Beth Wise

Category: Work

MOOCH

This week is the week when I should have been welcoming nervous, adult education students back into my classroom for my 10th year of teaching ESL. I should be taking their first day of school pictures and doing get to know you activities. I should be. But I’m not. Instead, I am jobless and directionless,…
Bridge-Building Magic

For the last nine years, I taught English as a Second Language at a tiny adult education program housed in rotting, aged portables behind a local school. Since 2017, every year I have welcomed a new group of nervous Level 2 students. Most of my students were Spanish-speaking stay-at-home moms but I always had a…
Burple

Language is a funny thing. One of the things that I love best about teaching English is learning how to make connections through language. During our clothing unit, I had a student who consistently mispronounced the word suit as ‘sweet’. She did it 100 times and I finally threatened her with the tiny leather sandal…
Prompt Me: My First Job

{In an effort to not drown in a sea of dumpster fires, I’m trying to write (at least every other blog) about something light. I’ve found some prompts to get me going} Here’s today’s prompt: Write about your first job and what it taught you. I don’t remember much about my first interview at Villa…
How to Lose 20 ESL Students in 30 Seconds

I may have mentioned before that field trips at my job are a little, how do you say, insane. Generally, we’ve got a group of about 70 adults (sometimes with kids) that we need to get on a train, off a train, and to the right location. It’s a bit like herding cats, except that…
Do you? Do you?

I might have mentioned once or twice that I have an ESL voice (see the 7:30-8:15 time slot here). When I am speaking in my ESL voice, I over-enunciate, speak loudly, don’t use contractions, repeat things, ask questions to things that I just said, and my eyes get huge. I might have also mentioned that…
A Night in the Basic English Computer Class

I wish there was a tasteful way to create a sitcom about an ESL school. It would be so tongue-in-cheek but it would be so stinkin’ funny. Today’s funny story comes to you from our computer lab. The computer lab is an excellent source of funny stories. My first week on the job, I walked…
2011: A Year in Review

Hello friends and family- If you were breathlessly checking your mailbox every day for a Christmas letter from Alex and Beth, you can breathe now. Here it is….in all its glory. Don’t get me wrong. I love sending people mail but I just bought replacement ink for our printer after months of us talking about…
They Call Me “The Hammer”

You might think this is hard to believe, but people do not find me intimidating. Maybe it’s my freckles or my fat cheeks or my un-make-uped face or my unkept hair or my ill-fitting clothes. I dunno. People think that I am a pushover when they see me. I guess I used to be, once a long time…
T-Shirt Series #4: Shut Up and Listen

{My younger sister went to Thailand to work at an orphanage this summer. You can read about her adventures here. She apparently found a t-shirt salesman who made t-shirts in English. Some of them are hilarious; some make no sense at all. She brought me 4 amazing little gems and I will blog about each of…
A Day in the Life

I thought I would give you all a sneak peak into my work life. I started last March at a non-profit ESL learnign center (email me for the website). (PS- Don’t judge us by our website. It is a work in prograss. Ten points to the person who can find the picture of the creepy…
A Mario By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet…

I really wanted to change my name in the 3rd grade. Because my given name is Elizabeth, I have plenty of options. (At least I wasn’t like my sister, who wanted to change her name from Leah to something like Samantha or Tiffany.) On the first day of school, I told my teacher that I…