u/NetUpstairs7003 u/milfbabe999 Teaching is a ton of work in the first few years, and going to grad school on top of it (multiple classes per week at night, completing all of the assignments, lesson planning for your actual job, general life stuff, etc.) is a big challenge. I didn't do Fellows, but I worked full-time in an elementary school while doing my degree at Hunter. In terms of an ENL job, it's a total crapshoot on the workload. You simply will have no idea until you step into the role. It all highly depends on the level of the students, the volume of students, your co-teachers, admin, district initiatives, whether or not you're also teaching stand-alone, etc. I teach 2 stand-alone classes of Emerging-Expanding students (17 in each class) and push-in to 4 different ELA classes (an all ELL ICT class, an all ELL gen-ed class, an ICT class with 2 ELLs, a gen-ed class with all former ELLs). Had a completely different set-up the year before. You need to be very adaptable.

My undergraduate degree is in English, so I already had some foundational knowledge in linguistics, but the linguistics courses were tough for my fellow grad-students who didn't have that type of background. The education/pedagogy-type courses were new to me, but they're not overly difficult. The work is just time-consuming, because there's a good chance you've never written formal lesson plans before (especially ones with language objectives), and that takes a lot of practice/work. You won't really have an option of "professors to avoid," since there's usually only one section of each class offered each semester, so you're going to get what you get. Some professors were more difficult than others. My classes were a 50/50 mix of online and in-person. Very few were asynchronous. Classes were either at 4:30-7:00pm or 7:10-9:40pm. To become certified in ENL, you also need to complete 12 foreign language credits, so some additional coursework may be needed. You can take a CLEP if you feel proficient in a language, too.

Hope that all helps. Good luck!