Job Discussion Forums

[wildchild]

For how long did you work with your longest private?

Or longest client?

For how long did you give classes to one single person?

Perverts!

And after, say the 6th meeting, what in the hell did you talk about? Did the private want to stick to the book, curriculum, grammar et cetera...
or did they prefer to small talk?

Did they improve? Or were you just milking them for their money? (just kidding well, kinda )

[Stephen Jones]

I had a couple of classes that ran for four or five years. A couple of years or less was more normal though.

[wildchild]

Stephen and Shonai,

What did you guys talk about? Grammar? Small talk? Or both?


Well, the thing is, I have a few regulars but I'm not sure how to procede.

Do I stick to the curiculum? make small talk? or both?

Should I take them out on the town? Stay in the office/school? or both?

How does one keep things interesting?

[Shonai Ben]

I have a group lesson that has been going for 5 years now with no end in sight.
Average though is about 2-3 years.

[canuck]

I know someone who has been teaching the same core group for 27 years. I'm serious.

[fluffyhamster]

Is 'teaching' the right word when it's been 27 years?! (I'm assuming this guy's core students have actually improved somewhat in all that time).

[Gordon]

I've had a few students 4+ years, never stayed in the same place long enough for it to last any longer. Usually they were HS or elementary students. A good break from my predictable uni students.

[Mike_2003]

By the time I left Turkey I had a few students who I'd been working with for over two years. Most of them took 4-6 hours a week for the first year and after reaching the level they wanted continued to come once a week for practice. A wise policy and good for both parties involved.

I've been working mostly with corporations since coming to Romania 2.5 years ago so it's a slightly different situation. I've been working with one client since my arrival, although they tend to change the students due to people leaving the company, being fired, no longer being considered for promotion, etc. I must say that this encourages students as those who are put on the training schedule know there are bigger things planned for them (and inversely, those removed from the programme start to worry).

So far all subsequent clients I've picked up are still with me although I'm thinking of dropped one of them because I'm wasting too much time travelling there and the market has picked up in the last year. I have a network of clients waiting for lessons so I can afford to be a little fussy now.

Mike

[Jetgirly]

About twelve months with three hours of one-on-one lessons per week (2 x 90 min). Most of my students were married, middle-aged men with families so I made a point of learning about their wives and children. I did in-company work at a few cool companies and would often play the airhead card by pretending I knew nothing about their line of work and getting them to educate me. Reading the financial section of the newspaper kept me up to date with the big changes that were happening at their workplaces, so I was always able to ask new dumb questions.

[sidjameson]

OP, I don't mean to sound harsh but you really make it sound that you are not really "teaching" then anything if you, as you say, "don't know what to talk about after 6 weeks" the thing is that any lesson should never really be a conversation as such. Present some target language(often previously learned but not used) practise it in a controlled way then use it in a more dynamic setting. This is the simplest teaching methodology around, but even armed with this you should be able to keep any class going for years.
Your job is to add the spark to the conversation but the flame should be mostly coming from them.

I taught some housewives for 5 years and kids for 7 years. I admit that I was running out of interesting supplementary material by the end. But to be honest I felt the need for a change far more than they did.

[Jetgirly]

^ I had a handful of students whose only goal was to "maintain" their level of English. These students did NOT want any instruction. They did not want their errors corrected (if their error made it absolutely impossible to understand them I would ask a question to clarify meaning). In general, they were less interested in having a conversation than in having someone to listen to them. I found they were mostly wealthy, unmarried retirees who just needed someone polite to lend an ear. I think they felt less pathetic by calling it a language lesson. While students like these definitely didn't make up the majority of my students, they are out there. In these cases you don't necessarily have a grammatical or communicative goal. Really, you just want to avoid falling asleep!

[Mike_2003]

[dmb]

I've had a few students who I have been teaching for 3 years. Like others have said, it is more a case of them maintaining their level. They have business meetings once every couple of months in English and so they don't want to 'lose' their English in between meetings.

[coffeedrinker]

I've had a couple students who I worked with my first year, they took a break when I left, and they came back when I returned. It seems like the longer-term ones do tend to be the more "talking/you listen" ones...people following a curriculum or just a book reach a rather natural ending point.

I find Jetgirly's post striking - it's an unusual feeling for me anyway to realize that people really just want to talk and have you listen...for an hour and a half in one sitting. Yeah.

One kind of odd thing I've noticed with longer one to ones is that they start to feel like friends almost...even if they are people I would never really cross paths with in my regular life. It's probably unbalanced because I know a lot more about them than they know about me.

And as you work with people longer it gets easier in one sense to prepare because you know what they like - but harder because you run out of your standard material!

I think after a time it is normal to get a bit more personal - though going out can get tricky. Given the difficulty to keep coming up with new stuff over time, I'd try not to turn more and more to chit chat only - I'd want to still keep with some curriculum and include chit chat, but, especially if they are dependent on you to maintain the chit chat...that will get old quickly.

[John Hall]

Three years is about the longest that I have gone with any one student or group. In one case, the student was studying English as a hobby. In the other cases, the students had to have their English as best as it could be for professional reasons. As they got past the "advanced" level books, we got into TOEFL Preparation books, even though only one or two actually intended to take the exam. Some of them would go to conferences in English once a year. So, we used a lot of "real material." For listening comprehension practice and discussion I used to use www.npr.org on the Internet; you can find just about any discussion on any topic there. Also, as often as possible, I tried to use authentic materials in English related to their work or their interests.

This part of English teaching for me is a lot of fun. As you explore the areas of interest of your students, you begin to learn a lot too. The trick is to have interesting material, and be almost like an interpreter at times: helping your students to understand English in the real world as they experience it. Sometimes I would plan things in advance; other times I would set up a discussion on a certain topic, see which direction it would go in, and then find an NPR discussion on the new topic, and we would listen to that. That way of doing things always seemed to keep things interesting for me and the students.