Testimonials

I would like to congratulate you Xenia for the multi-faceted and difficult task you are serving with great success. I am grateful that at least my last child, Irene, has the luck to enjoy education and personal support by you. I wish you strength and energy to continue offering your soul to children and parents as our society is suffering from lack of this humanistic offer.

Christos and Andriana Gregoriou (parents of two of my students – 2015)

Dear Xenia, your lesson for us parents and your words today got me thinking and reflecting quite significantly. I am just really sorry I missed the previous lessons, seminars and presentations. your contribution to the community of parents and generally the world is amazing. I doubt that there is another teacher like this thank you for everything you offer us for free!

Nancy Panagopoulou (mother of three of my students – 2014)

You created a ‘patience passport’ for us and for our kids! What an inspiration! I thought I knew so much being a teacher and a mother so many years. But every time I listen to you I realize that I know so little. If all parents and teachers follow your advice beautiful teacher, the world will be so much better. I leave with great feelings. I learned a lot and I am in a hurry to utilize them.

Aglaia Pisi (mother of two of my students – 2017)

Keep up with your outstanding job in inspiring, building self-confidence and planting the seed of energy the youngsters need to succeed in life. Congratulations!

Stavros Michaelides (father of two of my students – 2015)

Another life lesson! We needed to be shaken and to be puzzled and to be pushed! Thank you, your lively, passionate speech creates personalities and awakens consciousness. Keep being so creative. We need to realize that just becoming parents does not make us experts. We need your help so keep offering it to us.

Irene Koulle (mother of two of my students – 2015)

Thank you for your active presence in the lives of our children and in our lives. You give us knowledge, you teach our kids English in an amazing way but above all you give a piece of your soul!

Vasos Christophorou (father of one my students – 2013)

My Dear Xenia,
It is with great respect that I would like to express a huge thank you. Thank you for teaching us and for leading us. Your example and ability to positively affect us is unique; I remember you years ago as my own teacher at college and I can confess that the English I know I learnt it from you. Thank you for your efforts to make us better people and better parents. Congratulations! I love you!

Anna Ioannides (mother of one of my students – 2013)

You always manage to ground us with your words, your wisdom and with very basic games and activities that we would never have thought of; and you do manage to get results. Keep up the great work and good luck with your PhD!

Myria Lamari (mother of two of my students – 2013)

My dear amazing Xenia,
Today you gave me strength to try and elevate my own self-esteem in order to manage to help my own children. I am leaving with two words in my mind from your speech-WORK….TEAM. I need to team up with myself and my kids and work, work, work till I make it! Thank you Xenia.

Irene Michael (mother of three of my students – 2012)

I am leaving your presentation wiser and deeply moved. I am heading home to hug my children and to tell them again how much I love them. Continue

Sophie Ioannou (mother of two of my students – 2012)

When I adopted my daughter, I knew it would be a hard journey; too many psychological and educational difficulties and traumas that many times neither me nor the many psychologists could handle. Until we met you Xenia. I am simply grateful, and I thank you.Within a few years of my daughter Chara being your student, you simply made her fly.

Froso Ieropoullou (mother of one of my students – 2014)

An inexhaustible source of inspiration, love and education; that’s what you are Xenia. I will never stop learning from you.

Marita Skoullou (mother of one of my students – 2011)

You always fill my strength and positivity batteries.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Can I still come to your seminars when my son Alex graduates?

Maria Alexandrou (mother of four of my students – 2011)

I do not regret that I trusted you with my three children.
Thank you and may God give you the strength to always be by our side. We need you!

Elpida Michael (mother of one of my students – 2010)

Simple, full of knowledge and experience but above all human. It is hard to build bridges as you pointed out. It is so much easier to build walls; yet in your presentation you showed us the huge difference of the two and the outcome in our relationships with our children and the world in general. Thank you Xenia for caring about our children and the world.

Rebecca Michaelidou (mother of three of my students – 2016)

Congratulations! One of the best presentations I have ever attended in my life. I leave more optimistic about life and child raising. I admire your passion for teaching, but I mostly admire the passion you show in helping our own children with every single problem they have. I have followed your advice many times and the results were simply great! Thank you.

Maria Georgiou (mother of two of my students – 2011)

You always teach us lessons of life and you have a way to combine them with knowledge and it is simply great and we need it so much. Thank you! I will tell the stories to my children and as you suggested apart from asking them about their scores and their grades, I will concentrate on their feelings and their ideals and on the creation of happy people rather than robots with high grades. We needed the push to ‘wake’ up and get back to the basics which we took for granted.

