Supermarkets full of Halloween decorations indicate to us that summer is officially over and the teaching hustle is on again for most teachers. Perhaps you have also spent the first week or two of your language course discussing the customary topics of holidays and travel, exchanging mundane phrases such as “the holidays went by so quickly!”. But it doesn’t always have to end with superficial interest and a few pictures from the beach. As a private tutor I have the privilege of peeking into the lives of others even in summer and learning fascinating stories. Here are 10 of them that my students shared with me during July and August.
Ema: Summer at a Clinic on the Other Side of Europe
I watched Ema with some apprehension, as her experience would reflect on our previous year of classes. Having reached A2/B1 level Spanish, it was of course natural for her not to be completely comfortable in a new country. And while it was no walk in the park and the primary language of communication was English, I could see that she was proud of her Spanish.
Whether communicating with young patients, learning dental terminology on the spot, or searching for a lost package at the post office, the language was her crutch and, over time, a natural companion. After I saw her excitement when she was telling me about the elaborate patient triage and procedures that inspired her, it was clear to me that our efforts had paid off. She gained insights and experience in her field that she would have not found at a Slovak university.
Andrej: Alarm Set for 3 AM
Over the summer, I had been teasing Andrej a bit because he would always let me know in our early evening lessons that he was going to bed in an hour. The thing that drove him to bed so early was the hot weather. Andrej is a welder and at one point it was so hot in the factory that the boss offered his staff alternative shifts and earlier starts. This meant that if Andrej had to be ready for his shift at 04:00, he had to wake up at 3:00 for two weeks, which seemed to me, an air-conditioned-office native, almost like a parallel universe. We can only guess how temperature changes will affect the lives of the rest of us in the years to come.
Ben: I Confessed My Feelings
One of the beautiful things about being a 1:1 tutor is the trust and confidence you build with your students. Even to the point where they sometimes confide in you their heartaches. “Don’t you know the 90-day rule?” Ben responded when I asked him about his summer relationship situation. According to one rule (that is apparently well-known among the youth), enough time should have passed in the summer for him to be honest about his feelings with the girl who had captivated him for a good 4 months. When he finally did it and got only an ambiguous answer, I advised him by sharing my own dating fails and together we tried to move on.
Martina #1: A Concert that Cost a Fortune
The glittery clips of Taylor Swift’s concerts around Europe were bombarding me on all social media platforms, and they also reached me through one of my students. Thanks to Martina, who described her Eras Tour experience, I learned more about the behind the scenes of this pop craze: how the internet went down in the concert venue due to network overload, how fans choose their outfits, and why some people are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of euros on this spectacle.
Martina #2: New Me in Mid-August
We’ll stay with Martina for a while. There was one more thing she could check off her bucket list this summer, apart from the concert of a pop diva, namely the beginning of a new stage of her life. The stress of various interview stages, which I heard all about, finally paid off.
“Up until now I was used to understanding everyone around me, which will be different now, and it makes me quite nervous,” says my student, who moved to Munich in autumn for her new job. I am not worried about her from a language point of view, rather I wish her that the cultural and social adjustment will go well.
Tina: Behind the Scenes of a Film Festival
Thanks to one of my students, I gained insight into an experience I wouldn’t have otherwise imagined. You see, my student Tina was in charge of the subtitle screening at the Košice Film Festival. “Due to copyright reasons, it would have been very expensive to use films that already contain subtitles in them,” says Tina, whose job was to “insert” live subtitles into the film during screening.
Alberto: A Road Trip through My Country
Would you dare to go to a country with only a basic level of the local language? Well, when you have good people around you, everything is possible! Similarly to Emma, Alberto went abroad this year with “only” A2/B1 language level, specifically Slovak. His main motivation was his friends from Slovakia who wanted to spend their annual holiday at home and invited him to join them. Alberto’s language skills surprised not only their parents, who did not speak English, but also himself. And, I admit, me too, when we all ended up having a beer together in Bratislava. In this way, even through simple conversations, he managed to find his way to the people who made his stay in the land of halušky and socialist apartment blocks unforgettable.
Lucía: Officially an Aunt
With students in their late twenties, we always tease each other about who is closer to grandpa status whilst laughing about how behind in life we actually are. Lucía managed to reach a milestone because of her family this summer, as her older sister gave birth to the first child in the family. I remember my heart skipping a beat when Lucia told me why she needed to cancel our class. We were both expecting the arrival of her nephew into the world for quite a while and I am so pleased to see such joyous events as part of my work.
David: Greetings from the Norwegian Tunnels
David is one of those students whose work I know very little about. As a railway engineer, he had the opportunity to work on a project in Norway that I was very interested to hear about in class. Although the measuring devices in his presentation didn’t tell me much, I was able to be transported to my beloved Scandinavia for a while. We also were enchanted by the iconic Visit Oslo advertisement, which we watched in class and compared to his personal experience.