We all encounter it now and again in our various sites: You are just hanging out, minding your own business, when someone you barely know will come up and say, "Hey, you're the Peace Corps person, aren't you? Why don't you teach english?"
Responses to this are numerous:
1. You don't know me, so what do you know about whether I'm giving english lessons.
2. If I'd wanted to teach english, I'd have gotten real money to do it elsewhere.
3. Even if I do offer lessons and take time out of my day to hold a lesson, I might get the occasional visitor, but I will not get anyone to come in succession every week, and therefore any progress that could be made with people would be almost nonexistent.
Despite the validity of these arguments, I have been bullied into offering lessons. I refuse to go sit somewhere at a scheduled hour, but I tell people that they can come to my house any time, and I'll offer them a lesson. Usually no one takes me up on the offer. But the other day, I had my first student. It was a humble beginning, what with both the teacher and the student being inexperienced at playing school. But I managed to make her repeat the alphabet until she could say all the letters. Then I taught her phrases like Good Morning, My Name is ____, etc. She was fighting the derisive comments of my neighbor (this is typical Elsa) and the attempts at conversations being made by this other dude (that was just rude), and then we paused the lesson for a good while to argue with the guy about some event that happened at least ten years ago. But my student bravely soldiered on through the adversities of learning english in the jungle. If she ever comes back, I'll make her go over what I taught her the first time.
I am chalking this one up as a win. It's going on my trimester report.
Good morning how are you?
ReplyDeleteMy name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.
I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because trough them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately it’s impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.
For all this I would ask you one small favour:
Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Suriname? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Suriname in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:
Emilio Fernandez Esteban
Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
28902 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain
If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.
Finally I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.
Yours Sincerely
Emilio Fernandez
It looks like you just got spammed, but I guess not!
ReplyDeleteDude, let me know when you think you'll be on skype again. It would be awesome to talk to you. Lots, seriously lots, to say. And can you resend your mailing address? I still have stuff to send you, but I generally suck at this kind of thing ;)
Lots and lots and lots of love to you, my friend! -Banana