English conversation… the numbers really add up!

I mentioned before that having left a long career in teaching… I somehow get teaching voluntarily. This time I’m teaching adults whose first language isn’t English, and I’m doing it for fun! Our new term hasn’t started yet but we are planning already, in a loose fun way.

We keep a register now, at first it was a bit more slap-dash, but now we do take names and add up how many people we see each week, becoming more professional I guess! I took the registers home and looked at the numbers as we got the feeling that people were dropping off and wondering if perhaps our classes had run out of steam. Well, it hasn’t; there are fluctuations at different times of year, and as it is a voluntary thing people come and go. Some people get jobs (which is great!) some people sign on to college course (also great) some people move away from the area or have other commitments, and I guess some people just get fed up with coming!

It will be interesting to see who and how many people attend this year; I’m sure we will be in for some surprises! This will be my third year and when I first started the group was mainly Bangladeshi and ethnic Chinese people, mainly women. Then there seemed a change and more Polish people and some other Eastern European people joined our group, again mainly women, and the Bangladeshi and Chinese people drifted away – I know a lot of them used to come while their children were small but when they started going to school full-time, their mothers could get jobs or go to college. Then we saw a lot of Spanish people arriving and this time there were more men in their numbers; this obviously reflected the sad financial situation in Spain.

Here are some numbers, from April 2012 to July 2013, in case you’re interested:

92 students over 42 sessions
average attendance 12

- Bangladeshi
- Chinese
- Thai
- Indian
- Latvian
- Polish
- Spanish
- African
- Georgian
- Russian
- Greek
- Ukrainian
- Romanian
- Brazilian
- Lithuanian
- Hungarian