There’s a part of me that has a dream of a bucolic life in the middle of nowhere. I’d love the adventure of living in a hut in an African village or deep in the Amazon jungle. Both Mehmet and I love the idea of building a home ‘off the grid’ somewhere way north of here, with the challenge of living sustainably. We’d grow our own veggies and fruit trees and of course we’d have some sheep, goats and chickens!

It’s a bit of a paradox, then, how incredibly excited another part of me is when it comes to modern technology. For example, I can’t begin to explain how attached I am to my iPhone. It is so functional and helpful in my life (not to mention beautiful!). Homesteading and iPhones just don’t seem to mix. Philosophically, anyway.

Another way I’ve been enjoying modern technology is by teaching online.

This is Sun-Mi. About six weeks ago, I was meeting her at the library here in Toronto twice a week for English lessons.

Now, after a year in Toronto, she’s moved back to Seoul, South Korea. She is still studying for her IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam, so we are having lessons through Skype. That’s her brother Jake in the background. I taught him here too!

Skype is incredible. It’s so neat to be able to chat across the world with no delay. It’s free, and the convenience and efficiency of it all never ceases to amaze me.

We focus on speaking, and when she makes errors or needs some accurate vocabulary, I type it in the message box so she knows how to spell it. I keep track of all the new language I teach her, and drill her on it next time.

Part of the IELTS exam is being able to speak for 2 minutes on a topic that is provided by the examiner. In the box below the following picture, you can see I’ve cut and pasted a topic for her to talk about.

One of the concerns our international students have is that they will lose all their English skills once they return to their country – because they no longer have opportunities to practice it.

Speaking regularly online via Skype has several benefits for a student like Sun-Mi. First of all,  she saves a lot of time by not having to go to a language school for lessons. Secondly, she gets a LOT more speaking time by having one-on-one time with her teacher. And finally, she gets very specific feedback on her language, whereas if she were in a class, she’d get very limited attention.

And what about for me?

Well, sitting on my bed with a cup of coffee and my laptop? What can I say?

It’s win-win all around!

Maybe if Mehmet milks the goats, mows the grass and picks the berries… while I ’supervise’ from the back deck while sunbathing teaching online, we could live a modern life while still in the boondocks!

We have a lot of fun in our English class.  For the last three months, I’ve been teaching this small group of women. They are all internationally educated nurses, and the course helps them with communication skills.

They are all work-ready for Canada, which means they have passed the exam which qualifies to work as an RN or RPN in Canada.  When they tell me what that has involved, I’m amazed at the journey they’ve been on!

Some already have full-time jobs,  most have families,  and some drive or take the transit up to an hour to get to the course… such commitment!

The course is free for them – costs are covered by Canadian Immigration, and they really appreciate it.  I wish Canadians all over could observe these students, to see how hard they are working to be best prepared for a job here.

We do many interactive activities. They work in pairs and groups a lot, to help give as much talking time as possible. They really need to keep improving their spoken English, of course.

I don’t teach nursing content – I teach communication skills to use within the nursing workplace. There are so  many cultural components to working in Canada. And when you go into a field like nursing, you really need excellent communication skills!

This group has grown quite attached to each other. They’re supportive, fun, hard-working and ambitious.

In this task, they had to work in groups and decide how to react to a challenging patient – an adult male with a scalp wound was brought in to the hospital, swearing at staff and wanting to smoke.

We do lots and lots of role plays.

The students practice showing empathy. For example, it’s not okay to say ‘I understand how you feel’ because well, you probably don’t! So students learn to say, ‘I understand you are frightened.” For somebody whose first language is not English, this sounds almost the same – but the implications are quite different!

They learn how to reassure, (”We’re here to support you”,  “I don’t know the answers, but I can help you find them” , “We have a lot of experience dealing with this kind of treatment.”)

The scenarios and role plays we practice seem to be endless! But it’s amazing how much better they get at it over the weeks.

We also practice pronunciation of medications.  In the image below you se a Dominos game where students have to match words and word stress patterns. LIPitor is pronounced with this stress pattern: Ooo (accent on the first syllable). Although they know all the names in their language, and recognize them immediately in written form, it’s hard for them to remember the exact pronunciation – but we practice, practice, and practice… and they now remember them all!

I make grammar practice activities with a nursing focus. Here we were practicing tag questions.

We have discussions about what’s appropriate culturally in different contexts. Of special interest to them is how to interact appropriately with colleagues. Workplace culture varies so much around the world!

With these cards, the students worked in pairs to share a problem, with the partner using expressions appropriate for giving advice. “It’s important for you to…”,  “I think it would be a good idea for you to…”,  “Why don’t you…?”

There are a lot of different ways to use passive forms – and they are a real difficulty for lots of English learners.

