1 Meet your teacher (B2)

In 1992 I was 18 years old and I was just finishing secondary school in Torquay, a seaside town in South West England. My mother worked as a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) in a local language school. There was a shortage of part-time teachers that summer and the school badly needed to find qualified people who could take on some of the extra work.

My mother casually mentioned to her boss, the language school principal, that I was looking for a part-time job. She explained that, although I didn’t have the correct qualification to be an English teacher, I had completed my final school exams. One of these exams was an A-level (Advanced level) in English Literature. At that time, in the summer of 1992, I hadn’t yet received the results of the exams, so I didn’t even know whether or not I had passed the English Literature exam.

The principal must have been pretty desperate because she chose to employ me as a part-time teacher of English anyway. Previously, I had worked as a cashier in a local shop and as a barman in a pub, so the opportunity to earn more money and do a more interesting job was quite a step up for me.

When I first went into a classroom at that language school, I was very nervous. The adult students looked at me suspiciously and curiously. I knew what they were thinking: ‘How old is this teacher? Is he qualified? He looks like a teenager.’ Thankfully, my mum was able to help me prepare lessons and I believe I did an acceptable job.

Over the next five years, I worked at that local language school during the summer holidays. I was very grateful for the experience that I got there because it helped me to understand the problems and the challenges that people have when they study another language.

In 1993, after completing a sabbatical year, during which I worked as a volunteer missionary in France and Africa, I went to Cardiff University in Wales to study French and Spanish. Before starting university, I had not studied Spanish, so it was both stimulating and difficult. The university had two first-year Spanish groups. The advanced group was made up of students who had studied Spanish at school and the beginner group was made up of students who had never studied Spanish before. My Spanish teachers told me and the other beginner students that the beginner and advanced group would be merged after the first year and would then study together for the rest of the course, which was 3 more years. This was a little scary for me. I wondered how it might be possible to improve enough in Spanish to be able to study with the advanced students because they had already had seven years of Spanish experience from their school career before starting university.

It was indeed a challenge, but I finished my undergraduate degree in the summer of 1997, qualifying with first-class honours in French and Spanish. After finishing at Cardiff University, I married my childhood sweetheart Sue and we moved together to the city of Bath in the south of England, so that I could complete a postgraduate diploma in interpreting and translating. Sue was from Helsinki, Finland (which is a country in the north of Europe). She had an English mother and a Finnish father, so she was bilingual in both English and Finnish.

While studying for my postgraduate diploma I started learning Finnish and it was a big shock. Whereas French and Spanish had been relatively easy to learn, Finnish seemed impossible to me. I tried very hard but I didn’t feel as though I was making any progress because the structure of the language was so different from English. This frustration I had with Finnish made me think a lot more about some of my students at the language school. I realised that students whose first language is very different from English would find English very difficult to learn and I developed a new, deeper respect for their struggle and their commitment.

As part of my training to be a translator and interpreter, I completed a short placement at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, in spring 1998. I had the opportunity to go into the interpreting booths and listen to the professional interpreters interpreting between French, Spanish and English. I was also given the opportunity to take a short test in which I practised interpreting with a microphone that was switched off while the head interpreter listened to me and evaluated my performance. After my test, the head interpreter said that I had done well. She told me that if I came back to Geneva after finishing my diploma, she would give me some freelance work as a conference interpreter.

This was an incredible opportunity and the chance of a lifetime. In those days, in the late 90s, it was hard for young and inexperienced interpreters to find work so the offer of some part-time work as a freelancer was something very important to me. However, when I went back to Bath to talk to my wife Sue about moving to Geneva after the course, she received an exciting opportunity. Sue’s cousin, who worked for the company Nokia Networks in Finland, offered Sue a job at Nokia in Helsinki, Finland.

Now, we were in a difficult situation. There were two completely different career opportunities ahead. Either I could go with Sue to Finland and sacrifice the offer of work as an interpreter in Geneva or Sue could come with me to Geneva and sacrifice the job offer that she had received from Nokia Networks. The choice was a real quandary because there were no obvious opportunities for me in Finland and Sue did not speak French, which is the language spoken in Geneva. What’s more, Sue had already sacrificed a year to be with me in Bath. She was a qualified electrical engineer and she wanted to get experience in engineering, which was difficult in Bath because there were few job opportunities for her.

We talked about the situation and asked for advice from our friends and family. They were helpful but did not want to interfere too much. They believed that it was our decision to make as a couple. Eventually, I decided to speak to my course director at Bath University. I explained the situation carefully and asked him what he would do if he were in my position. To my surprise, he answered without any hesitation and said, ‘You should definitely go to Finland’. This was not what I had expected. He explained to me that because Finland had recently joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, there were still very few people who could translate and interpret between Finnish and English. He suggested that I go to Finland with my wife Sue and that I work hard on my Finnish so that I could use the skills I had learned on my postgraduate diploma course to translate and interpret from Finnish to English.

