My days, my challenges

I met the director of the school yesterday for the first time. Enkhjargal (Mongolians go by 1 name only) is a very nice, friendly man with great ambitions for the school. It appears to be a private, professional IT school, rather on the lines of IT Tech, with students ranging from 17 to 30. They have 2 years of studying to do in various fields on computer technology, ranging from animation to programming and html, and at the end of their study they have to take a qualifying exam in English, which is why he jumped at the chance to have me come when my opportunity in Khovd didn't come through. He explained to me that many students have the ability to do the work, but not the language skills to pass the test. My biggest problem here is that there is no textbook, and no lesson plan or curriculum for the English classes. Apparently these are add-on classes for the students: no tests or grades, yet the knowledge is critical for them to acquire, so they are dependent upon their own motivation to attend and pay attention. As I said earlier, the first days I spent in introductions, then we moved on to a simple review of what a sentence is, parts of a sentence, subject-verb agreement, good vs. well, verb tenses, adjectives and adverbs. (Moving right along...) Luckily they have had the basics before (I am not their first English teacher), so I'm just trying to stay alert and discover who is staying up with me and who is having trouble.

The next lesson we played 20 questions, which they seemed to enjoy a bit. At least it forces them to ask questions in English and answer them as well. One funny story: I have one class composed of the staff, who are primarily supposed to practice their English conversation with me. One of the staff/students is Nomio, a real "girly-girl", e.g., she has a Hello Kitty keyboard on her computer; she has pink ribbons glued to her monitor and her screen saver is pink, with a pink heart and pink ribbons, with the words "Love Me Tender" in the middle of the heart. When it was Nomio's turn to play, she announced that she was thinking of "a thing". The first question anyone asked was "is it pink?"