My Name is Kate and I'm a Teacher

Kate, I have a question.
A female student grabbed me by the arm looking all worried and asked, "Kate, if I only say 'my daughter' instead of 'our daughter', would people get the impression that I'm divorced?"

After teaching how to use the present and future tenses to express future, a studious student looked up from her notebook, covered with neat tiny hand prints, and said, "Could you tell us the exact percentage of the level of certainty with each sentence?"

I just came out of the bathroom and a student was pacing in the foyer with a rolled-up notebook in his hands. When he looked at me, his eyebrows were tangled and he looked as if he was in great pain. "Are you alright?" I asked (that was the mistake). He hit me with this question, "What's the difference between 'continuous' and 'continual'"? I was still drying my hands from my visit to the bathroom for crying out loud!

Students are Social Animals Too
I had been trying to figure out where the awkward vibe came from in my high-intermediate evening conversation class. They can work together, but they don't seem to jive. They laugh at my jokes, but they don't nudge and share a quick exchange of comments afterward. I decided to try something new as a way of getting to know what's going on in my classroom.

We learned to make polite requests in different ways last Friday. At the end of the class, the homework I assigned was for my students to put a request (for anyone in the class) on the class website. Depending on who they're asking, they'd need to adjust the language they used to ask for the favor. The end result was 17 new messages in my email. That confirmed my suspicion: They never gelled as a class ('cause they were not comfortable with their classmates seeing what they had produced) and they probably never will. It's really too bad 'cause some of them are really funny and wacky. I emailed them back individually with a silly comment. When I finished emailing them back, my brain was fried.

What Makes it All Worthwhile
My afternoon half-day students have been reading Penguin Reader "Billy Elliot", and we finished it on Monday. They enjoyed the book so much that some of them admitted that they had gone ahead and finished the whole thing a week earlier. On Tuesday they had their first quiz and we watched a part of the movie "Billy Elliot" afterward. We had the English subtitles on because the accent would've made it nearly impossible for them to understand. While we were watching the movie, I noticed they were saying some words and phrases in that heavy northern British accent in the movie. It was fun to watch these lower-intermediate-level adult EFL students, who had probably never enjoyed learning English before, having fun imitating what was said in a movie in that "strange" accent. Since they had read the book and learned about all the characters in the story, they burst out shouting a character's name while pointing at the screen when they recognized who that was..... like children do.

After the class, I saw some of my students in front of the bookshelf discussing which book they want to read next; others were exchanging phone numbers for a viewing of the movie at a student's place this weekend.