My head's back in my teaching, thankfully. I have back-to-back lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays (4:15 to 9:15, with a half-hour break in between), first a pre-intermediate class then a pre-advanced class. It's a long time to focus, but I'd rather have that than a split shift.

My pre-advanced class went really well tonight. It's a nice group, all my age or a little older (or I assume they're older than me because they're married, which is frequently a bad assumption). Everyone speaks at about the same level, makes similar grammar mistakes, is unfamiliar with the same sets of vocabulary words...and then there's Котя.

Котя speaks English almost as well as I do, and has analyzed the language more meticulously than I probably ever will (except when trying to keep up with his questions on the spot). He's taking the class to make his English sound more natural--he already knows the grammar and nearly all the vocabulary from the book we use. When I pose questions to the class, he's almost always the first to answer, and often acts like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

It's hard not to teach to him. For the first couple weeks after he joined the class, that's what I found myself doing--answering, as best I could, all of his obscure questions and feeding the class vocabulary words (homogenous, rarefied, scrutinize) that are fairly superfluous to everyone but him. I've since gotten better about putting off some of his questions and slowing down the class for the sake of everyone else, even if it frustrates him.

He wasn't there today, which is part of the reason why the class went so well. I really like him as a person--he poses interesting questions, is genuinely kind (if a little impatient), and deeply into science (another pitfall-trap of tangents I have to avoid)--but his gravitational pull in the class is hard to handle.