The transfusion was done by Michelle.
The transfusion has already been done.
Has the transfusion already been done?

As you can see, I use a lot of cards. The reason I prefer cards to worksheets is because it allows them to mix up the order, without seeing what’s coming next. I make a set for each student so they can keep them handy and practice regularly – the size allows them to review on the bus, in a waiting room, even on the toilet! :)

And I’m always listening for errors that come up repeatedly. I collect them, we correct them, and then I give them an error correction sheet to help them practice, to test themselves.

I just noticed a mistake I made in one of my corrections in the column on the right.  Can you find it?

Anyway, it’s such a delightful, refreshing change from general ESL classes, and I’ve had such fun teaching the course!

Last week after class we had a potluck lunch! Everybody brought some food, and we enjoyed our last time as a complete group, since Janayna was leaving a couple days later for her hometown in Brazil.

There is so much comraderie among them – it’s a wonder that three months ago they didn’t know each other at all.

Jeannie (Korea), and Janayna (Brazil)

They gave me a Christmas gift – a huge basket full of bath and body stuff…. mmmmm!

And I handed out my boxes of baked goods that I had prepared for them.

Paramjeet demonstrated a little Punjabi dance…

Janayna rocked the Samba…

And Olga (Russia) showed Cynthia (China) some Cha-Cha-Cha moves.

I’m so attached to this group. You’d think by now it would be easy to move on from one class to another… but no, it is still very difficult!

What a blessing to be in their lives for a few months.

For the summer I’m teaching full-time at a great language school downtown. I’m grateful for the two months of work as I continue to adjust to the reality of the ESL industry here in Canada!

And what a great group I have this month! I’m amazed at the demographic variety from one month to another. In the summer there are a lot of students from Europe.

When I heard that more than half of my class would be Spanish students, I imagined a room full of spoiled Eurobrats with attitude. Shame on me! Instead I’ve been blessed with a group of very special young people:

Eight of them are from Spain, two from Brazil, two from Japan, one from Germany and one from Switzerland. ALL of them are bright, fun-loving and motivated.

I'm quite sure Jaime (on the left, from Spain) has a crush on one of the other girls in the class. I'm observing these young adult interactions with great interest!

Most of them are between the ages of 16 and 22, and they are here for a month of their summer vacation. It’s quite an adventure for them!

Caroline (in the blue) is here from Germany for only two weeks - then she's going travelling around Ontario and Quebec with her friend and her friend's parents who are here from Germany on holiday too.

They stay in ‘homestays’ with a Canadian family. This of course makes their stay in Canada more authentic in terms of language and culture. They find it quite intriguing that their homestay parents are (like so many people in Toronto) first or second generation Canadians.

Silvia teaches English to little chilren in Brazil. She is working very hard on her English and is determined to do lots of challenging homework while she's here.

This is a pre-advanced class, which means they are all at a high level of English. This allows us to have some great discussions in class!

Janine is from Switzerland and Michiko is from Japan. Michiko is here for half a year or so, like many of the Japanese students, who generally have much much less experience and confidence with English than the European students.

Here the students are practicing dialogues using ’should have’.

“Did you do well on the exam?”  “No, I didn’t study hard enough. I should have studied harder.”

They go on to practice different dialogues like this, then discuss their own regrets from decisions they’ve made.

Here we have moved out of the classroom to the lounge area where there’s more space. They are trying to solve a murder mystery.

Each student is given a character to play in the mystery, and have to collect information from other characters.

“Where were you at 8:00?”

“What were you doing when you heard Ms. Gillis scream?”

They go around collecting information – motives, alibis, clues…

Marcella is just 16, and she's the youngest in the class. This girl has such a vibrant spirit and infectious energy - quite typical of our Brazilian students!

The students have all expressed a desire for speaking as much as possible. In their own countries they have so few opportunities to use English in spoken discourse, so I try to give them lots of opportunites to do so in the classes.

Giving them task-based activities (for example, where they have to solve a problem, find a solution, etc.) gets them busy with a purpose, and they use language in a natural, fun way.

So even though we dig into grammar and explore, investigate and dissect it…

Even though we discover, drill and integrate new vocabulary…

Even though we focus on intonation and enunciation…

Even though we know that strong listening skills need some pretty intense work…

We all agree that interactive, fun activities like this are fantastic opportunites to put all our work into action – and as the students are focused on a fun task, they can easily forget that they are developing myriad language skills. And of course they are also building confidence, which most of them say is something that hinders them.

Patricia (on the left) is from Spain, and just today got news of her acceptance to the university of Madrid for September. She's done summer homestay/study trips to Scotland, England, and Boston before this summer in Toronto.

For me, the most enjoyable part of teaching is coming up with creative, fun ways for my students to practice the grammar and vocabulary they have been learning.

After all these years, it’s still a challenge, and it’s still lots of fun!

