Beau Brown: An Introduction
As I only have 500 words or so, I’m going to keep the information about myself brief: I’m 37 years old, originally from Texas in The US and after many years traveling and living abroad, I am now settled in Holland. This is my second tour of duty here in The NL--the first time was back in 2009 when I came for my ex and worked at an international school in Hilversum. I left for a while to be a private tutor in Buenos Aires, but the strength of Holland--or rather, the strength of my love for its most beautiful citizen (my wife, Jamila) brought and kept me back full time since 2015. We have a daughter, Abby, and another on the way, and are currently renovating a house in Haarlem to move into from Amsterdam sometime in the summer. I love my family and my life here in the NL, and enjoy being a teacher and working with young people.
I’ve taught and worked on all 6 continents since my start in education back in 2004. I have a BA in Spanish and Latin American literature, and was a Spanish teacher for many years. After many years away from university, I came back last year to do a MA in English lit and linguistics at UvA, and am doing my M.Ed/1e graads this year at HvA in English as well. I plan on continuing research sometime in the near future to pursue a part time PhD exploring the relationship between motivation in a student’s L2 and their linguistic identities in and outside the English classroom (this is my exploratory work for my PO this year).
Unfortunately my class attendance has been limited thus far--Abby, my daughter, seems to fall ill when daddy has his studiedag, so as of yet I’ve not been able to meet up with fellow colleagues to discuss ICT in het onderwijs in any detail. However, I’m open for improving my knowledge of lesson planning and working with possible solutions to solve the seemingly unsolvable issue of cell phone use and student attention in class! I find that sometimes we as teachers are as eager to use ICT to supplement lessons as students are to distract themselves from following what we are trying to teach them. Accordingly, if I could learn about how to find a common ground via student’s interests and digital lives, it would be a boon to me bridging the gap in my approach to teaching them the drier side of English during grammar lessons and the like.
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