Some reflections on week #1

The first week of teaching is over - 8.5 hours total - but from next week on the regular weekly load should be up to 10 hours, including 2 exam preparation classes.

I see 3 of my individual students twice a week and I can already say they're going to stretch my ability to adapt. It's truly amazing to realize over and over again how diverse people can be and my prior teaching experience never really called for an individual approach which with bigger classes is never wholly possible. I find it impressive how some learners without any formal knowledge of learning&teaching instinctively echo all Krashen's ideas on second language acquisition, learning and production while some of the others who have been through several years of grammar-translation demand the same old sh..!

They're all elementary level business people in their early thirties and they seem very open to new ideas. I'm extremely pleased they take the letter seriously and so one of them is looking at setting up his blog, with another we will stick to a traditional journal. We're also going to work on stuff (eg. newspaper articles, movies) they bring to the class though we may restrict this to a half of each lesson only.

What I definitely enjoy is the general level of motivation on their part. It seems to be encouraged a good deal by the company's training scheme which I already mentioned in the comments on the previous post.