Summer Update

So much has happened that I am not completely sure where to begin, and since time is growing short, I will need to just begin, and organize information about the site later.

Our move to the Davis Emerson campus has placed us in a much more convenient location without stairs and with Internet access, but its location is still not known to many adult English learners in the area. I hope to remedy that with a recruiting campaign that will be made possible, in part, by the next bit of news...

I am moving to Indonesia for 10 months, to serve a Georgetown University English Language Fellowship at Tanjungpura University in Pontianak. As a community service, I'll continue to update this page just as before, and answer questions from learners online, but will not be teaching on the site any more.

Since my last regular day on the regular day job at Tuscaloosa Public Library is July 19th, I will have time before I leave to get out there and "recruit, recruit!" This applies to both students and volunteers, though the volunteer program has some cleaning up to do, mainly because in all the confusion, I have not taken the time to keep everyone updated on summer Conversation Partners assignments, who has continued, who has dropped, etc. I hope an email flash can go out later this weekend.

As with every July, we are talking about the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution during EL Civics time on Mondays. I have been looking for Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese versions of these documents online, and not having the success we have enjoyed in years past. July 26th is movie night, and I predict a spike in attendance that evening, since everyone knows this. We will probably show National Treasure or some other film with a Declaration of Independence theme.

Summer conference in Birmingham is July 21-23, and Diane, Wynn, and I will be presenting a workshop on the oral interactive techniques we learned from Dr. Spezzini and have used in our own classrooms. We are planning to invite our students to participate in demonstrating these, but I don't know if many will want to. The Birmingham Zoo is proving to be a more popular choice for our class field trip - and it is about time for one again, of course.