On Work
I told Adam yesterday that I would happily spend the rest of my life doing nothing but teaching extra-super-beginner English to little old ladies, if that were possible. Surely, somewhere on the planet, that's possible. When you're faced with a group of intermediate-level students, they're all saddled with different problems -- some need accent reduction, some can't master tenses, some have prepositions flying all over the place -- and they all seem to hit their inevitable learning plateaus at inconveniently different times. But with beginners, you have a good idea of what areas they will find problematic, and you know exactly what you can arm yourself with: typical greetings, repetition, wild gestures, familiar brand names, and cognates. This school is different from my program in Japan, in that translation from one language to another is not something to send wide-eyed students running to the front office with complaints. I still can't get into that mindset, though, so when my students use Spanish, it's my first instinct to say, "Shhh! English, please!" and my eventual second thought to help them translate their Spanish into English. My Spanish has been coming back to me; it's like getting free Spanish lessons in return for teaching there.
Just as I was getting used to the thought of walking from the language school to Borders in the afternoons to shelve books or make chai for $7.50 an hour, the school tossed more classes my way. I'm now the sole instructor for a TOEFL-prep student from South Korea, I'm helping design the curriculum for a group class, and my delicate-figured, delicately-accented French boss leaned in to me today in the front office and said, "There is a new intensive student coming, yes? Almost a done deal. More classes for you, yes?"
Why, yes. I still don't know if it'll be enough, though. Tomorrow's an unwanted day off.
There are some other interesting teachers there. There's Lola, who, if she doesn't teach Spanish, French, and Italian, is at least fluent in all of them. She wears a fur coat, matching hat, and huge glasses. I don't want to cross her ("But just because she speaks a bunch of languages doesn't mean she doesn't deserve a can of red paint thrown on that coat." -- Adam). There's Chris, a fellow English teacher, who reads the Drudge Report every morning in the teachers' room and spends his weekends drawing caricatures at parties and carnivals and such. There's a French woman, some sort of coordinator, who has a big corner office but prefers to spend her time sashaying up and down the hallways in her noisy, metallic mass of pleated skirts, piping out perfect little airy melodies, turning our gray-carpeted warren of classrooms into a nunnery of northern France, circa 1885.
It is a pleasant place, so different from the rest of the squat, square office building it's in, with its unlit parking garage and its bargain-basement college on the first floor, where people take Intro to Windows and smoke in the women's restroom. I am always a little sorry to have to leave, because stepping off the fifth floor means facing an Atlanta commute -- two radio stations playing the same insecurely guitar-driven pop song that sounds like a self-esteem lesson from the fourth grade; nine lanes at the toll booth suddenly merging into three, in a messily choreographed chrome weave. Some cars hang back, others surge ahead, and I always hold my breath with hope and horror and somehow end up in the middle at a gracefully constant speed. These city limits are always bending and sighing under the headiness of history, when all the while their current people are flinging themselves off to the suburbs at ninety miles an hour.
Just as I was getting used to the thought of walking from the language school to Borders in the afternoons to shelve books or make chai for $7.50 an hour, the school tossed more classes my way. I'm now the sole instructor for a TOEFL-prep student from South Korea, I'm helping design the curriculum for a group class, and my delicate-figured, delicately-accented French boss leaned in to me today in the front office and said, "There is a new intensive student coming, yes? Almost a done deal. More classes for you, yes?"
Why, yes. I still don't know if it'll be enough, though. Tomorrow's an unwanted day off.
There are some other interesting teachers there. There's Lola, who, if she doesn't teach Spanish, French, and Italian, is at least fluent in all of them. She wears a fur coat, matching hat, and huge glasses. I don't want to cross her ("But just because she speaks a bunch of languages doesn't mean she doesn't deserve a can of red paint thrown on that coat." -- Adam). There's Chris, a fellow English teacher, who reads the Drudge Report every morning in the teachers' room and spends his weekends drawing caricatures at parties and carnivals and such. There's a French woman, some sort of coordinator, who has a big corner office but prefers to spend her time sashaying up and down the hallways in her noisy, metallic mass of pleated skirts, piping out perfect little airy melodies, turning our gray-carpeted warren of classrooms into a nunnery of northern France, circa 1885.
It is a pleasant place, so different from the rest of the squat, square office building it's in, with its unlit parking garage and its bargain-basement college on the first floor, where people take Intro to Windows and smoke in the women's restroom. I am always a little sorry to have to leave, because stepping off the fifth floor means facing an Atlanta commute -- two radio stations playing the same insecurely guitar-driven pop song that sounds like a self-esteem lesson from the fourth grade; nine lanes at the toll booth suddenly merging into three, in a messily choreographed chrome weave. Some cars hang back, others surge ahead, and I always hold my breath with hope and horror and somehow end up in the middle at a gracefully constant speed. These city limits are always bending and sighing under the headiness of history, when all the while their current people are flinging themselves off to the suburbs at ninety miles an hour.