The End of English Classes...

Some of you may know that Erin and I have been teaching English classes here in beautiful Kochkor for about six months now. I have to admit that it has been a godsend: I am pretty sure I would have succumb to boredom if I didn’t have a full 5 hours of teaching every week during the winter months. If you include lesson planning and walking to the class, it consumed almost 12 hours a week. It doesn’t seem like much, but I needed the little escape during those brutal months. I probably couldn’t have made it without them.

The class started simply, with a couple of drivers for Community Based Tourism (CBT), a nonprofit organization that gives tours and guesthouses to tourists visiting the area. They also happened to be all related to my director, which is probably how the class came about in the first place. It wasn’t too long before we started branching out and by the end of January we had expanded to over ten students in our beginner class and five in our advanced. Though many of the faces would change each week, we had a solid core group that came regularly and enjoyed our innovative teaching style (like no yelling or reading from a book). That group remained pretty consistent until about mid-April.

Then the spring came. People all of a sudden had gardens to plant, errands to run, and tourists to drive and they could not fit our little ol’ class into the schedule. After a month or so of smaller classes, we decided to put the lessons on a break until the other side of summer, allowing people to go about their summer rituals in peace. We only hope that we made a difference.

What did we teach, you ask? Nothing to complicated, though I will admit I learned more about English in teaching than I ever did in studying. We went over a lot of common phrases to help the drivers work with tourists on a basic level (“Do you need…?”) and eventually got to the point where students could handle verbs in present, simple past, simple future, and present continuous (I am running) with some amount of confidence.

I must admit that English is an incredibly complicated language and I never realized how much so until now. Word order is so incredibly important that it can completely change the meaning of a sentence (“I just ate a sandwich” vs. “I ate just a sandwich” are two completely different sentences!). It took a lot of discipline to consistently use the same tense and word order when giving examples. I did get better at it toward the end, though I am far from a pedagogical master.

In the final analysis, it was well worth the effort. Three of our students took us to lunch after our last class, which was unexpected and well received. I truly hope that most of them will come back to our class when we start up again in September.