Over the years I have taught a great variety of kinds of English to an amazing range of people – from Japanese businessmen to Georgian schoolchildren, from a millionaire art collector and former business leader to five local children with whom I am engaged on a new teaching experiment, which is also designed to teach them about business. Every time they come without missing a class, they gain a financial credit which may later be withdrawn or re-invested in the project.
The best teacher doesn’t say, ‘I know everything, follow me!’ but something like, ‘language is a mysterious force which joins us and which we can explore together. All of us are masters of something but less advanced in other things. Student and Teacher are equal but opposite. Together we can interrogate language and find out some of its meanings.’
I love the interface of this site which is best suited – for English – to intermediate students who want to discover a lot of synonyms, idioms, ways of understanding structure and presentation, ways of shaping sound and phrase, which will help them in a professional situation or a personal quest. These can easily be notated as we go in real time, without the typing delays you get in Skype. English, both explaining and explained, therefore occupies the role of the Sphynx among languages.
There are many things you can do with it, but it is easily deformed. If you allow me to assist you, we can decode some of its messages!
Professionally, I have studied Chomskian Linguistics at Strathclyde and have a First from Cambridge in a degree which took in Ancient Languages and Western Art of the Middle Ages. Since then, I have studied more or less every other social science and humanities subject, as well as computing, in some depth and have an acute, educated mind and even my own system of sentence analysis, Yin Yang English, which you can see briefly in my Introduction Video.
I teach online most days and, weekly, at the local Russian-Armenian school (see above). I have lived for the last nine years in Georgia (2010- ) although with periods in Hungary (2016-2017)and China (2017-2019). Earlier, I taught in Belgium (1992-1995) and Japan (1980-19810, as well as spending time abroad in other occupations, for example in France (1996) and Norway (1982-1985)