Volunteer Explorer

We’ve been talking about love a lot lately.  Last week, a friend of mine from college, Amy, came to teach my ESOL class as a guest, one of the requirements of the TESOL certificate she is completing along with her MA in Composition. The main thrust of her lesson was having our group read a short story together.  She eased us into the story with a series of statements about love that we could agree or disagree with and give explanations for our responses. “Every person has a pre-selected soul mate,” read one. “Love is enough to make a relationship work,” was another. “It is important for people in a romantic relationship to share the same cultural history,” generated the most conversation. We all pretty much agreed on our answers to the first two statements. Yuwei spoke about his own relationship with his wife, Ying, to explain his opinion. “We were attracted to each other at first, yes,” he began, “but over time, we built trust and respect. The relationsh...

Yuwei frowned at the white board, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded yet.  We were working on some verb tense exercises I had given my ESOL students a week earlier. They had sentences and short narrative paragraphs wherein the verbs had been replaced with spaces to fill. My students had to choose between simple present or simple past, present or past progressive, and present or past perfect, depending on the context. For the most part, these exercises were easy for my students. Yuwei mentioned while we walked in together from the parking deck that these were similar to exercises he had done in his fourth grade English class. That oblique criticism made me question the appropriateness of assigning them, my ability to gauge my class’s needs, and, indeed, my qualifications as the teacher of this class.  I usually feel like an impostor in this class. Sure, English is my mother tongue and I have a master’s degree. But my degree is in creative writing, not pedagogy. Tru...