

Jodi Ziegler Durante Durante
TeacherGeneral Information
First Name | Jodi Ziegler Durante |
Nickname | Jodi |
Last Name | Durante |
Community Role | Teacher |
Languages
Language | Spanish |
Current Level | Intermediate |
Learning Start Date | 26 years ago |
Work Experience
Job Title | ESL and EFL teacher |
Company | Pinellas County Schools and freelance |
Career Description | I have been teaching EFL and ESL for 25 years this year. While most of my teaching experience has been in Europe, so EFL, the last 6 years and my first year were ESL. I love my job and what it has taught me as a person and a teacher. I truly enjoy teaching people my language and the other three I know. I believe in a holistic approach to learning language but all the while homing in on what makes the particular student learn the new language best. At this moment in time, I am teaching at a school in Clearwater Florida, but I also teach some online classes. |
Biography
Biography | I graduated from the University of San Diego in 2000 with a Bachelor’s in Spanish Language Arts. After teaching a year in Mexico I realized I needed more experience teaching my own language, so I went back to the states and got a TESOL degree at the Seattle Pacific University. After that I went back to Spain, (I had done a semester abroad in 1999) where I lived in Cadiz, southern Spain, for the next three years. This is where I had my second EFL experience and it was a very challenging one at that due to the fact that where I worked our boss did not want us to speak ANY Spanish while teaching English to the students. It worked! They felt as though they were in another country. In the summer of 2005, I crossed the border to Algarve Portugal and did what I thought was going to be a summer stint teaching English. In the long run I ended up staying for three years. This is where I learned Portugues as well. After having been out of the country for quite some time I thought maybe it was time to go back to the states. As I was preparing to do so I got a job offer teaching in an academy in Southern Italy. Well, I thought, I guess one more year won’t hurt. Ten years later……….. I was still there, and life just sort of happened. I had many different teaching experiences there not all in academies but some with business companies as well. This is when and where, I learned/ perfected my Italian, some dialect as well, as it was normal for everyone to speak in their dialect, not just in Italian. After getting married and having a child, we all decided it was time to go to the states and try life there. Of course, for me it wasn’t really “trying it out” for me, but after 18 years out of the country I can tell you things had sure changed here, and many things were very new to me as they were for my family. We moved to Charleston SC and that’s where I got a job with CORE languages and also with an adult education school, Fishburne, teaching ESL. I loved Charleston and I would have stayed but with the increase in housing around 2022 it really was almost impossible to buy a home, so we all moved to Clearwater Florida. Now I have been here two and a half years, and I freelance, work at an adult education school here as well AND do some accounting. In short, I have loads of experience teaching English, some in Spanish a quite a bit in Italian too. I still freelance if the price and person is right, I don’t have time to waste. So, if you’re interested, please look me up and we can have a chat about this. Until then, keep curious and keep learning always! |