Au-to-mat-ic-ally

I started TAing an ESL class today and walked into a classroom of about 20 international students entirely unsure of what the class syllabus may include for the day. I awkwardly stood in the back waiting for the facilitator to include the TAs in the class.

For the last half hour of class, I got to work with a small group of 4 students. One of my students was Iraqi and the other 3 were Chinese... all brilliant and super driven. While I don't even know them beyond a few words of conversation and an exchange of names, I am so impressed with them.

The students were working on stress syllables. The exercise, while perhaps helpful to learning the English language, seemed a bit useless in my eyes. A stress syllable is the part of a given word that is stressed...pretty self explanatory. Too bad, as we went through the exercise, it was hard for me to pick out the stressed syllable in some word. Our words included: simulation, supernova, automatically, galaxy, depression, etc. One of the students asked me how I learned which part of the word to stress and it was hard to respond with such an unfulfilling answer that I simply learned it from listening and being a native speaker...but I have full faith that they will get it - they are relatively good at pronunciation; screw the stress syllables. Since there is no consistent formula or rule, I personally think it just takes practice and listening.

We'll see where this course goes.

Off to write a theology paper (insert that i'm not excited about it and thus just spent time writing my blog instead of working. oops)