Chapter 1: “On how it all started”
Six months have already gone by and I still can’t believe my luck. Now I know, with the kind of certainty that comes once in a lifetime: DREAMS DO COME TRUE. Mine has. I’d better start writing about this turning point in my life or I’ll forget about the precious details that made this experience a life-changing moment.
In November 2013 I got an email from Oxford University Press (OUP) inviting me to take part in a competition. “Win a two-week all inclusive English Language Teachers’ Summer Seminar in Oxford”. This had always been my dream. For a number of reasons, I had never been able to achieve that goal. Yet, as it was the end of the school year in Argentina and I had loads of work to do, I read the email, thought “why not?”, but did nothing about it. Lessons finished eventually, I celebrated Christmas and New Year with my family, went away for the holidays and forgot about the whole thing.
I came back home by the end of January, as happy as a clam at high tide, and there it was, again: another email from OUP reminding me of the competition and telling me I still had a few more days to prepare and send my project to take part in the Headway Scholarship Competition. There were three different projects to choose from, and I seriously began considering the possibility of applying for it. I realized that the reason why I never win anything is because I don’t give it a shot, so I decided to do things in a different way this time.
This is how it all started: I devoted two full days of my life to write about “Headway makes a difference to teachers as well as students”. On 29th January, two days before the deadline, I had come up with the following:
Ten slides in Google Drive that pretty much comprised the work done with my 12th graders at school during the last couple of years, and how Headway had inspired us to do it.
I filled out the form, wrote a 100-word account on how winning this scholarship would make an impact in my life, attached my presentation and sent everything to OUP, with the secret hope of being the lucky one once in my life.
Exeter College - Front Quad
My first post!!!! :)
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