Since we moved to Toronto in February,  while looking (and looking, and looking) for a suitable job in management, I’ve been doing sub teaching off and on at a couple language schools here in the city. Despite the tiring nature of the job, there are endless rewards, and so many great aspects.

Language teachers who travel abroad to teach almost always work with a homogenous group of students. In Japan, for example, you teach all Japanese students. In Turkey, all Turkish.  One bonus, then, of teaching at a language school in an English-speaking country is that the students are not local – they are all international students. In Toronto, the majority of students come from Japan, Korea, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain and Saudi Arabia. But it’s not unusual to have students from many other countries too. In an evening class I teach, there are 15 students, with 12 nationalities! “We’re like the United Nations!” said a Lebanese student in delight on the first day.

This is me with one of my classes last month.  The nature of  language study means that students usually spend time with the same classmates for a month at most. Some are only in Toronto for a month, some for up to a year. But classes change – students move up to the next level, change to different classes, etc. They get quite attached to each other quickly, and on the last day of the month, there are bound to be group photos.

Three from Korea, four from Japan, two from Saudi Arabia, and one from Venezuela.

It’s heartwarming for me to see students working together and building friendships.

In an ESL classroom, the goal is usually to get the students speaking as much as possible so they get practice with new language structures and functions. This means the class is a lot more communicative than most. In a monolingual class abroad, students often slip back into their first language. But in a mixed-nationality classroom, we try to create activity partners and groups of different language groups, so they have to use English.

In fact, at this school, if any student is overheard speaking their own language in the school at any time during the day, they are sent home for the rest of the day! This includes breaks between classes, lunch time, etc. If a group of students is sitting in the lunch area at a table, and one student is overheard (by staff or a teacher) speaking their own language, the whole group is sent home! How’s that for harsh! It works – I love it! Trying to get students to stop using their first language is every ESL teacher’s nightmare.

On the last day with this group, I spent a few minutes one-on-one with each student, to see how they felt about the class, to discuss their goals, progress, etc. As I sat down with Takuro, the young Japanese guy below, he flopped his arms and head onto the table in front of him in exasperation and moaned, “Teacher, I must tell you something.”

“Oh?” I said, assuming it was an academic issue, or perhaps something cultural related to his time in Canada.

“I… I love JM.” (JM is the girl sitting next to him in the picture below). “Oh, I’m so stressssss… what I can do? Please teacher, I don’t know what to do. I don’t if I she will love me too.”

My heart melted. They are both such diligent, hard-working students, with confidence and great ability. And so our little counselling session began.

The students are almost all young adults, and for many it is their first big trip away from home and family. This means they are experiencing so many of the emotions that inevitably arise – homesickness and loneliness as well as the excitement and adventure of new independence.

On the last day of the month, it’s ‘graduation’ day. Many students are finished their time in Toronto, and are heading back to their jobs or studies in their own country. Some are moving up to the next level. Each teacher comes to the front (to cheers from their students) to say a few words to their class. An award (certificate) is given to a student in each class who has made extraordinary efforts, and helped to create a positive learning atmosphere.

After that, the students all watch a slide show with pictures of the students over the month. Every day the school has organized activities for the students. Some are free, some with ticket or transport prices. Students are led by the activities leader and are able to explore Toronto with their friends from school without worrying about the logistical details.

Activities include local festivals, museums and galleries, Toronto Island, bike trips, picnics, pub nights, ethnic restaurants, etc. Larger trips include Niagara Falls, Montreal and camping in Algonquin Park. Most students, by the time they leave Toronto, have had an unforgettable experience – improving their English, making friends from around the world, and experiencing Canadian culture.

It’s really fun to be a part of their adventure!

Sometimes I go out with the students. It was my last day with this group, and a few of them were headed to a  restaurant in Koreatown. “Teacher, you come too?” It’s hard to resist – they’re really sweet.

I don’t know, I’m thinking JM likes Takuro too!

Okay, truth be told, I can never say no to Korean food. It’s my favourite! Especially the barbecued beef! This is a dish where they put the grills right on the table and you cook the marinated meat yourself. It smells heavenly, it tastes even better, and it’s lots of fun! Check out all the free side dishes! We stuffed ourselves silly with  meat, vegetables and rice.

Mohammed is from Saudi Arabia. It was his first time to eat Korean food and he loved it like I knew he would! I really get a kick out of students getting introduced to each others’ cultures, but for some reason, watching the Arabic students make friends with the Asians is my favourite. They are so different, and yet they learn to appreciate each other in such special ways.

Since I started teaching ESL, I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of groups like this one. Each class is unique, each has its own dynamics and fun.

So even though I’m missing the regular adventures of living in an exotic country, there’s no lack of international exposure in my daily life! I really do feel blessed.

