Giving Private Lessons

A few years ago I refused to give private lessons.  Partly because I felt I needed all my energy for my regular classes and partly because I suspected private lessons would be boring.  For me and for the students.

Jokingly I said I was too much teacher for just one student.  It takes a certain amount of energy to confront a classroom filled with adolescents and channel all their emotions into a group activity. A good lesson involves a lot of interaction between students and the teacher, but also between the students. It's a challenge that can become an exhilarating drug when it goes well.  I couldn't imagine getting the same high from a private student.

Then life played one of its little jokes on me and the French Ministry of Education declared that they would kindly allow me to continue teaching to the age of 67, but then I would have to retire. If only I had had the forethought to lie about my age when I came to France, I would be getting a less miserly pension.  Since last June I've started taking on private students in order to supplement my income, and also because I don't feel ready to stop teaching.  I learn more from my students than they do from me and I'm convinced that every year I'm a better teacher than I was the year before.  To suddenly stop teaching and take up golf seemed a tremendous waste of everything I've learned in the last twenty years.

My first students were friends that knew me, then I began getting calls from people who saw my ads.  I now have about 30 students.  The youngest is in primary school and the oldest are retired.  Some are lycée students and some are adults who need English for their job or who want to be able to travel abroad.  The work is as varied as their expectations and motivations, and I find it very interesting.  I still miss the challenge of a class, but I have to admit that private lessons are much less stressful.  

Recently a friend asked me for advice because she's been asked to give private lessons.  I told her that I'm enjoying teaching with no discipline problems.  Basically, I plan what I want to talk about with my students, much as I would with a class, but I don't worry if we get side-tracked on something that particularly interests them.  It's personalization with a capital P.  I'm using Anne Matava's scripts but we also work on songs, learning the vocabulary with lots of PQA, or films.  Last week I gave two groups my recipe for a Christmas fruit cake.

I don't think that students have to have an advanced level to work with films.  We watch a scene with the subtitles in English (my target language), then we talk about it.  I tell stories, jokes, share my memories from growing up in the States or my life in Cameroon.  Basically, I see myself as being paid to have a conversation with my students and I try to make it interesting, to be a good conversationalist. 

Something that has worked very well is the graphic novel, "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. There are no words, but the pictures tell a complex and moving story.  We look at each page, describe the images and then talk about what we think it means.  It takes several lessons to work our way through the book and by then I have a good idea of where my students are at and where we can go next.

Basically, if we have faith in Krashen, we can ensure that our students will progress by simply chatting with them, verifying that they understand, translating when necessary so their affective filters stay down.  Today with a group of adults we watched a scene from Shawshank Redemption in which one of the characters said, "He should have died in here."  Spontaneously one of the students who would have tested as A2 last year translated the phrase "Il aurait du mourir ici." She did it without stopping to think and I was so proud of her.

I guess the extra, unexpected bonus with private lessons is that you come to know your students better than you can in a large classroom and they become your friends, people that you enjoy spending time with and look forward to seeing.