Interesting times at Seneca

As I've said already, teaching at Seneca was more like a real teaching experience than what I had gone through in Korea. At the same time, there weren't a lot of hi-jinks to report from this period of my ESL career. However, I can mention the following interesting moments.

Between every semester, we participated in new student level testing sessions, and my first experience with this was as a station manager. Basically, I was in charge of telling the potential new students where to sit and who to see next, and helping the testers whenever necessary. In following semesters, I worked as one of the testers, which basically meant asking a series of progressively harder questions to determine a starting level. If there was one moment that recalled the sarcastic good old days of Korea, it was when the man in charge (I think his name was xxxxx), disgustingly told me that one of the teachers (I'll call her Crystal) was a "cunt." Okay, so professionalism didn't rule the day 24/7 at Seneca, but I laughed my ass off at that one.

One time in class, I had a group of students that included immigrants from Israel and Iran. I thought this was cool until they began to talk Middle East politics. Fearing where such a conversation might go, I nipped it in the bud and stated that no politics should be discussed during the class.

In that same class, there was a Russian lady who liked to ask and answer questions as frequently as possible. I had no problem with that, but one other student, a lady from Romania, disliked it. At one point, the Romanian student stood up to face the Russian student and berated her for talking so much, stating that she didn't come to this class to listen to a Russian do all the talking (paraphrased). There was a chill in the air for the rest of that night, and I think the Romanian woman alienated herself from the rest of the class for that semester.

In one of the semesters, my class included a few people from the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as one young lady from Italy. One night after class, they took me out to a Cuban salsa club on Yonge Street. They taught me some salsa dance moves, and I enjoyed a few fine drinks. I believe this was the only time I went out with my students while teaching at Seneca.