Mari and I after one of her English lessons

Flashback Japan, 2002 – I have a dear one-to-one student named Mari, who works for a huge multi-national language school chain here in Japan called GEOS. They have a few hundred schools in the country, plus dozens overseas. Tomorrow she is leaving as a personal assistant to the CEO of GEOS as he takes some of his top school managers on a trip to reward them for their efforts. She is going, first-class, to Paris, Nice, Frankfurt, Rome and Malta, and staying in 5-star hotels everywhere. Wow!!! I get tingly just thinking about how much she will see and do! They chose her because she is amazingly efficient and a fabulous worker. But her self-confidence is so low; she’s always nervous about something… “I am panicking, Brenda…help me help me”, she said today. She will do FINE. Like so many Japanese women, she is so talented, but not confident in her skills.

I have been working hard on my Japanese lessons and going to Kumon twice a week. My teacher is so nice. She is actually not my teacher; everything we do is self-directed and we work alone, but we go there for help and to get a bit of testing to see if we are ready for the next worksheets.  The woman who always checks my homework and who knows me well (because I only usually ask her, not the others) is so kind and warm. But she passed me on to one of the other women the other day because she had too much to do, and I felt nervous and disappointed, because suddenly my inhibitions about speaking Japanese returned. And then I really understood how attached my students get to me, and why. Just like that woman is the only one that I feel really comfortable with, even moreso my students feel comfortable with only me, because for most of them, I am the only foreigner they know! I need to really try to wean them off me a bit so that they won’t panic when they need another teacher or need to speak English to others. I’ll be doing them a favour if I teach them to rely on me less.

Most of my high school classes are going well. But they are so undisciplined and unmotivated!  Some of the students show an incredible amount of apathy, and it’s difficult to train a class in learning behaviours when I see them just once a week for 90 minutes. Still, after all my (and their own) efforts, they are doing better, and there is one that is soaring. How verrrry interesting that two 10th grade classes can be so vastly different!  I am doing  my best to keep the classes interesting so they learn to enjoy English a bit.

Oh they're so naughty but still so loveable.

I have been working hard on pronunciation with this one class  of girls that I just love to death. I got them to say “What about you?” yesterday… about 50 times.”Whaddaboutchoo?” “Whaddaboutchoo?” “Whaddabouchoo?” This is called connected speech, and the Japanese students have such difficulty with it!

They laughed and blushed the first few times, but they are such an outgoing pleasant bunch, and did it with me, again and again. Then, “I’m in a hurry” as “I’minnahurry”, “I’minnahurry”. Again and again. All came from parts of a conversation we were reading from their textbook. “But I” = “bud-eye”. “What a beautiful day” = “waddabyoodiful day”.

It sounds so foreign to them, to speak English like that. Then on Tuesday I asked them to practice the dialogue with their partners and they were doing it! I was so happy to hear their pronunciation was amazing! When I hear them speak so well, I always feign weak knees and major shock to make them laugh. Or I kiss my fingers and sigh loudly. They laugh but I know they feel good, and it is a wonderful feeling for us all. “See?” I said on Tuesday. “Remember in November when you were using such Japanese pronunciation, and I told you that if we practiced, it would become easier? Now you all sound like American teenagers!!” [Apologies to any British or Aussie readers.] Wide-eyed, they giggled and nodded, so proud of themselves. Yay… a victory amongst all the struggles. THIS is why I love teaching.

Students working in the CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) Lab

I write about teaching a lot lately because I want to remember all my experiences and the stages of my own learning. I’m working so hard, and seeing such progress among some of my high school students. These are precious days.

[This was originally written on January 23, 2002]

Flashback Japan, 2001 – When I walk into a new classroom I feel so good.  I have all these unique challenges before me. I want to try to make the whole group feel like a cohesive unit, so they feel that when they walk into the classroom, they are part of a learning team.  On the other hand, I also have  the task of seeing each student as an individual with an absolutely unique set of life experiences – which will determine to a great extent how they learn.  By getting to know them individually,  I can help them in the way that works best for them.

So many high school students would rather be somewhere else, so the biggest challenge and absolutely the most exciting one for me is the thrill of seeing students get motivated about something they were not motivated about before.

These challenges are magnified significantly by the facts: I only see each class once a week, there are almost 50 students in the class, and they speak almost no English! Ahhh. And their names are all so new and difficult for me, not to mention the fact they all have black hair and wear the same clothes.

Today was my first day teaching at this high school. I had three classes. The first class was a NIGHTMARE. They were all 16-year-old girls, and despite the stereotypical view of Japanese students being quiet and disciplined, this group was insolent, disrespectful and noisy! I was really shocked. About half are genuinely interested, the other half completely not. Of course the interested ones were drowned out by the noisy slackers.