Lia Theodoulou (mother of two of my students – 2010)

Xenia, you used to be my own English teacher at Frederick University. You amazed me with your fresh, innovative ideas and you actually managed to calm the whole wild class down and to teach us the English language by combining it with life, with our concerns and worries and our joys. You actually brought a whole new world into the classroom and we were learning happily. Years later, I came to watch you as the teacher of my son, at a presentation about experiential education, self-esteem and child management. What amazed me so many years later is that I saw now what I always saw in you and I thanked God that it has not changed over the years; and I remembered one of the basic reasons I managed to do so much in my life after all the hurdles I went through. I remember the life messages I got from you in class back then: that there are many perspectives in every situation and that a road cannot and will not always be straight. Thank you for those games in class that carved morals and messages in our minds. Continue to show the way and I promise that we, your ex-students and current parents of your students will continue to spread those ideals and messages to our children and people who need them; because everyone in life needs a teacher like you: who teachers her subject but also changes lives through her methods and ways and character.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart because that is where you are and that is where you will stay.

George Skoullos (ex-student and father of my current student Spyros Skoullos – 2018)

Your words will guide me even when I am not present. Thank you.

George Hadjipavlou (16 years old – Class of 2018)

Thank you for the wise answers in my personal 13-15-year-old diary; and thank you for bringing it to me as you promised when I graduated, on my wedding day, wrapped up in a beautiful box with a frame of a picture of you and me hugging each other on the school final party. You are an inspiration Ms. Xenia. When my husband and I read that diary we simply cried; and those were tears of joy for having the honor to have met and been taught by a teacher like you, who knows how to teach but above all who knows how to love.

Nicole Ioannides Varnava (Class of 1992)

Dear Mrs. Xenia, more like my second mother I guess. I just wanted to tell you that you are the most inspiring woman in my life, no jokes. You are my role model, the woman I am looking forward to looking alike. You are authentic and one day I wish I can spread some magic to the people as you do now!

Chloe Georgiou (16 years old – Class of 2018)

An energized 14-year-old in the body of a wise, educated, professional woman. Could you ever not listen to her? No chance. Even I followed her advice and passed my English exam and I did it with pleasure despite my dislike for teachers and school in general.

George Kyriakou (16 years old – Class of 2018)

The bravest woman-teacher I have met so far. She does make a difference in the class but also in the world. She manages to affect the society through her teaching as she miraculously links in class work with societal issues and community service; and she does it so skillfully that we all see it as a fun game. Respect!

Andreas Tziambos (16 years old – Class of 2018)

My dear Xenia,
you are not a simple teacher; you are a unique person, a woman who provides encouragement and inspiration in the souls of students simply because you have a great genuine love and deep awareness of these souls and that is the reason you are able to touch them and leave your mark forever. I feel very blessed to have met you and to have been taught by you.

Maria Mavrogenous (Class of 1992)

Good morning Ms. Xenia,
I have just published my first book and I felt the need to send you this email, 20 years after the last day I saw you in class as my English teacher. I am Lysandros Lysandrou; I don’t know if you remember me. I am the young man whose English were horrible, the boy who told you after the first lesson ‘Ms. Xenia, you need to know that I will never learn English’. Your answer is still carved in my memory. You looked at me with your expressive eyes, you smiled at me and said, ‘what is your name?’ ‘Lysandros’, I answered and then you addressed me with my name and said ‘great name…. well, my dear Lysandros I want you to remember that in my class the word ‘never’ and ‘cannot’ are not allowed. Will you make a deal with me? Say ‘of course I can learn English, because my friend Ms. Xenia will make sure I will’ and you gave me your hand for the handshake and the deal. And I believed you. And you did it. In the two years that followed I followed you everywhere. At break time, in the cafeteria, in class… with lots of questions; and you always had an answer and a simplified way of explaining the most difficult concepts.
My published story has a lot of ‘Xenia’ in it. The most inspiring and touching thing about your teaching is not the typical things that every English teacher or book teachers us; the most inspiring and memorable lessons were the messages you instilled in our minds and souls though story telling and through songs. You taught us to never give up and to pursue our dreams no matter what. You taught us to stand before an audience and to present without fear but always with respect to our audience and their needs. You taught us not to be afraid of mistakes and failure because our failures and mistakes can become our teaching tools. In my story, the one I published, the hero turns his problem into a strength; and it is definitely not a coincidence that my story has its own song… just like the memorable songs you always used in class to teach us language. Thank you teacher Xenia. You deserve this title. Follow the link to my book on amazon and if you like it please send me a note.

