With you life is more sweat.

"With you life is more sweat."

These are the actual words from one of my incredible students. And, I couldn't help but laugh so hard when I read them. I know he meant "sweet," and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but the fact that he wrote "sweat" is both true and it points to a quite a hill that we have to climb with the English language.

First off, the sweaty truth: I've started running with this student and several others in the evening, and we are up to 8K. They can outrun me any day of the week, but they are so patient and caring about watching out for Mr. Tim and stick right beside me, ready to grab me if I should stumble. They make regular comments in Romanian, like "You have really good form for your age," and "Be careful of the cars, Mr. Tim." I taught them the word "knucklehead" and they love it when I reply, that they should stop being knuckleheads and that I'm not THAT OLD. :o)

There is also the figurative sweat that I bring to the classroom because I expect to see them grow. I expect to see them tangibly develop their English abilities. There are those students who shoot me sniper-beamed looks of hate, but there are a growing number of students who are also rising to the challenge, coming to after-school clubs and lessons. Some are writing. Some are debating in English. Some are simply honing up on their grammar skills. But they are all sweating as they exercise their brains.

The hill that must be climbed is one of the difficulty of learning English. We take so much for granted when we speak English, much as the kids here do with Russian and Romanian. We can't always answer the "why is it done that way" questions about English grammar, and there are literally thousands of exceptions throughout the various rules of spelling, grammar and pronunciation. In fact, I challenge you (my readers) to take a look at the following poem to get a sense of what I mean just about pronunciation: http://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/pronunciation.shtml To spur my students on, I tell them that if they can learn how to pronounce this poem correctly, they will pronounce English better than 90% of the world's native English speakers. This gets them excited. They are nothing if not competitive.

And so, we sweetly sweat while building confidence and English skills at the same time. I'm just so grateful to have these incredible students in my life.

I leave you with a poem I wrote while some of my students were writing a test paper:

Tested

The sun sifts dappled

into the classroom
where students take their tests.

Autumn Path outside of Ialoveni, Moldova

Warming
to the information
trying to understand the perfect
tense and structure
the sentence.

They have no sadness,

no fear of losing
this moment. No worry
that the sun dancing on the floor
will still be there
this time next year.

They move in the now

and consider only the problem at hand
reaching for the definition
of living
with a certainty
that is crisp in its fragility
and thick with oblivion.