I want them to enjoy learning, and I will do my best to make it fun for them, but I can’t accept them sleeping or talking on phones during class!  Kana, one of the girls, was really being a disturbance in the back, so I asked her to come and sit in the front row. I knew this would be a risky move, separating her from her friends.  Maybe I would turn her against me for the semester, or maybe my quick action would help earn her respect.  I took the risk. She gathered her books to move, and grumbled and complained loudly as she did so.

But later in the day I was walking through the halls and heard, “Sensei! Sensei!” (”Teacher! Teacher!”) and was really surprised to see HER waving and smiling at me. I had really tried to be kind and warm to her, even while being strict, so I think she knew I wasn’t trying to piss her off. I gained back a little confidence after I saw her in the hallway.

The other classes were wonderful. The girls are so beautiful – natural and fresh, bright-eyed and friendly. They are old enough to be genuinely interested in me as more than a teacher, and young enough to not be burdened by the worries of adulthood. I feel they are so very special, these girls. They welcomed me openly and warmly, and we had a lot of fun. I know that if my students are to improve in their English this semester, it is largely up to ME, and that I have a huge responsibility. I am also aware that the way a high school student feels about their subject or teacher can drastically affect career choices in life. I want to be a positive influence in their lives, even for the short time I am with them.

God, help me to see each student’s individual needs and talents. Help me to love them and make them feel important. They are so special. Help me be efficient, resourceful, creative and patient in my teaching.

What a welcome challenge these girls will be for me.

[Originally written Nov 1, 2001]

[This picture was taken on my last day at that school. I ended up developing a great relationship with the girls. I learned a lot, and was of course sad to leave!]

Well, for months and months I’ve been swinging between dread and excitement about finishing work, and now it’s done. Yesterday was my last day, and although I’ve still snuck a few things home to finish up, I’m officially finished.

In the last 12 years in this industry, I’ve worked at countless schools and companies, and I’ve always left with feelings of frustration and annoyance at the way things were run. This is the first time I’m leaving an organisation that has my full respect and admiration.

Our teaching centre manager (in the blue below) kindly took the management team out for lunch on my last day.

The two men on our team were out of the country, but besides them, this is the management team I work with on a day to day basis. Clare (with the baby) is the woman whose maternity leave I’ve been covering.  I’m thankful for the opportunity to work with such capable, motivated, efficient leaders, and I’ve learned a LOT over the last two years at this place!

After that it was the obligatory cake and official goodbye. Eww, I had to give a speech, but despite the discomfort, welcomed the opportunity to thank everyone.

I got some lovely gifts from the teachers…

…a Moleskin day planner, some Christmas decorations, handmade batik fabric, a fuzzy hot water bottle, a photography book, a scarf, a trivet (to hold hot pots), a pewter picture frame, and an Asian cookbook.Great things to remember them by!

I’m so glad that day is over. I’ve done the farewells so many times in my life – it seems I’m always saying goodbye – and it never gets easy. Although being able to say ’see on Facebook’ does help a bit.

And so now, with the stress of work lifted,  I can help continue to clean and organise our stuff. We leave for our Bali trip tomorrow, and then for Canada on the 20th!

Roller-coaster much?

Flashback Japan 06/12/2001: This evening I was teaching my weekly lesson to a class of young business men. They are really fun-loving, and we have good times in that class. They really laugh at each other, and I am glad that they all can laugh at themselves too.

Tonight we were talking about “What kind of movies/books/tv programs/food etc. do you like?”. When discussing movies, “SF” came up. I asked them, of course, “Do you know what SF means?” There are soooo many English words that have been adopted by the Japanese and made an official part of their language, and everyone knows SF but I wasn’t sure if they knew what it meant. But they all said yes right away… and answered in unison, “Spectacle Fantasy!”. I laughed, then made a point of writing it down in my notebook. They love when I find Japanese English funny enough to make a note of it. When I told them it means Science Fiction, they laughed hard too. They said it is common knowledge in Japan that it means Spectacle Fantasy. Sweet!!

It reminded me of a couple other incidents from back in Toronto. I always intend to write down the funny incidents, but sometimes I forget. Here are two I will never forget:

Once in Toronto, with a small class of students from all over the globe, I was showing pictures on a calendar of Canadian wildlife. I held them up one at a time to see how many they knew. Beaver. Racoon. Mountain Goat… no problem. Then, I held up a picture of a polar bear. They knew it was a bear, but… what kind? After a bit of hemming and hawing, Sasha, a Ukrainian guy suddenly and confidently spoke up. “I know!! It’s a Toon!” Umm… toon?

Nobody laughed, but everybody thought maybe he was wrong because they had never heard that before. Why a toon? I asked him. I didn’t tell him he was wrong. He said, “Because I know there is a loon on the Canadian loonie (which is our nickname for the one-dollar coin, because it has a loon (bird) on it), so I know this must be a toon, because it is on the toonie!” (We call our two-dollar coin a “two-nie”). It was cute.

