English Classes

Good morning. I am up relatively early (for my standards, at least) and am preparing to give my english class. I purposefully scheduled my class for 9:30am monday through friday so that I would be forced to keep some sort of consistent schedule. I've found that unless I have an outside committment, it is extremely hard for me to wake up at the same time every day, take a shower, and be ready for work by a reasonable hour. Now that I teach in the mornings, I wake up between 7am and 7:30am, have a nice cup of tea or coffee, and enjoy some time to myself as I get ready for the day.

I am strangely enjoying my english classes. I used to despise teaching back in Brasil, but this time around it's somehow different. My student is a Mozambican woman, about pre-intermediate level, who wants to improve all aspects of her english - speaking, writing, reading, and grammar. She has chosen to do intensive classes with me, and we meet for an hour on monday, wednesday, and friday and an hour and a half on tuesday and thursday. It's definitely intensive, but it's also a lot of fun (gasp!) even for me. I make up my own lesson plans, supplement them with content from the internet, and teach away as if it were my life calling. It is nearly effortless for me, something very strange to recognize since my memory of past english classes is that they were torturous.

So today we will talk about food, and the difference between "countable" and "uncountable" nouns in english. Us native speakers seldom stop to consider why it is we say, for example:

some salt
a carrot
some milk
a biscuit

Also, us native speakers often struggle to explain clearly the difference between:

some chocolate
a chocolate

Both are correct, each has a different meaning. We know it intuitively, but are hard-pressed to explain.

One of the things I enjoy about teaching english is that it forces me to think about my own language. I learn all sorts of new grammatical rules, and start to analyze why it is I say the things I do.

Have a good day!