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| My new kitchen, at last! |
Look! There it is... my kitchen is ready at last. And I have started to use it, although it still feels a little strange.
But there are still problems and things which are not finished or not correct. This means that I have to find and pay other people to finish and to correct. It is very frustrating and I am quite exhausted, as you can imagine. But this is great progress and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!
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| View from new hallway to front door |
My first student of 2016 arrived on Sunday 29th February. I worked very, very hard to prepare for her arrival. I had to clean the carpets with a carpet cleaning machine. I had to move a lot of furniture and unpack all my things. I realised that I had MUCH too much STUFF. My new kitchen does not have as much storage space as my old kitchen.
My student arrived very late, around midnight on Sunday. She is from Barcelona and she is the sister of my first student, who came to study with me eight years ago. She is a child psychologist for the Catalan government and she wants to improve her English so she can travel and communicate with people all over the world.
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| Anna doing her homework |
When we started our classes on Monday morning, we discussed her reasons for learning English. We also talked about the best way for her to learn and planned the course. Her level was quite low, about pre-intermediate, and she wanted to increase her vocabulary. She also needed to refresh her memory about our irregular verbs and to practise asking questions, remembering to use the auxiliary, or not with the verb 'BE' ('DO you LIKE..'? 'DID you EAT..?', 'ARE you..?', 'WERE you..?').
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| Anna working in the new classroom |
She is working very hard and has improved enormously. Now she is speaking with English sentences, with English word order, rather than translating from Spanish. I call this language 'Spanglish'.
I took her to listen to some great live jazz music. We went to see James Morton and his group playing at The Gallimaufry in Stokes Croft.
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| James Morton and guests |
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| Breakdancing Jesus in Stokes Croft |
On Saturday, we went on a tour together. She is crazy about graffiti or street art. Bristol is famous as the home of 'Banksy', the world's most famous street artist. The tour was very interesting and we were very lucky with the weather.
Here are some examples of the street art we saw:
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| Banksy's 'Mild, Mild West' |
Anna will leave on Saturday 12th March. Then I have a rest for one week. My next student is an English teacher from Rome. She will come for a short but intensive course of eight days, over the Easter holidays. She wants to refresh her English and discover new ways to engage her students with the English language.
If you are interested in a course with me, the next opportunity is the beginning of April or the middle of May onwards.
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| First day in the classroom |
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| Cooking in my new kitchen |
