I am not sure if you are aware, dear readers, this post marks one year for this blog. So much has changed in the last year. Teaching-wise I am starting to move away from online a bit. I will keep some of my online students through VIPKid, as the company acceptance rate is only about 12% of applicants hired. That’s 4% lower than Princeton’s acceptance rate. But I am happy to report that I have my first in real life consistent student from The English Center for 8 90-minute lessons. In fact, we met for the first time last night. We are to meet barring any complications on Monday evenings. Poor Felix. We have had to cut his lesson on Monday to just an hour. For me, that means that Monday will be a full 8 1/2 hour teaching day. I hope that my new student, we’ll call him Rex, does not want to change the Monday lesson. Speaking of Felix, we spent last week working on phrasal verbs, which to me is one of the hardest things to teach and the hardest thing to learn for students. In fact, I think I need to dial it down and teach more about prepositions first.
Over in the suburbs of Amsterdam, Carlton and I met on Tuesday, after an absence of two weeks. His mom canceled the previous Tuesday. With him, we continue with our spelling course and working on extracting relevant information from word problems to solve them, which are two things that he struggles with. Last Tuesday, we also played a funny version of a memory game. Instead of trying to guess where the words were by flipping over the cards we actually mix them up and put them word side up. When he found a pair he had to make a sentence with the word. These little flash cards I got from his teacher at the British school. The list is made up of words that year two students commonly misspell.
I also have a new student as a result of the Amsterdam language café. We’ll call her Janice. She is looking to improve her conversational English as well as IT terminology as she wants to go back to work and wants to switch careers to software development. I am particularly excited by this opportunity because I think there need to be more women in stem. There aren’t enough of us in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. And I kind of feel really good that I’m doing a small part to remedy that. Long ago were the days of my own study of Physics, and while I do not regret the path my life took, I love being able to stay current with industries that don’t have very many women at all.
Over in the writing world, I have discovered the word wars help me a lot. I can at least get some writing done in the context of a meeting. And since my English language story for the German/Polish market is currently on hold, I have gone back to the novel. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about when my novel here. It is an urban fantasy set in Scotland specifically in Edinburgh with a cast of characters that kind of resembles the cast of Scooby Doo. Minus the great Dane and mystery machine. There’s also lots more magic and less unmasking. It’s taken me seven years to get to 55,000 words. Not all of them Nanowrimo. I am really happy to be able to connect with my characters and that they are talking to me again.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. Stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 