How I Became an ESL Teacher

I became an English language learner teacher later in life. I taught for 30 years in the general classroom before going back to add an endorsement at age 51. One of my very best friends at school came to me at the beginning of the 21-22 school year and told me that she would be leaving our school at the end of the year because her husband had taken a job in another part of the state. She had been the person who had basically developed and grown our English language learner program. So, instantly I was concerned about who would advocate for those students and their families. I live in a very rural area where there's very small immigrant population, and she wasn't just their teacher, she was their family's resource. She connected them to services that they needed within the community, and she was just their person.  

The very next day I received an email, a mass emailing that went out to every teacher in the state of Tennessee, explaining that you could add a hard-to-fill licensure endorsement to your existing teaching license at no cost. It was through Tennessee's Grow Your Own program, and they had actually used ESSA funds as part of the funding of that. And that year, the three hard-to-fill areas were math, special education, and in Tennessee we call it English as a second language or ESL. So, I went to my director of schools and asked him if he would nominate me for that because each system can nominate one person, one teacher, to do that at no cost. So, I completed all the coursework, took my very first Praxis exam at almost 52 years old and earned my licensure that way. And in June, 2022, I became our school's English as a second language teacher.