I was asked to cover an evening shift at work tonight because the weather got a different teacher stuck in another city.
They were advanced classes, and they were a pleasure, because barely anyone showed up, and we just had conversations for four hours. The first class consisted of an elderly man from Chile and a young man from Albania, and we talked non-stop without taking a break. Then the next class had five students: two young men from Mexico, two men from the Dominican Republic and one woman from Gambia. We also talked for the duration. I wasn't skimping on the teaching intentionally, but it made no sense to take over someone else's class for one day with only a small fraction of their students present and try to move those students ahead of everyone else. So I just used the same techniques I learned in my first ever teaching job in Japan, where I was a conversation instructor. Correct a word here, suggest a better way to say it there, sneak in some vocabulary from time to time. It turns out that one of the students has been to the town neighboring my hometown many times. We played them in basketball all the time, and I loathed them. He had also been to another town, Bennington, Vermont, many times. One of my best friends lives there with his wife and kids, and I still visit whenever I can. Most of my students have never been outside New York City, and one of them knows my home area fairly well now. If only teaching were like that all the time!
On the way home I noticed the gates to this playground were open. I walk by it every day, but it's always closed in the morning. It was covered in snow tonight, and it was too cool to resist. There was an elephant that always reminds me of Ganesha, the patron saint of arts and letters invoked during writing sessions, and several pyramid shaped tops to the slides and jungle gyms. So I walked up under one of the pyramids, but the top was flat with a hole cut in the middle, so I could look up at the stars.
Genki.
They were advanced classes, and they were a pleasure, because barely anyone showed up, and we just had conversations for four hours. The first class consisted of an elderly man from Chile and a young man from Albania, and we talked non-stop without taking a break. Then the next class had five students: two young men from Mexico, two men from the Dominican Republic and one woman from Gambia. We also talked for the duration. I wasn't skimping on the teaching intentionally, but it made no sense to take over someone else's class for one day with only a small fraction of their students present and try to move those students ahead of everyone else. So I just used the same techniques I learned in my first ever teaching job in Japan, where I was a conversation instructor. Correct a word here, suggest a better way to say it there, sneak in some vocabulary from time to time. It turns out that one of the students has been to the town neighboring my hometown many times. We played them in basketball all the time, and I loathed them. He had also been to another town, Bennington, Vermont, many times. One of my best friends lives there with his wife and kids, and I still visit whenever I can. Most of my students have never been outside New York City, and one of them knows my home area fairly well now. If only teaching were like that all the time!
On the way home I noticed the gates to this playground were open. I walk by it every day, but it's always closed in the morning. It was covered in snow tonight, and it was too cool to resist. There was an elephant that always reminds me of Ganesha, the patron saint of arts and letters invoked during writing sessions, and several pyramid shaped tops to the slides and jungle gyms. So I walked up under one of the pyramids, but the top was flat with a hole cut in the middle, so I could look up at the stars.
Genki.
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