their pronunciation, increase their vocabulary, among other things. And I'm also moving into a niche for gaming, marketing, and advertising. I'm a gamer. I grew up knowing a lot of the terminology. I would go, I would watch the E3 gaming conventions on television. I would follow IGN, which is a very popular gaming website. So I know a lot about gaming. I'm a humongous Pokemon fan. So if you, you know, whoever loves Pokemon here, awesome. And for me, I just want to bring education and recreation together and bring something special to the gaming market and help people, particularly Spain. In Spain, the gaming market is really growing. It's very exciting, but English language learning, there's not a lot of that there. And so the combination to me is a great way to help people market their games internationally, get higher up in their companies, and really move forward into learning as gamification, as something that could be fun, and also having great games that inspire us.
Yeah, I know so many people who have taken their English and like leveled up by gaming. And I think that's great. But do you think if you're gaming, you get a certain type of language, there's a certain type of language with gaming, which might not be the same with your academic language?
Oh, sure. Sure, sure. That's two different things. I think you can always find ways to kind of cross what you're teaching and how you're learning. But for me, as far as gamification, what I do is, much like a lot of people, I make the things that I'm teaching into a game. A lot people use Kahoot. That's great. I create games on the website genially and I create quizzes and I try to incorporate the knowledge throughout the course or the lesson that I'm teaching at that moment into each lesson so that they can have fun with learning. See, no matter what age you are, you want to have fun. There's always a kid in us and I find that as adults we tend to forget that we also want to have fun when we're learning. So I found that when I create games for adults, they're like, it surprises them. They're like, oh, this is fun. And that's the kid in them. And I love that. I'm still a kid inside. And I want to bring that out in my students as well.
Yeah, it's so true, isn't it? We get sort of focused on the grammar and the books and the ticking off your calendar that you've done it. But, yeah, have some fun, too. It's totally allowed.
Yeah, I think so.
OK, so have you got any learners in mind that you've helped sort of make, that you've helped or you've seen them make a breakthrough through or any good stories about learners that you've you've talked to?
Well, I do have a student I'm working with. He's a he's an adult from the Ukraine. He has struggled a bit with his pronunciation a little bit. I'm guessing in the Ukrainian language, V's are pronounced like W's and W's are pronounced like V's. So I tend to hear vacation instead of vacation. and so words like that and so they're they're swapped. And through his needs, I ended up creating a sort of pronunciation course where I've gone over each of the letters of the alphabet, I show how they work in pairs with other letters of the alphabet, and we go through different examples and games that give him the practice that he needs. He's still working on it, it, but he's getting it. And I think he's, he's really enjoyed working on his pronunciation and working in the way that I've created this for him. I create, I always like changing the games. I'm always trying to do something different. And one time he was like, Oh, you know, I like this game. I'd love to continue to do this game. But I had something different the next time he was like, I liked this game. So I like variety. I'm somebody that gets bored very easily. So I create my PowerPoints and games in the way that I feel I would want them and luckily my students respond to them. So it's been fun to work with him. He's a great learner. He's really open to learning new things, to his pronunciation and he's just, yeah, he's fun to work with and I can see he's trying really hard. Yes, that's right. And it doesn't take one time or one game or one lesson to master this. You to keep repeating, isn't it? Yes.
I want to ask a bit more about why... So, we've seen a bit about your passion for games and your learners. What keeps you being a teacher?
Well, there's a lot of factors involved with that, you know, I, I, like I said, I didn't know what I was going to be. And I came online, you know, and I knew that I liked teaching, I knew that I liked English, and I liked writing, but how I was going to make it all happen, I just had no idea there, you know, to get a teaching degree would require a lot of money a lot of time. And online, there just seemed to be a lot of opportunities to teach English online at ESL. And I realized that I didn't need to know another language to teach it. I didn't need to know the person's native tongue. I didn't need to have a teaching degree. I needed a TEFL certification. And when I realized that I could achieve that, and that there were so many opportunities that were accessible to me and that it could be profitable, I realized that it really was just such a combination of things. Access, availability, opportunities, there was just so much that I could sink my teeth into. And over the past year, I've worked at different tutoring companies, I've created my own resources, and it's given me a lot of flexibility and it's given me opportunities to be creative, to do more than I thought. For instance, even today, I was working on a PowerPoint for gaming marketers about take the pain out of campaign, out of your marketing campaign. And I went over different things that would be important to that campaign, like making sure that you have the right requirements for success, making sure you have a specific campaign goal. These are things like I was never taught, but somehow what I've taught with my students, what I know, what I've learned and what I'm familiar with, I was able to come up with something that I feel was helpful. And even the examples I came up with were related to all the things that I've seen in gaming advertisements. And it just was like, It a combination of things that I didn't know I had but that came through as I was writing, and it was really cool..
Yeah, it is creative, isn't it? A creative job to be a teacher. Yeah. OK, so for in the future, what kind of learners would you like to help?
Gaming marketers or advertisers in Spain would be amazing or gaming marketers, advertisers in general. But either way, I have a lot of experience in business English. So anybody that wants to improve their business English skills, improve their pronunciation, improve their vocabulary, their grammar. But primarily, if you're an adult that wants to just get better at English, whether it be conversation or you have a specific interest in mind, that would be great.
Okay, that's great. Thank you very much Jade. It's great to talk to you today.
Wonderful to talk to you too. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Check out Jade’s lessons in The Elevate Directory of English language teachers here and connect with her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
