Actually, at first, I only regarded the title "English teacher"as a job, a way to earn a living after returning back to my hometown as being a teacher is somehow easier to be respected. I spent two months being trained and preparing. But not until the first class with a student did I realize the true feeling of being a teacher. When the student said he loved having class with me, I knew it was more than a job. I spent more time and fees training myself, aiming at providing them with a more quality couse. And then I found some of them were suffered from learning English due to the bad performance in exams. I tried to communicate with them and their parents,telling them something related to the adolescent rebellion, mental health, motivation of English learning, and even the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve,in order to convince parents that learning English was not only a process of reciting vocabularies and doing test papers. Since then I have been focusing more on students' mental health besides academic performance. I gradually become a friend of theirs. And the most impressive thing for me is that one day, one of my students, who is a 14-year-old shy boy, said to his mom that he would like to be an English teacher like me. His words means a lot to me. I really appreciate that being a language teacher opens the window for me to communicate, collaborate and make progress with those lovely teenagers and makes me push myself more. That's also why I am here, studying the master courses of TESOL.

 

- My professional identity: Being a “good” teacher, either I see myself or others see me, is important in my cognition. This belief makes me constantly modify my classes to make them better. 

Secondly, I am still a learner and in the process of teaching practice, I continue to identify problems and learn from good teaching experiences, for example, how to set up teaching activities to engage students' interest in learning. These are my identities impact on my pedagogy and classroom practice.

However, if it is closed to the final exam or the entrance exam for high school, I will stress more on those exam-centred skills, asking them to do more test papers and reciting vocabularies on a daily basis.

During the break, I sometimes invite students to play some games like playing the Switch or talk with them about what happened in their school life, trying to be a true friend of theirs.

Sometimes , they complain about the difficulties of learning English and I will give suggestions using my personal experience instead of directly telling them what to do and not to do.