How Claudia Tumba Authored a Teaching Career
| by Alex Skov
Studying law as an undergraduate in England, a career in education was the last thing Claudia Tumba envisioned. But once she had her degree in hand, Tumba found herself grappling with a feeling that many twentysomethings encounter.
“I had the quarter-life crisis where I was like, ‘I haven’t done anything with my life. I need to do something I’ve never done before,’” she said, “and coming to Korea was really outside of my comfort zone.”
Looking for a way to make international travel easier and more sustainable, Tumba applied for the English Program in Korea (EPIK), a government-run program that allows qualified teacher to lead English as a Second Language (ESL) classes across the country.
Tumba got accepted and, 11 years later, she’s still in Korea.
“I came for one year initially, fell in love [with teaching], and just continued every year, then ended up meeting my husband, and the story kind of goes on,” Tumba smiled.
Discovering a Passion for Teaching in a New Country
Admittedly, it took Tumba some time to latch onto the idea of teaching as a full-scale career since it wasn’t her primary motivation to make a move across continents.
“I came into English teaching with other goals. It wasn’t so much to actually teach and improve students lives; it was more to see Asia,” she remembered, “but when I realized that this was becoming a career for me and something serious, I wanted to actually improve my skills.”
Once she had spent more time in the classroom and exploring Korean culture outside of it, it also became clear to Tumba that “there’s not much job security in the long-term in just teaching English.”
Considering what kind of career path she wanted to carve out, Tumba began weighing her options.
“I started to look for other jobs, especially [at] international schools, and I knew I needed a license,” she said.
Tumba soon found Moreland University and the TEACH-NOW Teacher Preparation Certificate Program, which would allow her to earn a U.S. teaching license entirely online and complete her clinical practice in the school where she was already working.
So, she enrolled and got to work.
Becoming a Licensed Teacher with Moreland University
With a formal teaching credentials in her sights, Tumba found her coursework to be informative and useful, but it was the instruction and mentorship paired her hands-on student teaching experience that Tumba says “made a huge difference.”
“It taught me a lot about myself as a teacher,” she shared. “I used to blame the students a lot. If the students didn’t spell properly, I would be like, ‘Oh, these students are not learning anything. They’re not spelling properly,’ but when we did [TEACH-NOW], I was like, ‘I’m not getting enough data in order for me to know where their problems are, in order to see how to help them.’”
That shift in framing pushed Tumba to focus on building her own skills to better serve her students. She was especially thoughtful about receiving feedback and analyzing classes she filmed as part of the practicum.
“I realized there was one particular student of mine who I just used to kind of I put him in this bracket of, ‘Oh, he’s silly and he doesn’t like English,’” Tumba recalled, “but when we filmed our classes, when I was reviewing it, I realized he was trying to get my attention and I was too busy helping another student who I just put all my focus on because she was going through a couple of things.”
Realizing this, Tumba was able to adjust and better balance the attention she gave each student in the classroom. But her takeaways didn’t stop there.
The A-B-C’s of Teaching English in Korea
As part of her final module in TEACH-NOW, Tumba drafted a children’s book to submit as part of a capstone project. The inspiration came from her firsthand experiences with students who seemed hesitant to learn English.
“I wanted to create a book that that kind of married both Korean and English together, so it was like a food A-B-C book,” she said. “I was really pushed into creating deadlines and creating goals, and although I didn’t finish the book at the time that the course ended, I actually ended up finishing it and publishing it, which was amazing!”
Tumba credits her Moreland experience with helping her complete the book, K-dish ABCs: A fun way to learn the ABCs with Korean food (available on Amazon here).
“I feel like the course really helped to push me in that,” Tumba said, “and then the other things it did — it just opened me up to so many things, so many different apps were shared with me and tools that I didn’t know about.”
Tumba is now responsible for training other teachers within her school, but she hopes to create more resources tailored to non-native English teachers and parents in the future.
“I feel like a lot of materials are geared towards native speakers,” she explained, “but I want to make materials for non-native [speakers] so it’s a lot more accessible to them.”
Just like a reading a book, completing TEACH-NOW can provide inspiration that sticks with people long after the last page.
Moreland is ready to support you and your teaching goals. Complete your free application to our 100% online 9-month TEACH-NOW Teacher Certificate Preparation Program or one of our 12-month master’s degree programs today. It takes less than 15 minutes to take this important step in your teaching journey.
