I’m Damian and I teach all of the classes at Earthlings Learning. For those interested, this is a little blurb about who I am, how I started Earthlings and some of my approach to teaching.
I began my teaching career in 2010 after finishing my undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing. Having grown up in a fairly small industrial town in Somerset, England, I wanted to explore the world and decided to try out English language teaching. I did a CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) then set off to China for my first taste of living and working abroad.
I found that I rather liked teaching, the places it took me and the people it introduced me to so became somewhat hooked, spending the next ten years seeing where it could take me. I spend some time in Istanbul, Sicily, Paris and three years on and off in Japan. Along the way I learned a lot about different cultures and environments but after ten years began to look for something a bit different.
I’ve had a life-long interest and passion in the natural world, ever since watching Attenborough on my grandfathers knee when I was about five and spent much of my youth on my own knees looking for interesting bugs or climbing trees.
One thing that stood out during my travels was the pressures the natural environment faces in all parts of the world so I decided to take the plunge and study a masters degree in Environmental Management in 2018. Having had pretty poor science education in my youth it was a big challenge but I leveraged my knowledge of people, policy and language to pass with a Distinction.
Quite by chance and some helping hands, in 2021 I found myself teaching again, this time teaching Environmental Management to home-educated students and other people engaged in alternative education systems where I feel that I’ve at last found a place to combine my passions.
The principle of the classes is to be as engaging as possible, dealing with often complex subject matter in as enthusiastic, informal and simple style as possible. One thing I’ve certainly carried over from English teaching is that it should be fun. Having had the enthusiasm beaten out of me at secondary school, I try and foster as positive a learning environment as I can.
Exam preparation and technique is extremely important, especially for students who want to attain high grades but alongside this I try to relate our learning to real life and the world around us which will involve some tangents but I firmly believe that this is an important part of the learning process.
Being somewhat neurodivergent myself (I would be diagnosed with ADHD these days, but back then I was just a troublesome/inattentive child) I try and foster an environment based on enthusiasm and student-driven motivation. While I wanted to get into the sciences as a kid, I found the teaching environment so alien to my style of learning that I never got the chance and hope to instead help others on that journey.
I’m a firm believer that if you want to help make the world a better place, everything flows from education and it’s my earnest hope to be able to help students better understand the world they live in and help pass on some skills and understanding to help them on their educational journeys, wherever it may take them!
