Friday, November 6, 2009

Quality Soda Street

This video, which Seth linked to in his blog, is, as people used to say in England (or maybe still do, I've been away 4 years) quality - it speaks for itself so I won't, but needless to say I wish there was a store like this in Tallinn, particularly as I'm now on the waggon indefinitely...

Introducing The Puumaja Crew's Latest Addition

Tim Flowers is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher based in the capital city of one of the baltic states. He is 42 years old. His previous job was working for the Post Office (main sorting office - as a superintendent) and this excellent and relevant background has given him a good grasp of the fundamentals of the English language, and the art of teaching it to others.
He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamourous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the gliterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night.
He likes beer.
We join Tim's diary of an ESL teacher just as he is emerging, pumped and swearing, from a successful lesson...

Staff Room Rant

F*ck me, those f*cking students are really starting to piss  me off...
...oh it's you, sorry, I thought I was in the staff room again, gobbing off about how hopeless a group of pre-intermediates were in grasping my cursory and mumbled treatment of what is actually a conceptually very difficult area of English grammar (and which I don't understand myself, incidentally).
Yes, these students are such easy targets; spending good time and money and erroneously seeming to expect English lessons from me  in return.
Ha ha, they aren't as smart as me, since I got my diploma in post office relations and scraped a TEFL qualification, after having spent a drunken weekend in this city and, purely on that basis, decided I wanted to live here .
I had to laugh today, somebody in an elementary group said 'in every Russia there is a problem'..yes, I got a lot of mileage in the staffroom announcing it to all and sundry. Never mind that I don't speak a single foreign language myself (though I like to put myself forward as an expert on which lanuages are inflectional and which aren't, how many cases they have, articles, personal pronouns etc ...).
Anyway I have to fninish now, have to go and prepare a lesson on the present perfect continuous; so that'll kill five minutes anyway.
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