First Classes...

I went to teach my first two classes at Starfish today. It is quite the journey out there. It takes two subway transfers and two different buses. It's amazing how many people are out and about at 11:30 AM!

I made it to the last bus stop and called to ask for help on how to walk to the office. Wang Fei, who helps run the office, met me at the bus stop and walked me to the office. My first class was with three women, including Wang Fei, who are at an Intermediate level. I had a lesson plan based on their book. They haven't had an English teacher for four months so they all felt pretty rusty, but they did a fantastic job. The unit that we started was called "Love and Marriage." We talked about adjectives that describe people and the people that they would want to date or marry. It was a pretty awesome class. The women really liked the word "humble" and they all listed it as a quality they wanted in their future husbands.

My last class was a Beginner class was only for one hour. There was two women in that class. Both of their English levels are pretty low. We started with the alphabet. I felt a little weird teaching adults the alphabet and pronunciation. We got through A-G today. I taught them the sentence structure "I like..." and "I don't like..." and we used the words from the alphabet (apple, book, cat, dog, elephant, fish, girl). I learned after the lesson that one of the women in the Beginner class had only one year of education when she was a child. She has been taking classes for the last year. She did so well in class today that it surprised me!

I started to make my trip back to my neighborhood and got on the bus with a bunch of second to fourth grade students who looked at me curiously, but in a sweet way, not in the way the creepy old men look at me! They way just surprised to see me. One little girl was holding a crab and was telling it a story. It was pretty cute.