NATALIJA POPOVIC

You learn as long as your teacher is alive! Ok, that is a joke. My students learn, but so do I through them. Every new student, every new day, every new class is a new experience. Therefore, teaching languages is wonderful, and what is even more wonderful is that I have an opportunity to be an ambassador of my own language and culture.

I teach Serbian as a foreign language and that way I see it through a different set of eyes. I am constantly in contact with people and that is a real fortune. I am a bachelor of Turkish language and literature, so I find it interesting to keep finding parallels between the Turkish and Serbian languages, to unravel to our students the Serbian words that originate from Turkish and explain why those words found their way into the Serbian language. We get to the topics of history and culture, and then students start speaking about their cultures, and those are just wonderful experiences.

At e-word, I have a freedom to be creative while teaching, and that can really be seen in the quality of our classes. It is a wonderful feeling when a curriculum is not the most important thing, but the knowledge gained through our classes and the fact that students can tell us what they wish to learn and how they learn best.

And to sum up with a saying: when you do something you love, it stops being a job or a chore, it becomes a calling!