Penelope Vos

As part of the management team of a small independent school, I was involved in a review of our Japanese program. No-one ever actually learned Japanese and we asked if that mattered and what we hoped to achieve by foreign language teaching.Then we considered how best to achieve those goals. We concluded that Esperanto was the best strategy for providing linguistic flexibility, confidence,empathy with non-English speakers and curiosity about the World and its people. We didn't have a teacher in mind but concluded that what was worth the students' time to learn was worth a teacher's time to learn and they chose me. I learned it over summer, and our class was talking to Swiss kids (by webcam) in Esperanto before winter.
I studies modern Language teaching methodology hard and kept refining the program for the next ten years and it is about to be published as "Talking to the Whole Wide World".