So Maybe I'm A Little Crazy...

I have this crazy dream that I would one day LOVE to be a Mandarin teacher in a primary school in Australia. Now this is crazy for a few reasons.

1. My proficiency is nowhere near good enough. (In my opinion...and I'm working on this!)
2. Although I try my best, who knows really how good my pronunciation is??? (Also working on this!)
3. I've never even been to China. (I'm working on this too!)
4. I'm not a native Chinese speaker. (Well, my Nana is Chinese so technically I'm part Chinese...not that you'd ever be able to tell!)

Now 3 of those problems I can work on. And I do have a teaching degree so I'm qualified to be a primary school teacher. But it still feels like a crazy dream. I'm sure any Chinese person would be cringing reading this...that some random Australian wants to teach Mandarin, their language! But no matter how much time goes by or how long I spend trying to figure out what I want to do with myself, I always come back to wanting to teach young children Mandarin. It's the ONLY thing I get excited about when I try to figure out what I want to do.

I have absolutely LOVED teaching my boys to speak Mandarin and use it as part of our daily lives in our own home. I also thoroughly enjoyed helping out other students in my chinese class. They often didn't understand what we were learning or doing until I explained it to them.

So, I have a bit of a long term plan. The plan is to keep learning Mandarin on my own and as soon as I can, with a tutor or in a class. Then after my husband does his first year or two of primary school teaching and gets fully registered, we hope to go and live in China for a couple of years (this will hopefully be about 2015) which will give us all a wonderful opportunity to learn the language and experience the culture. Then, unless we just love China so much we don't want to leave, (which could be a possibility lol), we'll move back to Australia and I can apply to be a Mandarin teacher in the Australian public schools system.

My dream does seem somewhat more possible with the very recent push for all Australian primary schools to offer an Asian language (one being Mandarin) to every grade by 2025. This means there will be a much greater demand for LOTE teachers and more jobs available.

Anyway, we will see what happens. In the meantime, I'm really getting back into using ProVoc to help me remember characters. It's amazing how quickly they can come back after doing a few drills and I LOVE how customisable it is.

Lets hope I look back on this post one day and am able to say, "I finally achieved my dream!"