Boston Academy of English Blog

This week Cora’s communication class focused on ‘reality practice’. The students had to have conversation practice with loud music playing in the classroom, tell each other stories while standing in front of a construction area on Washington Street. And tell each other about an article from the Metro while standing four feet apart from each other.

Finally, they had to listen to recordings of themselves doing interviews. It was exhausting, but really fun! Students agreed it was a useful challenge. Hopefully, everyone will remember to SPEAK UP when using English So, what’s next - should we have a huge English-only rock and roll party at Cora’s house?

TEFL town is cookin’ as usual! Sara is off to Turkey with her new teaching certificate, Dan and Lin have been scanning some sites like TEFL.com and Dave’s ESL Cafe for jobs in France and Philippe has long-term plans to pursue a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics. That’s awesome! Good luck everyone; I’m sure the free class students miss you already.

Jennifer’s workshop class wrote an essay about racism last week. This is a hot topic, but these students seem to have a deep sense of how important it is to try to understand each other - not only understand English, but understanding how to live in a very diverse community of students and teachers.

One student wrote, “I feel sorry for people who are racist because they are missing one of the big pleasures of life in accepting other cultures and races”. Good for you guys! It would be great if everyone in the world had these kinds of feelings. Barack Obama won a Nobel peace prize this week, next year, I think it’s going to one of these great teachers at BAE.