I’m very pleased to say that I took his advice. Sue and I moved to Vantaa, Finland in July 1998. She started a career as an engineer at Nokia Networks and I worked hard to improve my Finnish. In early 1999, I had my first opportunity to interpret from French to English at an international conference. It was terrifying because the first person to listen to me interpreting was the then Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen. All in all, Sue and I spent 5 very happy years in Finland. I love the country and the people so much that it is difficult for me to express my feelings in words. I learned Finnish well enough to use it professionally and I got a lot of experience as a translator and interpreter.

In summer 2003, Sue and I moved back to Torquay, South West England. There were many reasons for this decision, but it was not easy for me to leave Finland. For approximately two years, I continued to work as a freelance translator and proofreader. Sometimes I went back to Finland to interpret in conferences. Ultimately, however, I realised that it was very important for me to recalibrate my life and focus on England. Whenever I went back to Finland to work and I walked around the streets of Helsinki, I felt sad and I missed the city. After each trip, I returned to England and I spent a lot of time thinking about our former life in Finland.

This was not helpful or useful for me or for my family. Then, one afternoon in spring 2005, I was shopping in a local supermarket when I bumped into my old French teacher from school. We chatted for a few minutes. He told me a little bit about his life and he asked me what I was doing now. I explained what was happening with my trips to Finland and told him that I was currently rethinking my career. Just as my course director at Bath University had done in 1998, my old French teacher made a suggestion. He said, ‘Why don’t you become a secondary school teacher?’

He explained that there was a real shortage of language teachers in the UK and that Spanish was becoming more and more popular as a second language. However, there were few qualified Spanish teachers working in secondary schools.

I returned home and thought about his suggestion. I realised that, if I retrained as a language teacher, I would be able to refocus my attention on the local community. This would help me to stop thinking about Finland and find a new career focus that would give me new skills to use with my languages. I consulted Sue and my family, who all agreed that it would be a very good idea.

So, in September 2005, I started training to be a Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) teacher, initially with French and Spanish. As a part of my training, I completed two placements in different schools. Then I got a job as a teacher of French and Spanish at a local secondary school, Churston Ferrers Grammar School, and I began working there in September 2006. That year, the school introduced Spanish, as a second language option for pupils, alongside French and German, so I had the privilege of co-teaching the first group of beginner Spanish students. After my first year, I became head of the Spanish department.

All in all, I worked 16 years at Churston. During that time, I taught myself Italian sufficiently well to teach it to some students who needed qualifications in Italian so that they could access university courses. In 2018, I went on an incredible adventure with my family to South Island, New Zealand, for a year-long sabbatical where I was head of the languages department at a school in Christchurch, covering for a teacher and friend who was on maternity leave.

In spring 2019, I returned to my old position in the school in England. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I worked from home and taught pupils online. With the extra time I had from the lockdowns in England, I started teaching myself Swedish using podcasts rather than traditional methods of studying. This helped me to reflect deeply on the power and value of podcasting as a medium. I started dreaming of one day creating my own podcast.

In September 2022, I made the decision to quit secondary teaching. I wanted very badly to do something different and a part of me longed to be my own boss again. Before leaving my secondary teaching job in July 2023, I had been reflecting on the start of my career and thinking about how wonderful it had been to have my own small company in Finland. I remembered the feelings I had when I was working as a translator from home in our flat in Vantaa and I wondered whether it might be possible to have autonomy over my own work life once again.

It was a complete leap of faith to leave my job because I did not have another job to go to. Instead, I decided to do something that I had been intending to do for 30 years, which was, finally, to get a qualification as a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL). It was poignant and perhaps a little ironic that the best course provider was the school where I had accidentally started my teaching career in 1992, more than 30 years previously. I completed the CELTA course (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and was very grateful to get work almost immediately in another international language school very close to where I lived.

For the next 2 years, from January 2024 to January 2026, I had many incredible times. It felt absolutely right and fitting to be back where I had started, but this time with the experience of two very different careers in languages. I felt strongly that I was in the right place at the right time. Having studied or taught French, Spanish, Finnish, Italian and Swedish I was finally able to teach English, but this time with more confidence and authority. I asked my boss for as many different teaching opportunities as possible, so that I could get experience with every level and every possible dynamic. I had large groups of teenagers, one-on-one lessons with professionals, intensive groups studying for the IELTS exam, absolute beginners who were unable to speak English at all when they arrived at the school, and even students who were themselves teachers and experts in English.

I had a strong sense of empathy for my students, who came from every continent, and spoke many different languages. More than anything, I wanted to know about their experiences learning English and understand how best I could help them. I began thinking seriously about how, when I was studying other languages, I had benefitted from the kindness of other teachers who had created free podcasts and given away free resources. An idea began to take shape in my mind; perhaps it would be possible for me to start a small podcasting business which I could use to give resources to people who wanted to learn English.

In January 2026, I finally started building the ecosystem for my website and, in mid-March, I recorded this, the first episode of the Intermediate podcast.

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