Teaching ESL During the Holidays

Things sometimes slow down in the ESL tutoring world during the Thanksgiving holiday. Sometimes I wonder if it's because of the teachers and tutors or because of the ESL students. The American Thanksgiving holiday is not something that's celebrated by many of my ESL adult students. For a few, it's a time to take a four-day weekend and head to Vegas.

Although, I do have one student who has a kindergarten-aged child who insists on all the traditional trimmings. Since he's only five or six years old and has only learned about the basics of the trimmings in class, his mom takes certain liberties in preparing the meal. They have a traditional American Thanksgiving with some Chinese flavor.

Another thing I've noticed over the last few years of tutoring ESL students privately is that I've traditionally gotten several new students in the month of December. I assumed when I started out that December would be a really slow month. I expected January to be a bigger month, but it's never worked that way. Strangely, December is the busy month.

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