Study

January 23rd, 2009 Posted by john
Lunal Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Since we got back from skiing it’s been relatively busy. Liz has loads of students preparing for TOEFL exams and is doing 22 hours of classes a week at the moment. I’ve just started doing three hours a week with some rheumatologists at the hospital as part of a national scheme to improve doctors’ English. On top of that I’ve got some exam preparation too so I’m varying between 23 and 26 hours a week which is full time (they reckon that 25 hours of teching is a full time level, because of the preparation you need to do). One of my students is doing both TOEFL and SAT exams. The SAT is the US college entrance exam and, while it has none of the listening or speaking parts like TOEFL, it’s got three maths sections. So I’ve been teaching maths too. Which was unexpected.

The poor student is being ‘encouraged’ by her parents, she’s doing the TOEFL exam today and then getting on a train and going to Madrid to do the SAT exam at 7:45 tomorrow.

I haven’t looked at maths like this for ages. It’s GCSE level, simple geometry, algebra and the like. I’ve actually enjoyed doing the exam questions, they remind me of the puzzles in the guardian. This of course, doesn’t help the student at all. Teaching someone how to recognise and solve these questions is a bit more than just solving them, I hope we’ve done enough. In the nicest possible sense, I don’t want to see her again…

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