I am an English native speaker from California, in the United States. I enjoy teaching English as a profession and in my free time, I like to read books, write, and spend time with friends. I recently began learning to play the guitar, and it is going quite well, even though it makes for sore fingertips. Before I began teaching, I worked for a while with independent filmmakers around Sacramento, California, which helped me to develop not only creatively, but also a good sense of organization.

I received a TEFL certificate from the British School of Panyadee on Koh Samui in May of 2011, after completing the 120-hour in-class course and passing the final exam. I received the highest marks of my class and significant praise from my instructors.

I have been teaching at three different English academies in South Korea for the majority of the past 4 years, both in the capital of Seoul as well as Daegu, a smaller city in the Southeast. My students have ranged from new English learners to advanced students, and I have taught everything from basic phonics and the alphabet, to conversation and grammar, up to idiom usage, public speaking practice, and TOEFL preparation. I can say with pride that my TOEFL students' scores increased significantly under my supervision, especially in the areas of writing and speaking.

In addition, at one of my schools, I wrote the material for a series of books to be distributed to various academies around South Korea. The materials included workbooks covering topics such as phonics and sentence structure, and were paired with listening and speaking activities, which I also recorded. To my knowledge, these materials are still in use in various academies around the country today.

I believe the biggest key to learning English is patience. Not only patience from the teacher for the student, but also patience for the student with themselves. English is absolutely a difficult language, and being a native speaker, I will be the first to admit this. But it is not impossible! With the proper motivation and engagement of the material, anyone can learn anything they set their mind to.

I have specific ideas on how I feel it is best to approach learning the different aspects of English, whether it is writing, conversational skills,or grammar rules, but of course not everyone learns the same way! If you don't know where to start, I can always suggest how I would like to approach your learning, but ultimately, YOU know best how you learn, so I am always open to suggestions and ideas a student may have about how they would like to spend their classes with me.

I love English, and I believe that my passion shines through in my lessons and activities. A large part of language learning is repetition, but that doesn't mean that "repetition" has to be "read the same words over and over." Playing a game or doing an activity as part of a lesson can afford just as much repetition and moreover, the learning becomes almost a secondary benefit to enjoying the time. This encourages further learning, which is ultimately what I want to impart to a student: to not only learn how to use the language well, but to love to use it.