day by day

 Hi folks! It was an exciting weekend. On the one hand, I gave a presentation and spoke English for the first time in my life for almost 10 minutes straight, on the other hand, I had an online meeting with my former students who were scattered all over the world right after our lesson ended.  In the presentation, I tried to give my classmates a lesson on how to write and read music notation by simply describing and illustrating the tools we use. Frankly, I think my speaking skills are still at B1 level at most and not good enough for this level, so for now I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible. Therefore, I kept the language simple in my presentation as well. Even if I forgot what I was going to say, it was comforting to know I could say it in another way.  As usual, we did reading and listening activities as well as speaking, and this weekend's topic was 'Language'. Talking about language, and specifically the idea that ‘language shapes thought’, was an excel...

 Hello everyone! We moved our classroom this week and I was happy with the move. Our old classroom felt weird and made our voices louder than they should have been because of the blank walls. I know not everyone likes the new classroom, but I hope they will get used to it. The only problem with this classroom is that there is a huge pillar near the middle of the room which somewhat disrupts the sitting arrangement. But other than that, it's a very nice, cute room with Japanese decorations on the walls and various cologne bottles in the cabinets. In our fifth and sixth lessons this week, we talked about different professions and the qualifications they require, and we also listened to some audio recordings and watched videos about this topic. (I must admit that all this talk about qualifications, especially for the 21st century, really makes me feel old. Yes, I am, indeed.) The most enjoyable part of our lesson was watching an interview with folk musician Eliza Carthy. I had never h...

  Hi folks, We had our second and third lessons on the weekend.  What we did was mostly speaking exercises on some topics in our textbook and then we had the most engaging activity, the ten-minute meeting with the A1 students. We split up into pairs and tried to talk to each other as much as we could.  This activity was a shot in the arm that I badly needed. It reminded me of where I came from. You know, things don't always go so smoothly in real life, and  neither does mine. Before I started this course, I was stuck at the intermediate plateau and didn't know how to get past it. And I am still not sure if I can get past this seemingly never-ending plateau. Since I started learning English, I have experienced many things that made me put my English studies on hold, and this caused me to forget most of what I learned, and then I had to study the same topics over and over again. But I know that as long as I'm alive and well, no matter how long my journey takes, no...

 We had our first lesson on Saturday and there's so much to say. Our teacher first divided us into two groups and then paired us up face to face, one by one, and asked us to  introduce ourselves to the others. Every time we finished introducing ourselves, we had to take a step to the left and pair up with a new classmate. Thus, we have completed an interactive part of introducing ourselves to others, which was more useful and exciting than making individual introductions. After finishing this part of lesson, we were told about some requirements we needed to do in this course by the teacher. In the last part of the lesson we played a different game: 'Pass the ball to the others and tell two truths and a lie.' As the name suggests, in this game, when it's your turn, you have to tell the class three things, one of which is a lie, and then your classmates have to ask questions to determine which one is the lie.  We completed the game and then left the classroom to see eac...

 I've just started a C1 course and this is a blog where I'll write about what's going on in my new class, how I feel about it, and how difficult or manageable it is. The idea of creating and writing a blog -actually an assignment- came from our teacher who wanted us to create a blog to improve our writing skills. So, you might think there's nothing new here and you'd be right.  I don't know if I can make this more enjoyable for you and me, but I'll try to write something readable and enjoyable in case you accidentally end up here.  See you soon