My name is Amalia Oyarzún Rivera, I am from the small city of San Carlos de Bariloche, in the West side of the province of Rio Negro. I am 31 years old and I have been teaching English since 2015.

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Let me tell you about who I was before and who I am now:

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                     In 2005, when my sister finished secondary school, my parents  decided to move to General Roca to accompany my sister at Law school in Comahue university while I was finishing the last two years of secondary school.

                   In 2008, I started the translator's training course but I only attended its subjects for two years.  In 2011, due to a radical change in the  syllabus, many of my classmates and I decided to stop attending the translator's subjects and

we continued the teacher's training course. 

The first three years of the teacher course were the quickest and the less difficult to deal with. As time went by, I could not make much progress, and as a result,  I could not move forward to go on  the fifth and last year.

               It was not possible for me to finish the course of studies in that town; then my parents could not afford our stay there. Consequently, we had to go back home with our careers unfinished in 2017. 

            Once I could complete all the requirements for the public teaching system, I started to work in public high schools and with that money I decided to go back to the teacher training course in the IFDC Lenguas Vivas.

              My mother was the main pillar that guided me to stop chasing the translator's course and to go on with the teacher's course.

I understand my mother now, who helped me so much to start teaching since she knew I would always have a steady job to survive financially and she knew that my love for English would always remain. She used to say that teaching was a caring human job as meaningful as her nursing career. She was my constant support who reminded me that, if I was persistent and I made more effort to keep studying, I could pursuit that goal of becoming a teacher in the future. I made a promise to her that I would finish studying to continue teaching students the language with all my effort, devotion and passion to the language.

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                                                                  WORK EXPERIENCE

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As regards my working experience,

I must say that I have always been connected with teaching.

Since I was 25 years old, I started to work in small private institutes in General Roca, and since then, I found out that I had a sort of great connection with children, teaching them and playing the language with them. From there on, I never stopped teaching students from different school levels and also students from bilingual levels (a1, b2, and FCE).

Nowadays, I am working in a private school but my dream is to keep changing the way English is taught in public schools, make a big change and change students' lives for good.

Nowadays, I am also working as teacher and secretary in my own online institution "English Workshop Big Ben", which was created by some old friends and I. We still wish to have a building in the future to coach public school students, mainly, and to give them the opportunity to use English for working and using it communicatively.

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                             WHY  DO I WANT TO BECOME A TEACHER?

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Despite the ups and downs of the Argentinian educational system that I have witnessed as substitute teacher in many schools,

I do not lose faith and hope to change the way English is taught in public schools, to find new ways to motivate students, promote the four skills and encourage learners to be more active than passive receptors of the language.

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Maybe,  I may sound like an utopian person but if one person can start making a bit of a difference, students could truly see the huge importance of education as an ideological weapon to defend themselves from political pressure and to be the leaders of their own lives.

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