Letters make words and words make sentences. These create short ideas, and the result is simple.
The lightbulb sparks.
There is nothing like seeing a lightbulb turn on above a student’s head, the moment he or she understood a concept. The illuminated face, the involuntary smile and the wide pupils keep making me believe that creative teaching, art, and creative writing go hand in hand.
I have taught for many years. In Miami. In Birmingham, Alabama. In China’s Urumqi and Beijing, and several other places.
My students came from the most diverse backgrounds. Cuban refugees who needed English for survival. Well-to-do Chinese students who needed Spanish for cultural reasons, as an expansion to their already quite cemented English. Company CEOs who needed English just enough so they could mingle in circles they loved to find themselves in. American students who knew that Spanish soft power is on the rise. And above all, Chinese children who would, or could, become the very first member of their families to become fluent in a language, their parents and grandparents always knew important, yet never had the resources to tackle in any serious way.
Sure. Some “had” to go to class because “mom said so” but most of them never stopped gobbling up English vocabulary, learning about its Latin roots, and spitting out copied, well-rehearsed sentences, until one day, creative thinking would kick in and all those prior copycat sentences would become creative statements of their own.
This is teaching! This is creativity at its best.
Partial reproduction of my self-published book “American English” (in PDF format here) which I often see as extremely useful when teaching people who are not immersed in the English language on a daily basis and have therefore no idea of terms like “he acts like Simon Cowell” or what the cultural importance of Jay Leno vs. David Letterman were. Numbers like 420, 101, 411, and abbreviations like SCOTUS, FLOTUS, ROI and even MILF may be mentioned in their routine conversations if they lived in the US, and yet, they don’t even trigger a facial reaction in them, simply because they are not aware of it.
Remember. Teaching is learning. Learning is teaching, eve nif just yourself.