On teaching English

So apparently, I sound authoritative enough to be a teacher!

At least, this is according a random man who was a colleague of the guy who runs the English classes, which I'm now helping to teach. Indeed, I made it over there this past weekend--it's a bit of a trek; I have to walk to the center of town to take the bus that will then take me off in another direction for 15 minutes to actually get there, so all in all it's about a 45 minute commute. Still, it wasn't hard to find from there, and it ended up being rather fun. It's a pretty disorganized set up, all told, since it's free and people can show or not show whenever, but we ended up sitting around small tables with reading assignments and worksheets.

Most of the people coming in have been living in the UK for a year or more, so they know enough English to communicate the basics, but there's a lot of vocabulary missing, and/or the nuances of the differences between similar words aren't there. I mostly followed the lead of the one teacher who's actually gotten qualified to teach English at first, and as she was not a native speaker herself, her approach was definitely one I'll want to imitate. So as we went through some reading she would lead with questions and I would supplement with definitions of words and troubleshoot.

Eventually, however, I ended up working one-on-one with one woman who was clearly several steps behind the rest of the group. It was difficult, but difficult in a fun way, as a lot of her questions were ones that I wasn't always prepared to answer--for example, how does one define 'shame' or 'embarrassment'? I couldn't use synonyms, since those wouldn't be understood either, so I had to go for examples, and sometimes without cultural context, examples became hard too. It was a creative challenge to come up with situational examples that were universal and clear, and I don't think I always succeeded. I definitely had to go back a couple times and say, 'Wait, that was a terrible explanation, let me try again.' Luckily we were both patient with each other!

Anyway, we managed to get through half a worksheet over an hour or so, and it seemed like the woman was retaining some of it by the end, so overall I'd call it a success. In any case, I'll be going back next week, and hopefully I'll be able to do better. It's really satisfying to be able to hone my own skills of articulation (and piece apart the English language myself) while helping other people--I think teaching is actually getting more and more appealing as a general career on the whole. It's kind of really exciting. And given the comment from Random Man at the end of the session, I fit the general profile pretty well!