I need to tell you something that might make your day easier. You know those gaps your students have? The ones where you’re teaching present perfect and suddenly realize half the class is shaky on simple past? Or you’re doing passive voice and someone raises their hand to ask what a past participle is? Those […]
I’ve been going through all my blog posts, fixing where images exploded into huge sizes and formatting got weird after I changed my site theme when I found this “gem” from September 2017: “3 Ideas for Inspiring Shared Gratitude in the Classroom.” I cringed while reading it. Not because it’s badly written or because the
“Teacher, I am very exhausting today.” I looked up from my desk to see Maria standing there, clearly tired. She meant exhausted, of course. We’d been over this. Multiple times. I’d explained participial adjectives, shown examples, done the whole “boring vs bored” demonstration. She got it… in that moment. But understanding participial adjectives in isolation
Apologies can be uncomfortable, right? Different cultures apologize differently. Some are known for apologizing for everything (looking at you, Canada). Some barely apologize at all. And English has about seventeen different ways to say “sorry,” depending on whether you’re talking to your boss, your friend, or the groggy co-worker whose coffee you just knocked over.
You know how everyone assumes greetings and introductions are easy? Like students just stroll in on day one, shake hands, and magically know what to say? Yeah. No. For a lot of adult ESL newcomers, even saying “hello” feels like walking into the DMV for the first time. Lots of unknowns with too many expectations.
“Teacher, I need two advices.” I still remember the look on Fahad’s face when I told him that wasn’t quite right. He’d spent days mastering plurals, proudly adding those ‘s’ endings to everything, and now I was telling him some nouns just…don’t do that? Yeah, now you’re teaching noncount nouns, where the rules your students
So, here’s a confession…I once wore expired Halloween face paint to class. Not just expired. Wrong kind of paint entirely. (This wasn’t on purpose.) Eight days. That’s how long I had a blue and red tint to my face despite aggressive scrubbing. My students thought it was hilarious. I did not. Learn from my mistakes,
I was sitting in my graduate program class, getting my M.Ed. in TESL while teaching full-time, when one of my international student classmates got visibly frustrated. “Why does he use so many idioms?” she whispered. “I can’t follow what he’s saying.” I’d never noticed. Our professor seemed pretty straightforward to me. But once she pointed
Updated January 2026. Another year has passed, remarkably fast and excruciatingly slow both in turns and at the same time. Time is a weird concept to me. Once I learned that it’s not the same “time” for everyone in the world simultaneously, a lot of time-related traditions became meaningless for me, especially perhaps New Year’s.
If you’re looking for a theme that won’t make your adult ESL students groan and check their phones, try “health.” I know, I know. It sounds about as exciting sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with no data, wifi, or magazines.. But hear me out. Health is one of those topics that’s both practical AND
