Paper Target Essay Example

Paper Targets:
My Development as an ESL Teacher
Teaching English to second language learners is a once in a lifetime opportunity I keep having over and over again. I never envisioned that year I spent teaching English to preschoolers in South Korea after I graduated from college would somehow turn into a lifelong career pursuit. I never imagined that day I first flew 18 hours over the Pacific Ocean, with nothing more than a bachelor’s degree and a naïve quest for adventure, that years later I would get recruited into military intelligence based on my experiences teaching and living in Korea. They say once you become a soldier you always remain a soldier. Yet during my four years in the military, I felt more like an English teacher who occasionally shot holes through paper targets than I ever felt like a warrior. Now that I am out of the Army, I have a new paper target, to use my GI Bill scholarship to earn a master’s degree in TESOL. While it remains to be seen whether or not earning this degree will change my future teaching practices, I have certainly come to better understand and appreciate my past experiences as a second language teacher.
Paper Target
A diploma is a paper target. It takes tremendous focus and discipline to aim and hit a paper target. Accurately hitting a paper target is at best only a simulation of actual combat. Paper

An appropriate language learning curriculum considers the needs of the teacher, his or her students, the target language, and the learning environment. According to Craig (2008) from a Schwabian perspective, any curriculum can be understood in terms of four commonplaces: teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu as well as the implied existence of a fifth commonplace: self-study (p. 2). For Craig, walking around the curriculum tree is a metaphorical explanation of the way in which a teacher’s self-study examines the teacher, the learner, the subject matter, and the milieu of a