My name is Carolina Morales and I have been a language teacher for almost two decades.
I’ve found within teaching purpose and meaning, a way to overcome my shyness, a way to be relevant by helping others. I was inspired by amazing teachers I’ve had to follow my calling from an early age.
I started my teaching career by tutoring friends who were behind in Math and Natural Sciences. Due to my English-Portuguese bilingual family background and the fact that I’d studied my elementary years in an American International School, I eventually started teaching English as a second language. When I was 17, I started tutoring my very sweet 80 year-old next-door neighbor who wanted to stave off dementia with language learning, that’s when I started to formally study English Grammar and basic Phonetics.
Soon after I got into the university, I started teaching English to kids who had learning difficulties at my old school, that’s when I was familiarized with disorders such as dyslexia & ADHD.
Afterwards, I started teaching at language schools. There I was able to compare the distinct and shared tools used by both language schools and Linguists and from all that, build my own language-teaching toolset. My time working at language schools reinforced my beliefs that efficient language learning is an individual process and much frustration is felt by both educator and learner when an inflexible unproven methodology is forced upon us and all the joy of learning vanishes within minutes. People are different, as someone who has, as one her main hobbies, the study of psychology and cognitive sciences; I know how important it is to make learning an enjoyable experience.
Therefore, I have dedicated the greatest chunk of my career as a private language teacher. It was the perfect fit for me, I was free to build methodologies, study plans and bibliographies by consulting my students, taking their needs and personality traits into account and also learn from them vocabulary that was new to me. I had students from myriad backgrounds, from blue-collar workers, to CEOs of multinational companies, from methodical shy engineers, to outspoken disorganized artists. I was also at the time, translating all kinds of scientific articles texts, legal contracts, and formal documents. I also started travelling and living some time abroad where I realized how many doors my standard American English opened.
In my mid-twenties, I started teaching English to toddlers and pre-schoolers. That was my greatest challenge yet, small children have a very short attention-span, and so, creativity, infinite patience and energy are a MUST. Those years that I’ve spent singing, dancing, drawing, coloring, reading to kids prepared me for motherhood and the joys of homeschooling my own kids.
My work as a private English educator for adults resumed when I opened a very cozy office downtown. I started using some tools from psychology such as requiring my students to keep journals in English as a way of naturalizing expression and bringing objectivity whilst analyzing problems. Thinking about a problem in a foreign language forces you to be more objective when finding suitable words for sentence building in order to articulate a complex thought or feeling.
After Covid-19, I have been working exclusively from home which has allowed me to restudy Linguistics and Language Acquisition, learn new concepts from Cognitive and Neural Sciences to reinvent myself professionally.
