Creative, effective online and in-person lessons with a friendly, experienced American teacher of English:
I have 20 years’ experience teaching general English and helping people break down their barriers in the language. I'm comfortable teaching levels low (A1) to high (C2+) and everything in between. My school specializes in individual and small group lessons for professionals, language enthusiasts, adults and teens.
I try to be creative and to design lessons that help students speak, pronounce and write better English. That’s in addition to whatever you want to accomplish: pass an exam, increase your vocabulary, improve your command of phrasal verbs, or speak appropriate English in a business setting. I love talking to students and hearing about their lives. But I also take the education part of my work very seriously. As such, I write my own teaching materials. This guarantees I am addressing students’ problems—and students are having some fun.
I also draw on a wide range of engaging, up-to-date materials, including from the Economist and New York Times. I have experience teaching Individual lessons, in-company, large and small groups in academic settings. I hold a degree in English Literature. I have an office on Włodarzewska Street in Warsaw where I can do lessons in person. But most students find working from home more convenient, so we do most lessons online now.
The first lesson/consultation is free of charge. The price of an individual lesson is 100 PLN/60-minute hour.
I have a lot of experience in
1. preparing students to PASS exams: Matura, FC, CAE, CPE, IELTS, TOEFL, PET
2. General English
3. Vocabulary building
4. Pronunciation
5. Preparing to work in English/business-focused English
6. Conversation-based classes
7. Mastering question forms, verb tenses and difficult grammar
8. Writing classes for professionals
9. Writing for academic purposes
10. High-proficiency fluency training
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A sample of the original materials you'll get at The Ochota English Pages:
Health expressions (how many health-related expressions can you find in my writing?)
Whenever we have a long weekend, I like to go out to my place in the village. I don’t do much—just take it easy and get some rest, and maybe go for a long walk out through the woods. If the city has me feeling down, getting away from it all really does wonders for me. One of my neighbors out there, Dorota, is blind and has an army of chickens and a cow. She’s a veterinarian and employs an assistant, Beata, who sees just fine. Another of my neighbors is Greg, a German who retired after making a fortune selling windows in Warsaw. You read that right: he made a fortune selling windows in Warsaw.
There’s a condition my doctor calls ‘malaise’— feeling out of sorts, like you just can’t get it together, or you can’t put your finger on exactly what’s bothering you. You have a low-grade infection, maybe. Maybe you’re running a fever below the knees. If it’s the city that’s got me stressed out, it can take me days to get over it and really unwind, though if I get out into the woods and the mud and the swamps for a few hours I cheer right up and come back smiling. ‘Don’t track zat mud in zee house’, Greg will say when I rap on his door. But I digress. Walking in the woods: that’s how I get over the ‘malaise’ of city life or modern living or whatever you want to call it.
Next day, it’s with no malaise at all but a tall mug of beer that Greg comes out and leans on the fence.
“You don’t need to be dying to take a few days off work,” he says.
As if on cue, the cow wanders up and sticks her head through the fence slats beside him, chewing away, the picture of serenity. The two of them stand there looking at me. “Just call in sick,” he finally says. “No sweat.”
“Mental health days,” Dorota calls out from behind the firepit, winking at no one, her midday martini sweating elegantly atop a brick. “They’re big in Denmark, you know.”
“Meeeeee time!” Beata shouts out from a cloud of chickens all acluck, scrabbling and pecking up their food as she doles it out in cupfuls. “Make the call!”
I’ve come to appreciate this wayward fireside counsel. So much so that perhaps I am feeling a bit under the weather. My nose may indeed have just taken a turn for the runnier. Yes, I must be coming down with a cold—or just enough of one to make facing the real world too great a burden to take on today. Maybe I’m not so sick that I need to take an antibiotic, or stay in bed for a week. There’s no need to see a doctor. Let’s not get carried away, after all.
Ruminate on this country fact, instead: Last Winter, when I couldn’t shake a nasty chest infection, Dorota wrote me a doctor’s note, good for a full three days. She and Beata and I promptly took our skis over to the big cross-country loop nearby and skied for the whole afternoon, right out in the sun—10 kilometers in all, up and down the hills until I was worn out and soaking wet and had coughed out any trace of an infection. I was sick as a dog the next day, but right back on my feet within a week.
Greg moved out of Warsaw a long time ago, the city having stressed him out so much that he needed therapy. Now he helps Dorota with the cow and the chickens. Sometimes he chases them; sometimes they chase him. He left the business world behind and became a nature writer and a consultant, though as near as I can tell he mainly consults with squirrels and birds and “bulletins from immortality.” When he needs to blow off some steam or has writer’s block, he heads for the barn to bang on his twenty-piece drum set, a headache you can hear from three big hay fields away. I guess it’s possible his playing “keeps zee pigeons away and zee rodents at bay, as he’s fond of saying—but it for sure puts me and the chickens on edge. 537 460 550