One more. I asked one of my Japanese girls once about her recent trip to Thailand. “Oh, it was wonderful!” she gushed. “How was the weather?” “Well, it was so hot and humi… humi… humiliating!” Of course as English speakers we never imagine that to others’ humid and humiliating sound similar – but can you blame them?I know I make the same kinds of mistakes in Japanese.

Language teaching and learning sure lends itself to so many memorable moments.

Dear Brain,

I would kindly like to take a moment to make a request.

Please.
While I’m lying in bed at 3am, kindly refrain from feeling like this:

I prefer this.

Please.
No more Microsoft Outlook from work in my head at midnight.

And no planning for the next staff meeting.

I’d rather not be trying to solve
next term’s teaching puzzle timetable from bed.

Take me to calm blue lakes.

Or gently carry me back to Redang Island.

Best of all, please just shut down completely for at least seven hours.

Thanks for all your work. But please take breaks.

You don’t get paid for overtime.

Sincerely,

The management

Yesterday another ten-week term of classes finished at the British Council. The adult classes love to bring thank-you gifts for the teachers. I scored a small book of beautiful Chinese hand-cut, hand-dyed paper animals, Iranian pistacchios, Ferrerro Rocher deluxe box of chocolates, and a silk-covered jewellery box. There’s a shelf at work – must take a picture of it sometime – of ‘unwanted gifts’. Mostly some tacky ornaments (like a pewter model of the Petronas towers, for example). But nah, I’m holding on to the stuff I got.

Today marks the beginning of an almost four-week paid holiday for me. Classes at the teaching centre will begin again about a month from now, and teachers have made their plans for eagerly-awaited time off. Some are sticking around KL, some are heading back to their home countries, and some have planned island vacations around South East Asia.

I would love to go back to Canada for a month. The last two times I went home (2005, 2003) were for David’s and Joan’s weddings, and we were all so busy. I long for a relaxed camping trip in Muskoka! But I don’t want to go without Mehmet, and it would be impossible for Mehmet to get a tourist visa to visit Canada. (It just comes with being a young Turkish male). Besides, we’re really *really* saving our pesos (well, our ringgits) for our eventual life in Canada or wherever we settle. That strong Canadian dollar causes me worry!

But we do have a trip planned! Nine months after our wedding date, we’ll finally have the time to take a real honeymoon. For those of you that recall, we had a rather tumultuous wedding week, and then two days later, all frazzled and hazzled, landed in KL where I started work the next day. “Malaysia’s our honeymoon” is how we consoled ourselves. But after our three-day, low-budget, last-minute run to Thailand in December, we decided we’d come back for a real trip, one we’d dub our honeymoon.

So, at the end of the month, we’ve got a nine-day trip planned, back to those lovely Thai beaches, the ones ravaged by the huge tsunami a couple years ago. Yay! (you know, yay that we’re going, not that they were destroyed).

There are a million other things we need to work on during this time off, but today… today… today… the priority is to relish the first day of a month of days with my hubby. That, and call a Canadian farmer for Father’s day.

A year ago I was in the throes of completing my post-grad Diploma in English Language Teaching for Adults (DELTA) in Istanbul. For eight months I developed a new relationship with comfort food, and floundered under endless assignments and weighty research. There was the stress of an extrenal assessor flying in from Cambridge University, combined with the constraints of time and the demands of my job at the same time — wheee… it was quite a ride!

My flatmate Donna was also doing it – what a blessing that was. And of course, the love and attention from her cat Tabby. When the cat plops himself down right on the papers you’re reading or writing on, you have no choice but to take a break!

Ahh but anyway, a year has passed and the horrors are fading. Jonathon at work is doing it now through distance education and when he sets his tired body down at his desk at the beginning of his work day, when he looks up from his reading with tired, bloodshot eyes… I remember. Today, Pete, another teacher, promised Jonathon, “When you’re all finished your DELTA, I’ll give you a gift certificate to get a massage”.

“HEY!” I said, “I’m done my DELTA.”
His response: “Nice try.”
Yeah, well.

