I Am A Teacher
I've had two lessons with my ESL student, two hours each. So we've spent four hours together and he is quite pleased.
I am pleased as well. So far my lessons have fit neatly into the time allotted and I never lost the interest of my student. He asks good questions and I think I do a reasonable job of explaining things to him. Plus we've been working hard on pronunciation.
So far, the topics we've covered:
- Movies, media
- Body Language
- Conversation (opening gambits, interrupting, chit chat, closing out conversations)
- Bureaucracy and office politics
- Common Reduced Forms in American English (wanna, gonna, letcha)
- Latin and Greek origins of words (briefly; we'll do more in-depth work on this in time)
- Borrowed words from other languages (brief history of immigration)
- Distortion/subjectivity (even in "objective" media)
- Emergencies
- American Holidays
- Political Parties: Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, Green, Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Constitution
- Geography of the USA (common terms, shorthand, regions)
- Education: Kindergarten, grammar school, middle school, high school, 2-year college, 4-year college, graduate school, technical degrees, certificates, training
- Baseball (American terms)
- More on word origins
- Stereotypes: race, nationality, job, hair color, humor
- Figuring out slang from context
- Clothing: e.g., threads versus treads
- Common Internet gathering places (social networking), words, phrases, quotes, and trends
- Weather (words, phrases, as a conversational gambit)
- Entertainment (music, movies, TV, theater)