Though the duration of my private classes has been short here it surely has been interesting. I started in March and was given a few classes by a girlfriend who wasn´t able to fit them in to her schedule. One of the classes on Wednesdays was with a 9-year-old boy named Daniel, the other, on Thursdays was with a 16-year-old boy named Javier. The classes at first were a bit intimidating and challenging to me. The parents would be paying me in cash, 20 euro/hour to help their children become more proficient in English. At first I felt bad, like I was taking advantage of them for how much they were paying me but I soon realized that each class took me time to prep and lots of time to travel to so that I was definitely worth the money I was getting paid.
My class with Daniel only lasted about 3 months and for many of those weeks I either had to cancel because of travelling or conflicts or his mom cancelled for some reason. The family lived only two metro stops from my school so even though the class was at 5pm-6pm on Wednesdays, I usually wouldn´t go home after school ended at 2pm since it would be a long commute back. The classes with Daniel were challenging. His English was terrible...which is why I understood why his parents insisted he have a private tutor. For the first few classes we would go over his homework and lessons, I would help him with his homework and then we would work a lot on pronunciation since his was so very bad. One lesson we were learning about parts of the body and he could NOT pronuonce the word: "muscle." In Spanish it would be pronounced "moose-clay." So he kept saying, "Moose-clay, and then I would say musss-sell," and he would repeat and then a minute later read, "moose-clay." It was very frustrating. Finally I wrote it phonetically how it would be pronounced in Spanish and at the end of the lesson he said it correctly without me correcthing him!
The next week I came to his class though and his mom must have overheard how much I had been emphasizing pronounciation with him and told me, "I discussed with his teacher and she said the only things that are important for him to be working on are grammar and vocabulary. It is not necessary for you to work on pronunciation with him anymore." I couldn´t believe it....this teacher had told his mom that pronunciation isn´t important?! In my opinion, pronunciation is one of the most important things when learning a new language! If someone for example says spicy but pronounces it as "specie" than NO ONE will understand that person. But I realized that this was why it seemed like so many Spanish students were struggling with English because their teachers thought it more important to focus on simply grammar and vocabulary and NOT on pronunciation.
My classes with the 16-year-old Javier were much different. His level of English was high and we did two-hours of conversation once a week. The two hours would always go by so slow....I feel even at a high level of a second language that its hard to have a "personality" or a sense of humor. We would blaze through topics and I felt I was constantly struggling to maintain an interesting and engaging conversation. I started having to search conversation topics online just to have enough material to talk about for the two hours each week that we met. He was most interested in talking to me about sports- preferrably basketball. He was easy to criticize American culture and politics even though he never had visited the states before. I was very adament about refuting his criticisims and making him see another side than what he had seen on TV about Americans.
I guess I would have to say that private classes taught me something very different than working with larger classes. I saw how it takes so much work to help one student alone. I realized even more how important it is to understand a particular learning style of a student. Some are visual, some auditory while others are read-write learners. In a classroom setting it is very challenging to engage all students when everyone seems to have different learning styles. Though I feel with more time at anything I would have been able to adjust to these and found the best way to stimulate all the students through a variety of different activities.
The most valuable lesson to learn about doing private classes in Madrid is the time committment. Madrid is a HUGE city and it takes forever to go from class to class. You end up spending about an hour each way commutting plus time waiting for the class if you don´t want to make the long trek home and then back again. At the end of the day for the money I was making and the number of hours I was putting in to all the commuting it hardly seemed worth it to me. But I am glad I did them because they filled up some of my lazy time here and introduced me to students who were adament about improving on their English. And even after the hours of commute it was still nice to have some extra money in the pocket.
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