Celebrate those who put their hand up to help this Volunteer Week
National Volunteer Week (19-25 May) is the perfect time to thank all of those who give up their time to help others.
One of the areas at GOTAFE where volunteers offer their services is in language courses, where volunteer tutors spend time with students in order to help them with their conversational English.
Recently retired Ken Cameron – who has been helping at GOTAFE for around a year – is one of these volunteers.
“I retired last year (and) I had been an English teacher many, many years ago so that makes it a bit easier because I had done teaching before,” Ken said.
“There’s a group of volunteer tutors and basically we provide a bit of extra (help) to the English lessons.
“There’s a class of around 15-20 students and then what they try to do is give them an additional hour of conversation with a volunteer person and there’s probably around a dozen or more volunteers on the list.”
Ken and the other volunteer tutors help mostly with real-world English skills, either in or outside of a classroom setting.
“We come in and do conversation classes or conversation lessons really with (up to four) students each,” Ken said.
“We can meet anywhere, you can take people down the street and a lot of it is (basic stuff) like what the traffic signs mean and what the pedestrian rules are.
“Recently we used a little bit about the election as an example of the government structure in Australia, talking about the different parties and that everyone goes and votes on a particular day and all that sort of stuff.
“I’ve always loved helping people and teaching and stuff like that so I enjoy that.”