Mallorca, TEFL and Gap Year planning

Aloha, here's the latest installment of my gap year blog.

Big question many of you may want to know is why did I choose to take a gap year? I initially decided to have a gap year before University while I was filling in my UCAS application and writing my personal statement in Autumn of last year (like most sensible people). Come end of August/early September last year I was giving myself headaches deciding what degree course to study and where to apply to. Going to University is a big life-changing decision so I wanted to make sure I got it right so I gained the services of my mother (always happy to help) and we went through the pros and cons of certain aspects and helped me formulate a general consensus of what I wanted to do. All of this Uni stuff plus the weight of A levels was stifling me and I felt that a gap year would first and foremost be a great excuse for a break from study and stress with many other positives along with it.

A gap year is hugely beneficial to me because of the nature of my University degree course. In a year's time I will begin studying a BA Modern Languages degree at Southampton University in which I will be studying 3 languages: French, Spanish and a new language from scratch (ab initio) which I haven't yet decided on but at this point in time could be either Mandarin, Portuguese, Japanese or Arabic. My sister, Imogen, happens to already study the same degree at the same University as me so she has provided me a glimpse into what my future may look like and from what I can tell so far having experience of living/travelling/working abroad for an extended period of time as well as communicating with native speakers is highly regarded in order to improve the quality of my language learning as well as forming an open minded viewpoint of the world. It is also good for helping me get used to the idea of the third year of my degree which entails spending 9 months (an academic year) away from home studying/working in one of the countries whose language you study. In the case of Imogen, as of this Friday she will be setting off to spend 9 months studying at Xiamen University in the south of China so she is currently rushing around getting everything ready to go away and saying goodbye to various friends and family along the way who she won't be seeing (certainly not in person) for a while. If you wish to read her blog about her year abroad then please follow the link provided: http://whereonearthisimogen.blogspot.co.uk/. I imagine this gap year will also help me decide which language I will choose to study from scratch once I get to Uni. If not, then it will still buy me some valuable thinking time.

In terms of enjoyment, this gap year gives me the chance to travel to and cross off some of places I've longed to visit on my mental bucket list but not had the chance of yet. I realise that having the support and influence of my rather out-going parents that I have been incredibly lucky and been able to visit many incredible places over my short lifetime which include China, Malaysia, Australia, Morocco, Israel, UAE and most of Central and Southern Europe however it doesn't seem like quite enough. I'm greedy I know. There are still many places I would like to visit especially any of the Americas, New Zealand, Fiji, Thailand and Japan. If I can have both a linguistic experience in a francophone or hispanic country as well as going to at least one of the places mentioned above then I will view that as a very successful gap year.

Now many of you may be questioning why Mallorca is mentioned in the title of this post. Well, that's the first stop! Over the summer I looked at various different options of things to do on my gap year in terms of spending time abroad. They all looked really appealing, all sorts of projects helping impoverished children in third world countries plus extra touristy attractions but then you would see the price and find the cheapest ones would be about £5000, way out of my budget. Instead, I've gone down the alley of looking and applying for jobs and gaining qualifications. Whilst job searching a few weeks back before I went away to Leeds Festival, Imogen told me that her friend Ollie was advertising an au pair job with a family in Mallorca for 3 months during the Autumn. He'd been working for them for two months during summer and really enjoyed the whole experience so it seemed like a great opportunity to pursue. If you would like to read Ollie's blog which also includes his Third year abroad in Lille, France then follow this link: http://olliecraig15.wordpress.com/ .After a few e-mail exchanges and Skype conversation with the mother (Marta) we've arranged it all and I am going to be starting there this time next week! I'm really excited and looking forward to becoming an Au Pair in Mallorca. As a Swimming Teacher in my part-time job at home and having had previous work experience in a French primary school and a Spanish nursery I would say I enjoy working with kids because it allows you to rekindle the memory of those care-free days you used to have, blind and innocent to the world around us which having now grown up is a lot more cruel, difficult and in some cases miserable than it may seem (dark thoughts I know). I also find teaching really fulfilling so along with my interests in travelling and foreign languages, Au Pairing seemed like the next logical step. I've never been to Mallorca before and the only places I have been to in Spain (Bilbao, Salamanca and Zaragoza) are all mainland/northern cities so I will be expecting quite a different experience of Spanish culture during this trip.

As well as my upcoming job in Mallorca, I have recently started a TEFL qualification with TEFL England. For all of those not in the know, that stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. To complete the qualification you have to do 100 hours worth of learning/assesment online which breaks down as 50 hours of learning how to teach TEFL, 30 hours of Grammar and a 20 hour video course which can all be done at your own pace over a 6 month period. Besides the online work, you also have to do an intense 20-hour course over a weekend to compliment your online learning which I did during the weekend Saturday 31st August-Sunday 1st September at the Manchester Conference Centre. Bar trying to get into Manchester at 9AM on a Sunday morning using public transport (a herculean task to say the least) I have actually found this aspect of the course the most enjoyable so far as I was able to meet other like-minded people going through the course at the same time as me from all walks of life. I expected to go and find it was full of language students (like myself) and language graduates however I was very much mistaken. Most people on the course were people looking for career changes from their dull 9-5s although there were a few language students as I expected as well as an international poker player, a drama student, 3 politics students and graduates, a teacher who'd come all the way from Germany to do the course and (most bizarrely) an older gentleman who wanted to do the course so he could meet up with a woman he'd been chatting with online from the Ukraine! the things people do for love ey?

Because the TEFL course is all online I plan to complete it whilst in Mallorca and that should unlock the next chapter in my gap year plan. TEFL teachers are in demand in various countries across the world and I hope to get myself a short term teaching contract with my qualification that will allow me to do a bit more travelling (hopefully in South America) and enrich my teaching and overall gap year experience. Although I'm not guaranteed to get a job immediately from this qualification, the TEFL programme will be useful for me if I want to find some work over the summer holidays between Uni terms and I have already learnt a lot about my own language which will be very beneficial to my linguistic ability in foreign languages. At Uni in Southampton, I know they offer modules in TEFL so it is a highly regarded skill and career path should I wish to pursue it more in the future.

My back-up plan if the TEFL doesn't work out this year is to go and volunteer with the International Citizen Service (ICS) for 3 months, a government funded initiative which runs various community projects in third-world countries across the world. My initial application has been accepted and I have been referred to one of the ICS partner companies called Progressio who organise projects in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Malawi and Zimbabwe. If I pass their selection day which I should be having once I've returned from Mallorca then I will be expected to fundraise £1,500 before potentially heading off in March/April next year. Besides the ideas and plans I've got down so far the rest of the year is up for grabs, full of possibility and hopefully full of adventure!

FP

#FraserOnTour