Malaysian society is an intriguing mix of native Malays, Chinese and Indians. It affects all aspects of life here – food, business, politics, etc. So these three littlies I’m going to write about are quite representative of my classroom as well. Saturdays are the days we switch from teaching adults to kids, and it’s a tiring day (1500 of them come through the centre in one day!) but it’s fun too. And of course, the youngest ones provide countless special little moments. Meet Jin Wei, Dustin and Sharmila:

Jin Wei
This little Chinese boy steals my heart each week. He is so eager to learn, so naive and honest and sweet. He asks a million questions, and is just an all ’round sweetie. On Saturday he lost his eraser and was really down that he couldn’t find it anywhere. I went into my teacher’s stash – I bring a box of supplies into the room for each class, and asked if his was among the erasers in the teacher’s container. He said no. I said, “Look, you can have one these, just choose one.” I saw him looking at the one that said “Portugal” with a little picture on it, but he shook his head and said no. I said, “Go on, you may have one.” He finally looked up at me with big sad eyes and said, “My mother said I should never take anything that belongs to others.” “Oh, ” I said. “you tell your mother this was a gift from your teacher.” Finally he took the Portugal eraser happily and went back to work.

Dustin
At the end of class I often read the kids a story. They sit on the floor but if I sit on the floor too, they can’t all see, so I usually sit on a chair. Yesterday I just took one of the student tables (they’re tables, not desks), and sat on it, with my legs dangling. The kids were all gathering round and one of them gasped, “Teacher’s sitting on the table!” and a few others gasped. I thought they were all thinking that it was maybe a childish thing to do? A fun thing? I don’t know – I’ve sat on tables a zillion times! Dustin…was looking up and smiling at me. Dustin is also another darling. He’s mischeivous but so so smart and knows when to draw the line.

I said to Dustin, “What’s wrong? Is it bad?” I mean, each culture has their own rules of social behaviour. Was this one I had missed? He whispered sweetly, “It’s not bad, teacher. It’s just rude.”

Oooops! Of course I got off the table. I sometimes forget what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’ve experienced so many cultures and don’t even know if it would be okay to sit on a table in our culture! I forget… !

Sharmila
I used a video of Stevie Wonder singing “I just called to say I love you” to supplement one of my lessons, and the kids loved it. When I told them he was blind, of course the questions poured out. How can he sing if he’s blind? How does he eat? Why is he blind, teacher? And so on. Sharmila put her hand up and said, “But he can still see from his heart, right?”

There are about 25 English teachers at our centre. Most of them are British, but there’s our little minority of Canadians, New Zealanders, and Aussies. It gets more colourful when you mix in the partners; spouses hail from Colombia, Italy, Korea, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Australia, and more. About half a dozen teachers are married to Malaysians and are quite settled here with families.

We have quite a variety of shifts at work, and there’s not a whole lot of social mingling because everyone is really quite busy. So when Jonathon invited everyone out to an Italian restaurant down the road to celebrate his 33rd birthday, we decided to go. Jonathon lives in the same building as us.

About half the teachers came, and it was a good time to get to know a few people better. People have such interesting and unique backgrounds! I never tire of hearing where other teachers have lived, why they left, what they miss, what their students were like, etc.

Mehmet is content if he has somebody to talk football with. “English teacher talk” can get boring pretty fast if you’re not one of them!

Well, a week’s holiday has come and gone – so quickly! While most teachers at work headed off to islands in Malaysia or nearby Thailand, Cambodia, etc., Mehmet and I stuck around to get some things done. We have come across new hitches that will take more time with our immigration application, but made headway with all of that.

Mehmet has been learning Microsoft FrontPage and I’ve been studying Macromedia Flash. Between the two of us, our poor laptop is working triple-time!

And we have also both worked hard to complete an online certification of the technology I use at work with the Interactive White Boards. Mehmet has become really good at preparing digital flipcharts for me for work – he’s got a great eye for detail, and is just as fussy as me about making things look “just right”.

I also did lots of planning for the next term of school. Each term is ten weeks, and now I’ve got more than half of the activities prepared for these lessons. The thing with language teaching is that you need to give students lots and lots of talk time. You can’t just say “ok, now talk“. You need to teach them new language structures and vocabulary to use, and give them situations to use it in. This involves lots of pair work and group work. We’ve got great resources at work to help us with our planning. And with Mehmet being willing to cut up the hundreds of discussion/activity cards I laminate at work, my workload again gets lighter.

So now, my second ten-week teaching term begins. But I’m ready!

I teach adults from Tuesday to Friday, and kids on Saturdays. Actually, every Saturday, 1500 kids descend on and pass through our centre! It’s nuts!

Although I am glad I don’t teach kids every day, I do enjoy having them once a week. I teach three classes of 20 kids, and most of them come from homes with well-educated parents who are willing to shell out a pretty penny for their kids to be in a pure English environment. Most children in Malaysia can communicate quite well in English, because they are introduced to it right away at school. And English is everywhere. But the problem is that they usually speak “Malaysian English”, which means – like Singapore kids – that they’ve kind of simplified it and made it their own unique dialect. “Teacher – page two no need do?” “Already do!”. Even though some are fluent, and understand everything they hear, they still make these “fossilized” errors.

So my challenge here is not so much teaching them new English, but helping them unlearn some of those mistakes. That’s much harder!

