Why I'm here

I decided to start a blog because I think it will be fun. The English major in me loves to write, and blogging gives me an easy outlet for that, which I could potentially one day condense, publish, and live happily ever after. I just read "Twilight," and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, one of my parting thoughts was, "Hey, I could do that." I know it's harder than it looks, but I'm pretty sure the hero of my story would do more than look brooding and rescue the same accident-prone girl 15 times in a row.

So here I am, mainly to write for fun. I called the blog "Excuse Me, Teacher" because that's what I hear pretty much all day from the international students I teach. Their languages all have a respectful term for "teacher" that is less high-ranking than "professor," and I can't convince many of them to just call me Emily, so I get called "teacher" a lot. I think it's cute - not really accurate in terms of English usage, but very endearing. My officemate Melina always responds to "Excuse me, teacher" with "Yes, student?" but I just let them go along calling me teacher and counting on some future teacher to tell them not to. It's just too sweet.

So in this blog, I plan to share some of the adventures I have in teaching and also in the rest of my life. Anybody who's reading this pretty much knows me, so I don't have to introduce myself and say where I live, how old I am, etc. - actually, it's probably not a good idea to put that stuff on the internet anyway. As far as teaching goes, I teach English composition to college freshmen at the local community college, and English language skills to international students at our university's English Language Institute. I really enjoy both of my jobs, but teaching international students is really where my heart is - I love to make them feel welcome and comfortable in the US, and I love learning about their cultures. I love sharing the joys and wonders of the English language, which, as a native speaker, I think are plentiful. For example, I think it is absolutely brilliant of Southerners to invent "y'all." English is lacking a second person plural (i.e. the plural of "you," which plenty of other languages have), so Southerners, in our great wisdom, came up with one: "y'all." I think this completely disproves the "Southerners are slow" theory that so many people from up North seem to cling to, and makes our language more interesting. So as a proud Southerner, I teach it to my international students on the first day of class. Joy #1 of English.