I Have a Couple Teaching Obsessions You Should Be Aware Of

My Approach to Teaching

I have a couple teaching obsessions you should be aware of:

1.  I think these eight parts of speech are the center

of the grammar universe:

a. noun

b.  pronoun

c.  verb

d.  preposition

e.  adjective parts of speech

f.  adverb

g.  conjunction

h.  article

2.  Reading is super important, too. Reading regularly helps you improve your vocabulary, grammar, writing, and spelling—and your reading, of course! Do yourself a favor: set time aside to read in English every day.

BUT it’s not enough to know what each part of speech is by itself, in isolation. I want you to understand how the words fit together to build big language pictures. I always care about how one word is interacting with other words, how the pieces fit together.

I want you to see the whole elephant, not just its trunk or its tail!

My goal is to teach you how to teach yourself. If I am successful, you will leave 042 with the skills to go on learning independently, taking your English just as far as you want to go!

Your new skills

Finally, you should know that my class is frontloaded; I introduce a lot of important ideas in the first few weeks of class. Somewhere around week three, my students often look at me like this:

(This is called scowling.)

Don’t panic! Once we get through all those parts of speech, we spend a lot of time reviewing and reinforcing those ideas. It gets easier and easier. By the end of the quarter, my students are usually smiling at me again!