A Plea for Comments

Wednesday November 11th 2009 10:00am

The title has nothing to do with the entry, I would just enjoy reading your comments, so feel free to leave them. Feedback is always great, but it can be even better to hear about how you are doing.

Yesterday was a very enjoyable day for me. When I got to work, Cristian, Heidy, Betza and Edgardo were talking about learning English and enrolling in a course at a local school. They had talked about the possibility before, and in the back of my head, I had the idea that I could teach them a little bit of English each day. I hadn´t said anything before, but yesterday, I offered my services as an English teacher.

They all seemed very excited at the idea of me teaching them English, and we resolved to have a half hour long "class" after lunch.

I spent a good portion of my morning preparing for the class, which proved to be more difficult than I had originally thought it would be. I remembered having a Spanish teacher in school who was a teacher and who was from Latin America. She was terrible. I remembered thinking that just because someone knows a language doesn´t mean that they can teach it.

So, I tried my best to approach the class through the eyes of the student, and we started with the alphabet and the numbers 1-100. It was a very fun class for me, and I think they enjoyed it too. Learning the number six was especially humorous for me, though I had difficulty explaining why I was laughing uncontrollably when the each of them kept saying the word "sex". I tried repeating the word "six" with better pronounciation, but it just led to the four of them sitting around a table staring at their papers saying "sex, sex, sex, sex, sex."

The class went on for an hour, and we didn´t finish all that I had thought we would get done. That was fine with me, though, and I look forward to the next lesson.

The rest of the day, I worked on a budget proposal, showed Marisela some of the stuff I had been working on with regards to websites, and read a few more of the essays from the Saturday class.

Traffic was light, so I arrived home a little bit earlier than normal and read some more of Betza´s thesis. For dinner I made pancakes, and I watched the Tim Burton version of Willy Wonka in Spanish. I watched it without subtitles, and felt pretty good about my general understanding of what was going on. I´m slowly getting better and better with my Spanish, but there is still a lot of work to be done.