Eliana Zemmer

"Be the change that you want to see in the world." (Mahatma Gandhi)

Teaching for me is a vocation and not only a mere job. I believe in equal opportunities and free access to education for everybody and that education should be principally centered on students including their social, cultural and geographical background rather than on teachers.

I love interacting and sharing ideas with students and with my colleagues. Teaching is like a journey where I know the starting point and the goal but the whole path is a work in progress. Being a teacher gives me the opportunity to be creative, flexible and versatile regarding curriculum, lesson plan and syllabus. I love to see the joy and motivation of my students in the classroom or in the lab when they work on literary topics or on a project. What I like most is that even after many years, students still recognize and stop me on the streets and are eager to tell me what they do now and some even remember my teaching lessons and think back about them with pleasure.

I have been teaching Englih in high chool; German and hitory in middle school; maths, German and Italian in elementary school. At the moment I teach migrant women Italian to help them integrate into the nwe society they now are part of. As part of this project, I help migrant children with their homework and do leisure activities with them.

My teaching has been and will always be students-centered. In my lessons I try to relate the subject I am teaching to every-day-life situations to let students build a bridge to something that is already familiar to them. So they see the sense in what they are learning and how they can apply it in practice. School should be a preparation for the real world and give students the necessary skills to face it as good as possible.