About me and my relationship with EFL teaching

I'm not going to tell you  that I always wanted to be a teacher because that's not true. If there was something I had made my biggest effort to avoid doing was exactly that...teaching. I could have become anything if the necessary conditions would have been fulfilled.

Unfortunately, back in the nineties, if your parents couldn't afford your education you had no other choice but to get a job, get married, or enroll in one of the courses of studies available in your hometown. I faced that sort of "crossroad" and followed my mom's suggestion that I should study economics.

What a big mistake! Numbers have never been  my cup of tea! I still cannot believe that Gardner's Multiple Intelligences theory was not taken into consideration at that time. Anyway, I was able to endure the first semester, excelling at Economics but struggling with maths and accounting. By the end of that period, I was certain about trying something different, more oriented towards social studies: "Comunicación Social", "Turismo" were the words making noise in my head. "I'd really enjoy doing something like that" I used to tell to myself.

"When there's a will, there's a way" goes an old saying, although it didn't apply in my case. So I gave it up.
My brother, who was attending high school, told me about a position for teaching English in his school. "There are not graduated teachers of English, that's why they hire anyone with a certain knowledge of the language". That was true (as it still is in some places). Demonstrating knowledge of the language (mostly of grammar and vocabulary) was enough to teach it.
Language teaching was different those days. Learners were not expected to use the language outside the classroom (not even in the classroom) so everything went around filling gaps, writing vocabulary lists where translation was the only strategy applied and, as regards skills, reading was the queen. You would be able to tell in Spanish what you had read in English. That was all.
To sum up, I took the position. I enjoyed talking about my favourite language and my students could feel that passion...but they didn't learn anything. They went through all the exercises, they did that very well, but they didn't learn. Frustrating? Yes! very much indeed...we shared that feeling. Feeling that, once again, confirmed my initial idea: Never ever shall you dare become a teacher!