ESL, week 3

Third meeting today with my ESL student. We're supposed to maintain confidentiality, but I hope it's okay to say a little bit about what I'm learning - so much - from my efforts to be a "tutor" and my weekly conversations with her. So I'll call her M.

She's got it together: courage, motivation, sense of humor. Ready to learn English, the most illogical language in the world, while caring for 3 kids and a husband. I think in just a few more meetings I'm gonna be working to keep up. Every week I get all uptight, I worry that I don't have the ability or enough of a lesson plan. And then I get there and it all goes fine. Today when I arrived at her house, M was wearing a t-shirt that said, "If you're rich, I'm single." She had a question about the shirt. Not the overall meaning - she had that already. She just wanted to be sure she had the word "if" right.

I love how DIY the work is. The trainers encouraged us not to spend money or overdo it on presentation, just to get creative with what we could find. Bus schedules. Toys and action figures. Paper plates and pipe cleaners. We did an incredible vocabulary and grammar lesson today with only some words I wrote on little scraps of paper. I didn't even intend to do grammar for a while yet, but there it was.

This is fun. And I guess I'm not doing too horrible a job, either: today M asked if her neighbor, who is interested in joining us, could start coming next week. We'll be a class soon!