Tammy and the Bachelor

Well, today was an interesting day at school. One class sort of opened (the parents are undecided about when they want their child to begin lessons). One class closed--my adult foundation course, because one of the two people in it has a conflict. The other student is Ruby's son, who will eventually have a private lesson with me but whom I have to figure out how to teach because I have no idea how to conduct a class at that level for only one person. And I got to spend two hours trying to explain the Pyramids to a 10-year-old Taiwanese girl named Tammy.

Okay, that's exaggerating a bit. We had a lesson all prepared for Tammy, who will most likely be taking private lessons with us. But at the last minute, I was asked to switch what I was teaching her to something from a higher level that was not at all appropriate for her, because the girl's mother wanted to try her at this level for some reason. This was part of one of our books in which the main characters talk about places they have seen or would like to see someday, like the Grand Canyon, the desert, and the Pyramids. The vocab included words like "curry" and "camel."

This wouldn't be a bad text for someone at the right level, but for Tammy, it was totally over her head. To get across "camel", I had to try to get across "desert," which was next to impossible. It's likely she hasn't yet learned about these things in her regular classes in her Chinese elementary school. Which made trying to explain them to her in English a lot of fun.

I went through the motions on this for about an hour, but after a short break, I came back and had the guts to ask her if this was just too hard. We ended up talking for half an hour until her mother came to pick her up--really basic stuff like whether she liked her teacher in school and how well she got along with her brother.