Tasha Hacker started her teaching career as a Peace Corps volunteer working in Nakhodka, a coastal city in a remote area of the Russian Far East. After two years of teaching, she traveled independently through Siberia and Central Asia before exploring Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Caucasus Region (Georgia and Armenia).
Finding herself out of work in England (but not ready to go home yet) Tasha decided to look for employment as a teacher. Despite her training and experience, she found it impossible to work in Europe teaching ESL without having done an internationally-recognized certificate course, so she went on to study for a Trinity College Certificate in English language teaching. Since then, she has completed the University of Cambridge Diploma course in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA) and has undertaken post-graduate study at Columbia University Teachers College in English teaching.
In the eight years since she started teaching, Tasha has worked as an ESL teacher in Russia, the U.K. (London and Eastbourne), Spain (Seville and Barcelona), the Middle East (Qatar) and New York.
Tasha gained teacher training experience while working in Russia and doing extensive curriculum development in Qatar where she was part of a team producing English language teaching course books for a petroleum company.
The highlights of Tasha’s career as a teacher are:
- Working with highly motivated teenage and adult students in the Russian Far East, exchanging cultural idiosyncrasies and learning to speak, read and write Russian
- Taking French and Italian students on day trips to London to see Big Ben and the Tower of London and to Brighton to visit the beach and see the punk rockers they had just learned about in a lesson on British pop culture
- Watching an extraordinary classroom environment unfold each day for 8 months as 17 female Qatari students quietly entered class covered from head to toe in black and then suddenly transformed when the door closed, head scarves coming off and personalities opening up with girls laughing and chatting in English about their lives
- Gaining new experiences in Qatar as a curriculum developer and layout designer with a team of talented and capable TEFL teachers
- Teaching adult classes directly across the street from the Sevilla Football (soccer) Club stadium on game nights with only the female students left and intermittently having to pause instruction to wait for the roaring cheers from the stadium to die down
- Teaching ESL students in the Bronx and learning about students’ incredible experiences immigrating to the U.S. with and without their families from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Guinea, Togo and Guyana
Tasha has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from St. Lawrence University, a Trinity College CertTESOL, a University of Cambridge Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA) and a Master's degree in Teaching of English from Columbia University Teachers College.
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Tasha with a class of younger learner ESL students in New York |
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