I teach two classes every weekday (sat-wed.). The first one is an upper level English course, we cover grammar, vocab, the whole works. It starts at 2 and goes until 4. My second class is a conversation class. It starts at 7 and goes for one hour.
The English class is a challenge. Their English is better than my Arabic and so I’m able to talk to them for the most part. A lot of it is fun, the challenges for me are remembering my grammar rules and spelling. Inevitably, I know to to put sentences together properly, my problem is answering the question “Why?” As we go through the book, I’m being reacquainted with things like combining the past continuos with the past simple… I’ve always been a terrible speller. Thank God for spell check on the computer.. The problem is there isn’t one on the board of course. My course of action is to admit right up front that I misspell (ha! got it right on the first try!) a lot of words and keep my computer with it’s dictionary close by.
I love the sections when they explain how native speakers (north America) pronounce things. So far, my reaction has always been, “I’ll be damned, I do do that…” It’s fun to see the technical side of something that I do unconsciously.
My conversation class is nice. Nice in the sense that there is a lot less work for me, there’s no real lesson plan to speak of, and there’s no testing or grading. I’m just supposed to get people talking and address any major problems with grammar and vocab that come up. The trick is that there are two people in there that are pretty advanced and the other 4 lag behind significantly. It’s easy enough to just let the two dominate the conversation, but I work hard to try to get the others involved.
So my Arabic class is from 10 till 12, then I have to eat a quick lunch and get way the hell down Hadda street by 2. i stay at the school until 8pm and get home around 9ish. Busy busy busy but it pays the bills and more importantly I feel like I’m accomplishing something.