I have only a couple foreign students in my children’s classes – from Iran and Turkey. But the rest are all Malaysian – Chinese Malaysians, Indian Malaysians, and Malay Malaysians.

It’s a nice mix, and a nice job!

I was planning to work next week too, right until getting married but I really do need my time. There are still countless little things that need to be done. Yep, I’m still SO glad I’m not planning a big wedding!

So… today was my last day at Goldas. I’ve been teaching English to some of the workers at Goldas (the largest jewellery company in Turkey) for about 5 or 6 months and they have all been so good to me. It’s such a nice change from the typical language school, and I’ve had the chance to get to know the sector a bit, familiarize myself with the company culture and spend time with some well-educated professionals with a sincere desire to learn English and progress in their careers.

They surprised me with a party today! Cake, drinks, and also a pretty gold necklace – a Goldas one, of course!


This is the classroom I have been teaching them in. Here we sit and talk a lot… about Turkish culture, foreign culture, politics, education, their company, their futures, their goals – it’s been a nice teaching environment. The students work at Goldas in different capacities – Human resources, engineering, design, production, finance, etc.

Tonight I was teaching Cem and Umit, the two business partners I give private English lessons to. We were doing a lesson from Market Leader, a really high-quality resource for Business English. The topic of the unit we are working on is “Success” and we talked about our ideas of what helps people be successful. Luck? Money? Drive? Charm? Intuition? Nepotism? Passion? Dedication? We also discussed “status symbols”. What makes you think a person is successful? The kind of car they drive? The kinds of vacations they take? Cosmetic surgery? Private school? Cem said, “That’s not success, that’s just wealth”. And that led into further discussions about the difference between success and wealth. We also talked about signs of successful businesses. High value of shares? The employees like their jobs? International branches? Respected in the community?

I enjoy lessons like this. My job is partly to give students new words to use, and to get them talking and using their English. Cem and Umit are both professionals, well educated, and I love to have discussions like this because they are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject, and of course the various cultural implications really come into play and colour our discussions.

In our Friday lessons I always spend the last half hour or so on a song with them. I burned a CD of a variety of songs for them – ones I chose for their English expressions, but also because I liked them and thought they would too. So, we are slowly making our way through each of the songs. It’s amazing how much you can sing along with a song in your own language when you don’t even know half the words… but when it’s another language and you love the song, sitting down and learning the lyrics and their meanings is such a pleasure and achievement.

So far we have done a song by The Police, Harry Connick Junior, Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse of the Heart, oh yeah!!), Fairground Attraction, and tonight, Bob Marley (Baby I love your way). They loved it, and learned a few good expressions. Most of the English in these songs they know already – it’s just a matter of seeing the words written, and then realizing “ohhh, THAT’S what he’s singing!”

After we have listened a couple times and they have filled in the blanks on the worksheet I made, or arranged the sentences in order – whatever the activity is – we listen a final time and sing along. They are so cute… such professionals sitting there in their suits, but singing along to the song, all out of tune.

It got me thinking tonight, about how endearing my students are, the Turkish men especially. They remind me a lot of Japanese men. My heart goes out to them, because they work so hard, their hours are so long, and the demands on their time are great. They struggle so much in Turkey to live well, like they do in Japan – for different reasons though. Life is difficult here, and yet, despite all their tiredness, they are sitting there at 9:30 on a Friday night, singing along with Bob Marley.

I think of 45 year old business men in Canada or the States… would they sing along with pop songs in a language lessons like that? If they did, they would be kind of embarassed or else do it in a silly way. It’s not very cool for western guys to walk along the street singing, either, but here you often see a man or boy singing with neither shame nor arrogance… just enjoying his walk to the bus station or whatever. I like that.

I taught my kids’ class today too. They are making such progress, and these two months of English input, English input, English input is paying off. They are making sentences, asking questions in English, and doing it voluntarily. Getting students to repeat sentences, learn lists of vocabulary, or use new structures in organised games is one thing, but having them come out with the forms of their own accord when needed, is another thing altogether. I picked up some used readers for English learners the other day for 2 lira each. I brought 6 elementary-level ones in today and gave them each one to sit and read aloud. So they were scattered around the living room floor, each totally in their own world, reading simple stories. It totally made my day. They were reading English and understanding a story! I felt so happy. It is that class I will be most sorry to leave, because their progress is so quick and they are such a pleasure to teach.

They all know I’m leaving now. Last class, Huma, one of the 9 year old girls, took my hand under the table during one of our worksheet activities, looked up at me and said, “Gitme, teacher, gitme.” “”Don’t go, teacher, don’t go.”
Today I told the mothers that I’ll be taking all the kids to Malaysia with me. I sure do wish I could have them for a year or so – I envy the teacher who will take them after me; she will see such progress in the next few months as they begin to speak more and more.