Lysandros Lysandrou (Frederick University Course)

My dear teacher Ms. Xenia,
I felt the need to send you this letter as I am now in a conference in the USA with my current job and I have just finished presenting in front of a huge audience. As the audience was applauding, I felt the need to scream to them ‘please save your applause for Ms. Xenia, my one and only teacher, the person who managed to take me out of my shell and to turn me from a worm into a beautiful butterfly’. Honestly Ms. Xenia, everything you taught me as a teenager in your classes of English and life, every single writing technique, listening tip, vocabulary awareness, passage management, vocabulary learning though songs, storytelling, public speaking, verbal and non-verbal communication….everything, would simply be meaningless and it would be forgotten, had it not been for your passion, innovative and crazy, out of the box creative techniques and your moral lessons that touched our souls and made us shed tears. Today, I stand here in this huge conference room as a young adult and I tell you ‘continue to spread the light in the minds and the hearts of the young people you teach’. Thank you teacher!

Eliana Aravi (Class of 1998)

My dearest Ms. Xenia,
Thank you for being near me all these years. Thank you for everything you have taught me, thank you for being in my life, thank you for being YOU. Words cannot describe everything I learnt from your lessons. You have a way to make each lesson special and unique, helpful for our English and helpful for our lives as well. I believe you deserve all the hugs in the world. I will always be grateful to you and also I will always feel lucky to have been your student.

Stefania Christophidou (16 years old – Class of 2018)

Dear Ms. Xenia,
After attending your classes for 9 years, I simply need to tell you that I am not ready to leave you forever. This journey has been an unforgettable experience, a magnificent way to educate me not only on an educational level but also on a personal, psychological, character level. Throughout your teaching and through the years in your school I have grown as a learner but also as a person: I learned perfect English, passed my University Exams with distinction but I also matured, learnt to behave, to respect, to have values important to a child, a teenager and a decent adult. If someone asked me what will stay from my years with you I would answer the following:
The smell of your coffee, mixed with the essential oils you always used in class with a diffuser to boost our energy and fix our mood, your huge smile and very distinctive voice always asking us how we felt or complimenting us on our looks, hair, clothes when we felt that nothing on us looked right; But above all, what will always be carved in my heart will be the way you looked at us, filled with love, warmth. We felt as if you gave birth to all of us; and here I need to add a huge thank you for always believing in us as a professional, as a woman, as a teacher, as a mother. You believed in us and in our capabilities when we ourselves doubted ourselves. I will always remember the laughter, the tears of gratitude, the stress relief techniques that always accompanied our lessons which were lessons of English but above all, lessons of life, of struggle of not giving up, of learning to look at everything form a different perspective; they were lessons of exceeding limits, of failing and trying again, of being taught the right techniques to tackle language exams, of using music and songs to learn vocabulary which would never be forgotten. Hard and unpleasant exam papers became creative games by you and difficult vocabulary became a competition between us and we had no option but to learn and to learn with style and with fun and with love. But we did not only learn language; we learnt moral lessons from your personal stories on love, survival, poverty, even funny cooking tips which became amazing speaking lesson like the amazing real story “how to protect your canary from ending up in your soup’ which stirred up so much creative writing in our class. As you can see I can speak for hours about my positive memories from your lessons.
Thank you Ms. Xenia, mother, teacher, friend. You will always be in my heart.

Rafaella Solomou (17 years old – Class of 2018)

Dear Ms. Metaxa,
During the time I spent as your student in your teacher training/leadership course I have learnt new ways to build community within my classrooms and I am excited, because I will soon have many opportunities to use this knowledge in my classroom and in the seminars I will give to colleagues next year.
You also turned on my “reflection machine” and it seems that I will be doing a great amount of thinking about my personal philosophy concerning leadership and teaching methodologies. It is an interesting quest and I thank you for setting me off for it.
Finally, I thank you sincerely for the warm atmosphere you created during your lessons.
I am looking forward to the next module we will have together.

Katerina Trimi (Teacher Training Course)