Wendy Johnson has worked at Instituut Jeroen Bosch for 24 years. Last week she had her last class and now she is enjoying her retirement.
Here are a few words from her:
“With a heavy heart I’ve decided to retire from teaching and my last lesson was on the 2nd of May.
In September 2000 Instituut Jeroen Bosch gave me the opportunity to start teaching without any training or experience. I started with groups of French-speaking Belgians and then gradually progressed to other nationalities with different native languages.
Once I got the hang of things, I realised that I wished I’d done it years before . I had been afraid that I wouldn’t have the correct knowledge, the confidence or the patience to teach, but my experience in learning Dutch when I arrived in The Hague in March 1976 to work as a secretary at the Head Office of the Aramco Overseas Company was a huge help to me.
I had found the language really hard to learn and had even shed some tears of frustration during the weekly private lessons I had with a retired Dutch language teacher. Fortunately she was an absolutely marvellous teacher; she had the patience of a saint, and she kept encouraging me not to give up .
Although after a year and a half I panicked when she told me that it was my last lesson because she couldn’t teach me anything else, I just had to go out there and use it! So I did, and I often still think of her and wonder what she would have thought if she’d known that I became a language teacher myself.
I can now say that I have really enjoyed teaching and that I’m hugely grateful for the wide variety of language students and business people I was engaged by Instituut Jeroen Bosch to help in their quest to improve their use of social and business English.
Now I feel the time is right for me to stop teaching and perhaps do some local voluntary work, but nothing too strenuous!
Thank you to all my students, my colleagues and Joëlle for their trust, their help and all the good times we’ve shared. I wish you all the very best for the future!
Wendy Johnson”
