Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I鈥檓 a husband and father to one daughter and three sons and an owner to two dogs and a cat. It鈥檚 a busy life!
I have been teaching English professionally as a foreign language since 1999. I first taught in South Korea for one year and was there for the great Y2K scare. In 2000, I moved to Indonesia, where I would live for the next four years. I was there for the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks -- one of the scariest times of my life. I met the woman I would marry in Indonesia, got married there (with over 1,000 people at our wedding!), and our daughter was born there as well.
In 2004, we moved to the United States. I have since earned a teacher鈥檚 certificate enabling me to teach high school, and I鈥檝e been teaching English learners in high schools in the 王中王六合彩特码 area since 2006. In 2011, after having received a Master鈥檚 degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), my family rented a house directly across the street from 王中王六合彩特码. I remember telling a friend as we stared at the school, 鈥淪omeday, I鈥檓 going to teach English there.鈥 Two weeks later, I was in the great Jeff Eldot鈥檚 office for a job interview, and fortunately for me, he hired me as an adjunct professor in the ESL department! Hooray! I can鈥檛 believe it鈥檚 already been ten years!
What do you like most about teaching ESL students?
I like the unpredictability of teaching ESL students. I can never predict what questions students will ask, what students will want to talk about, or what life experiences in their home countries or here that they want to share with me and the rest of the class. My ESL students inspire me, especially as so many of them have multiple jobs, families, past traumas, and other demands on their time, and yet, they are motivated to learn to speak, read, write, and understand English better. I also love and miss the pre-COVID potlucks that we used to enjoy. :)
What would your ESL students say about you?
I think most of them would say that I鈥檓 friendly and outgoing, but I can be demanding (I make them work hard). I鈥檓 serious about teaching but funny and welcoming. We laugh a lot in our classes, for sure. I hope they would say that every class is valuable and that they go home having learned more English than they had known before the class started. I make it a goal to speak clearly and give ample opportunities for every student to speak in my classes.
What is your most memorable teaching experience?
In 2019, before the world became crazy or we ever had any inklings that things would ever go insane, my good friend, Jennifer Rogers, and I began creating instructional videos for my high school classes (Like and subscribe on my YouTube channel!) At the time, Jennifer served both as the school鈥檚 literacy coach and theater teacher, and the videos were made in conjunction with her duty as helping high schools become more literate.
Together, we made videos for students in which she explained to me how to answer multiple choice reading comprehension questions as well as how to respond to essay prompts. We also made fun videos in which I taught her jazz chants (simple rhymes with useful English words and phrases) created by Carolyn Graham. Eventually, I had the idea that we read and discuss an ESL novel for beginners called Poor Ana by Blaine Ray. This story uses 300 of the most common words in English and is unique in its simplicity. One day, Jennifer asked me if I wanted to help her and her theater students turn the book into a play and have her advanced theater students perform it for my English learners. I jumped at the chance to take on this project. Little did Jennifer know that at one time in the past, I had dreamed of becoming a playwright (a person who writes plays). Before I knew it, I was staying up late nearly every night, turning a simple book into a simple play. One day, I had the bright idea that we should incorporate jazz chants into the play and call it a 鈥渃hantical.鈥 Jennifer supported the idea, and I ended up writing a whole lot of rhyming chants that went along with the story. This led to us creating even more videos of the two of us performing the chants for the benefit of both my English learners and her theater students.
We ended up performing the play in late January of 2020 (I even had a small part in the play! It was my first time performing since I was in high school!). Ironically, as the play came to a close, I remember thinking that this would be my hardest experience of 2020. A couple of months later, COVID hit the United States, so indeed, writing, acting in, and producing a play was probably the easiest part of that year!
The combination of having this amazing collaborative experience, the awakening of my former creative self, and the flexibility that COVID brought in terms of scheduling led me to both want to and be able to take two creative writing classes at 王中王六合彩特码 in the spring of 2021: Intro to Writing Fiction (taught by the amazing Jennifer Bell) and Intro to Screen Writing (taught by the legendary Dennis Bush). In the fiction writing class, I started writing a novel similar to Poor Ana but one that aligns more to the story of many of my refugee students-- it鈥檚 about a high school-aged boy from Tanzania who comes to the United States knowing no English and the struggles and methods he uses to achieve fluency. In the screenwriting class, I have started writing stories that I dream will eventually be turned into a comedy-drama series for ESL students in the future. For years, I鈥檝e been using an outdated series called 鈥淐onnect with English鈥 with some of my students. (It鈥檚 on YouTube if you鈥檙e interested.) It鈥檚 a 48-episode series specifically made for English learners, and while the story is quite good and the actors speak in a way that is clear and understandable to English learners, it鈥檚 extremely outdated. In other words, the technology that we take for granted today didn鈥檛 exist when this series was filmed. For example, in one scene, the main character views promotional materials for a school she hopes to attend through: a VHS tape. In another scene, she frantically looks for a payphone. I hope to create something more modern that can reach a large audience and help more people in the 王中王六合彩特码 area and around the world learn the English language. I will be taking another course by Dennis Bush in the fall, and I鈥檓 hoping I will be able to write something that will someday be marketable. As I鈥檝e been hoping to sit down and write a screenplay for over ten years, I鈥檓 thankful for the opportunity to learn the process.
What advice would you give to ESL students or to someone thinking about taking an ESL class?
I think the best advice I can give to ESL students is to constantly write new words and phrases down in a notebook and consistently review them. Learners should always be writing new words along with the translations in their language. ESL students should then refer to that notebook often, reviewing new words and adding to it.
If someone wants to learn a language well, it has to become an obsession. This means that he or she needs to constantly be thinking about how to get better at listening, reading, speaking, and writing in the language.
I also think ESL students should ask native English speakers to correct their speech. Most English speakers are too polite to tell ESL students if they say something incorrectly. English speakers may understand what English learners are trying to say, but the goal of an ESL student is to know how something is more commonly said or pronounced. Of course, it鈥檚 a good idea to write down what students learn from English speakers in the same notebook where they are writing down new vocabulary words and phrases.
ESL students should take advantage of technology. There are countless videos, podcasts, and websites designed to help ESL students to learn. ESL students should find a few that they like and use them often!
Finally, ESL students should ask their teachers questions about words or phrases that are new to them. This also includes things that they have heard other English speakers say (from work, from the radio, from television鈥). An effective learner is an active learner, and it鈥檚 the goal of every ESL teacher at 王中王六合彩特码 to help the English-speaking world to make more sense to our students, but we can鈥檛 answer the questions they don鈥檛 ask!