Many of you probably assume that I work a full schedule over here. You would be wrong. I only work about 12-15 hours a week at the school with maybe 1-2 hours of preparing lessons per week ("WHAT ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" said probably all of you). Obviously the work culture in the U.S. is around 40 hours a week and sometimes (or maybe a lot of the time) 40+ a week, so in comparison we don't work very much. But for the amount of hours we work and what we get paid, we honestly can live a pretty good life here. Obviously it's always nice to have extra money on the side for traveling purposes so I have been very fortunate to have been connected to several side teaching jobs. I work for 3 different families teaching English to kids that range from 3 to 11 years old. If you ask anyone back home, I've always loved working with kids so it's nice to be able to work with them again. The children are good (for the most part), and it's been really fun working with them and coming up with creative games to practice their listening, reading, and conversational skills. I honestly learn just as much from them as they learn from me, and my vocabulary for kid games such as hide and seek or different toys is getting better, which is definitely a nice change from all the bad words I'm learning from my Spanish friends. For those of you who are giving private lessons, a friend recommended the website boggles world esl, and it has been a life saver. The kids have loved the content board games (a board game that asks questions such as "What do kids do in the summer?" so that they practice conversation and has spaces like "free candy" and "miss your turn" to make it more exciting), taboo, pictionary, solving mystery stories, bingo, fill in the blank to learn new vocabulary, etc. I've found myself running out of ideas and getting repetitive with games once in a while, but luckily there are a ton of resources out there that help give ideas for activities.
Another side job I have is called "conversación de club" and is for students at my school. There are about 8 of us in the club and all but one are in 3 ESO (=highschool freshman), and as the title suggests, it's a club where we just practice conversing. There's a lot of freedom in what we can do so it's been really fun leading this club and working on the kid's conversational skills. I think once you have a solid foundation of the grammar, all you need is to practice speaking. It's okay to make grammatical mistakes as people will still be able to understand you. After all, language is a means of communicating with another so if they can understand you even with the occasional grammatical errors, that is okay. Conversing is always the hardest part, and with any language, it takes constant practice. I applaud all the children I tutor for taking the extra time to learn English (even if it may be their parent's choice and not theirs) and am grateful to have such hard-working kids--it's never easy learning a new language, especially English with all of it's different sounds and pronunciations.
Most of my clases particulares are with younger kids. For those who are around my age, I've done language exchanges so that I can practice my Spanish as well. I've done language exchanges so far with two different groups of people, one with an older gentleman in his 30s who lived in London for several months and wants to keep up his English and another with our blabla car driver and his friend. I've really enjoyed these language exchanges so far as I learn a lot of new Spanish vocabulary and even more about my own language and why we say certain things. It's been really nice because it's always a casual setting where we chat over tapas or kick back a few estrella galicias.
So including my side jobs, I work about 25 hours a week, and in addition, do language exchanges about 3-5 hours a week. I've finally gotten my schedule down and into a routine and am really enjoying the extra time I have exploring the city, swimming, going to the gym, reading a good book, cooking, watching a movie, hanging out with friends, etc. It's nice to finally have some sort of schedule going, and I look forward to every day!
Yours truly,
TLT
Another side job I have is called "conversación de club" and is for students at my school. There are about 8 of us in the club and all but one are in 3 ESO (=highschool freshman), and as the title suggests, it's a club where we just practice conversing. There's a lot of freedom in what we can do so it's been really fun leading this club and working on the kid's conversational skills. I think once you have a solid foundation of the grammar, all you need is to practice speaking. It's okay to make grammatical mistakes as people will still be able to understand you. After all, language is a means of communicating with another so if they can understand you even with the occasional grammatical errors, that is okay. Conversing is always the hardest part, and with any language, it takes constant practice. I applaud all the children I tutor for taking the extra time to learn English (even if it may be their parent's choice and not theirs) and am grateful to have such hard-working kids--it's never easy learning a new language, especially English with all of it's different sounds and pronunciations.
Most of my clases particulares are with younger kids. For those who are around my age, I've done language exchanges so that I can practice my Spanish as well. I've done language exchanges so far with two different groups of people, one with an older gentleman in his 30s who lived in London for several months and wants to keep up his English and another with our blabla car driver and his friend. I've really enjoyed these language exchanges so far as I learn a lot of new Spanish vocabulary and even more about my own language and why we say certain things. It's been really nice because it's always a casual setting where we chat over tapas or kick back a few estrella galicias.
So including my side jobs, I work about 25 hours a week, and in addition, do language exchanges about 3-5 hours a week. I've finally gotten my schedule down and into a routine and am really enjoying the extra time I have exploring the city, swimming, going to the gym, reading a good book, cooking, watching a movie, hanging out with friends, etc. It's nice to finally have some sort of schedule going, and I look forward to every day!
Yours truly,
TLT