On Saturdays around 40 students (mainly from the cities of Donetsk and Makeevka) converge on campus to learn English. The classes range from beginner to pre-intermediate. I was brave/crazy enough to agree to teach the pre-intermediate class. I have 8 students who are anywhere in the 14-35 age range. They are, for the most part, very motivated to learn English yet getting most of them to talk is sometimes difficult. The premise of the class is that we will spend half of the time conversing and the other half working through grammar.
My background is in teaching, but math is quite different than ESL and over the last few weeks I have often wished I owned “Teaching ESL for Dummies” (to clarify, the students are not the “dummies” most of the time so you can guess who is). Nothing against my high school English teacher (who was the best and was probably my inspiration in choosing the teaching profession) but I have really been struggling with teaching some of the grammar. For the most part I know what sounds right, but I am not able to explain rules (and exceptions) very well. In high school, I told my English teacher that I was going to modify the English language and write a textbook where there were no exceptions. Rules that work most of the time are difficult for a math guy to teach, and preparing for 3+ hours of teaching on Saturday mornings is far more time consuming than I had anticipated. But the students are great and I am happy to help the university earn a little money to pay some of the bills.
Dave
