When a woman contacted me and said she would bring her son who needed to study English,I thought he would be at least a teenager. When I met them at a coffee shop, I was surprised to see an old woman with a middle age looking man.
“Who is going to learn?” I asked. The mother pointed the man, “Him”. I looked at him and said hello.He was putting his one arm around the top of the couch where his mother was sitting. He looked very relaxing for a person to start serious class.
Whatever I asked him, his mother answered instead of him.
“What did you study” His mother answered, “He finished university in Korea and now he wants go to a university in Canada.”
The exhausted looking mother said her son was 32 years old and the reason the family immigrated to Canada was partly for the son who couldn’t adjust to Korean ways.
Korean ways!
He hated Korean style of strict education system, korean teachers, and friends who bullied him. I asked if he had a friend in Canada, he said, no friend.
It could be a very interesting opportunity for me to have a student like him. I was excited to help him more than teaching English. I felt he needed lots of encouragement.
His first class started. Once it started, I noticed he had some problems with concentrating on something. When he read out loud a sentence in the text book, such as “I slipped on the ice while I was crossing the street in front of the dorm”, he added right after reading the sentence, “Ouch, that’s horrible!”
When it comes to the sentence, “I have been waiting for her since this morning 8:00 am” He adds, “Holly, I hate that kind of person! there used to be a girl…”
Every single sentence he studies, he took the sample example of sentence too seriously and wants to express how he feels! I had to be a therapist as well as a teacher.
I taught him for about one year and now he must be studying at a university in Canada.
LOL I doubt that.
Z
thanks!
I’m only patient with my students : )
You are very patient. :)
Z