Recently graduated college student looking to help children/teenagers learn English as a second language in the Portland metropolitan area.

I can speak to Joshua’s academic strengths, having had him in many of my literature and theory courses, but perhaps even more relevant for a position teaching. English abroad is his success as a student mentor for our First Year Seminar program. Joshua mentored for one of my colleagues, but I selected him for a mentoring position and served as an evaluator for the course. Pacific University’s First Year Seminar is designed to help students transition into college life, both culturally and academically, and to help develop strong writing and critical thinking skills. Each course has its own theme, and the course Joshua mentored for focused on the theme of Critical Frames: Illusions and Reality. As a student mentor, Joshua’s role was to provide support and guidance for the students, keep track of and review extracurricular projects, hold office hours to provide assistance for papers, lead one course discussion, and give one lecture. Joshua’s lecture presented different critical approaches, including materialist, psychoanalytic, and postmodernist, to the film Night Crawler. He did a remarkable job of providing context and history without seeming pedantic, and of making challenging material accessible and interesting to freshmen. I was astonished at the ease and confidence with which Josh took to teaching his own class. I told him directly afterwards that he was a natural teacher and should go into higher education. Josh proved to be an ideal student mentor: the students looked up and admired him, but also clearly valued his approval and friendship. Students seem to take to Josh immediately: he is at once responsible and accessible, organized and easy-going. He enjoys what he was doing and deeply appreciates intellectual ideas and academic material but also popular culture and entertainment as well, which makes him very relatable to the students. Joshua’s leadership skills in the classroom indicate to me that he would be a perfect candidate for teaching English language, literature, or other subjects.