Why Spanish?
¡Hola hola!
“Álvaro, why did you choose to teach Spanish as your main job?”
I’ve been asked this question many times, both from Spanish friends/family and English students/friends, so today I bring you the answer…
All my life I’ve never known what I wanted to do work wise, people around me had it clear from a very young age, or at least before they started university, but me...? I had an idea that no matter what I chose, science, humanities or art, I had to apply different languages to them, not only Spanish, but Portuguese, English and whatever other languages I could learn.
Basically in my head I was thinking something like:
If I study law, I can be the translator in cases between languages I know.
If I study biology or any other science degree, I can work in a different country and write about it in different languages to get to as many people as possible.
I just knew I wanted to use different languages, but even back then, it wasn’t clear, I wanted to do it all, but we all know you can’t, or at least that’s what you’re told.
Well, even when I had to choose what degree I was going to study, my list was an absolute mess between different science and humanities degrees, but I still had no idea what I wanted! I just chose a few different ones and said “well whatever my final marks allow me to study, that will be it”.
I was basically my own worst enemy, blocking myself in the areas I was good at, because I thought I wasn’t good enough, or not worthy of making a living out of it. After all these years I think only one person knew what I was going to do or work as, and that’s my school English teacher Amaya. She always told me how I was going to move from Spain to another country and use English in my favour and well… I ended up moving to England at 19!
One thing that hasn’t changed since being a kid is that I love learning and studying different languages and cultures, but back then I didn’t know or understand how I could make a living out of it. So after working a few years in hospitality in England (that’s a different story), I was having a break from it and it’s when I decided to try something new, to become self-employed and start my own business.
I started with my art business Alvaro’s Arts, but after a few months I was thinking that I wanted more and something using my knowledge in different languages. I never thought to begin with teaching, because I have always been extremely self-conscious about myself, my confidence problems have been stopping me from doing what I want or like since forever, so for me teaching was a no. “Would I be good enough?” I always try to do everything as perfect as my skills let me in that moment of my life. But my mind kept telling me that I would never be good enough to teach and that it would be a waste of time. After thinking about it for a long time and with my partner’s help, I ended up being really excited for the idea. To be fair, teaching is not only a skill, but a learning process that every teacher has to go through, so if more people have done it, why couldn’t I?
I then decided to jump into it without wasting more time thinking about how “I’m not good enough” and make myself good enough to do it. Learn and practice, make your own material, read a lot, study, and be that “perfect teacher” that you have in your mind. Help people learn your language as best as possible, and this is how I created AVA Spanish Lessons in 2019, my first ever class taught was the 24th of February 2019 and will never forget it! This group is still with me and I can’t thank them enough for it, they’ve learnt so much and at the same time they have inspired me and made me realise that I can actually teach, I now know that this is my career and I’m so happy that I made that jump back in 2019. All the students that I have make me so happy and proud, I’m so glad I can be someone who inspires them to keep on learning Spanish. I feel inspired by them too, to keep growing and keep learning, getting better and better, working hard for them.
After almost a year of teaching I then decided to do something new and different, but similar culture wise, I decided to become a ZUMBA instructor and changed my business name to AVA Spanish, and currently I’m teaching both Spanish and ZUMBA and I couldn’t be happier! But the reason why I ended up doing ZUMBA is a different story…
Hasta pronto!
💃🏻🇪🇸💃🏻