User:Dirk

Oh cool, so this is my user page. Yes, I am completely new to both wikis and this site. But I have been teaching English for the past year, and I am looking for a place to donate all my self-created lessons to the public domain.

I've taught in Russia, where most of my students had a great knowledge of English grammar. Having said that, they probably wouldn't be able to ask for the nearest supermarket or order a meal in English. One of my students was a girl who could flawlessly determine the tense of any sentence, yet still wouldn't have a clue what it was about. I'd have her panicking in class shouting "Present perfect! Present perfect! It is present perfect!" when I asked her what she had done the day before. Sad really.

So in order to help them catch up with their oral skills I designed a range of roleplays and listening exercises based on videos from the public domain. It was quite successful in the sence that we had a lot of fun in class and I managed to get even my most terrified students talking. And I discovered that designing lessons is a lot of fun. Right now, I am designing lessons for more complicated grammar issues. I know there are a lot of skilled, friendly teachers out there in Russia who have no access to modern materials. There are schools full of wonderful, smart young teachers forced to work for horrible soviet-type directors with dito resources.

I hope that my contributions to this site will be used by those people to make teaching and learning English fun again. And I hope that teachers from the community with better skills than me will help me improve my materials.