My name is Ioana Dumitrescu and I am very happy to return to Avenor as a part-time Drama teacher. I restarted the collaboration with Avenor College in 2021 teaching the LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) English language drama club and I am very proud of the results obtained by the children who made the effort and finished the course with a fairly difficult online exam assessed by this prestigious British institution. 

My connection with Avenor, in fact, has never stopped. I left in 2014, but I have kept the friends I made in this warm and welcoming community which, sometimes, I missed. We have seen each other over time at various events and I am not surprised that my career path has brought me back to a place dear to my heart and I am convinced that we will have a long-term collaboration.

I am a  foreign language teacher. I have over 20 years of experience teaching Spanish and English. I have successfully taught and assessed Cambridge ESOL, IGCSE and A Levels in both languages. I have also gained experience in teaching theater in English over the years, also preparing for IGCSE Drama and the exams offered by LAMDA.

I have held various positions of responsibility in education over time: key stage coordinator, head of department, exams officer, deputy head, but nothing motivates and excites me more than drama and music, and I can say with great gratitude in my heart that I am a woman who earns her living from her talents put at the service of the younger generations. I like teaching foreign languages, but I like teaching theater and organizing shows just as much, or even more. I like to perform myself whenever I have the opportunity. This is my purpose. The satisfaction of seeing the children succeed with my help or, better said,  the help of the teams I’ve worked with over time is worth every hour or day spent with them because art always requires a lot of work if it is to be done with passion and care.  Working with people, motivating and inspiring them cannot be done without invested time and love, and a  drama exam is not an easy task. It is a challenge on several levels: managing personal emotions, understanding and building believable characters test and polish the communication skills of the students and, sometimes, also those of the teachers involved, because we also learn from the students! You can’t teach anybody anything really if you don’t try to look  into their souls and understand their mindset. Drama is also a discipline that helps enormously in the development of empathy, creativity and, last but not least, intuition.

So, I am starting this school year with a lot of energy and joy. It is a new beginning within an old friendship, with a lot of new people, too, with whom I am convinced that I will collaborate successfully.