An Introduction

Before I get started on this entry, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Bevis, I came to Mexico from the UK about ten years ago, and I've been working at Gardner English for nine of them. As you can imagine, I've experienced quite a lot as a teacher in those years. In addition to teaching, I'm also responsible for our website, blogs and internal communications media. By writing in this blog, I hope to share some of my experiences of teaching in Mexico City and explain what we do in a little more detail.

What do we do? Basically, we teach students at all levels in companies throughout Mexico City, and our teachers go to the student's place of work to give their classes. This makes it easier for students to study English without having to spend time in traffic to get to classes. We assess all our students before we begin teaching them, so materials and courses are targeted at the right level when we start. Classes are a mixture of one-to-ones and groups, although groups are small enough that everyone gets the level of tuition they need.

As regards my own projects, I've recently become involved in setting up our new company calendar. This happened because of new regulations which meant that many public holidays have been moved to Mondays to avoid people bridging their days off. For those who are interested in such things, I've found the Mexican Banking Association's website to be extremely useful.

Having sorted out exactly when our teachers wouldn't be able to give classes, I started looking for other events which might be of interest to them. Cambridge ESOL in Mexico provides Saturday seminars for teachers, and the Mexico City Chapter of MEXTESOL gives bimonthly Saturday workshops as well. There will also be a Foreign Language Teachers' Conference hosted by CELE in June, which will deal with Educational Practice in the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Mexico. All of these events are now on our calendar, along with the relevant details.

So, that's what I've been up to so far. I hope that what you've read here has been useful. As we say in Mexico, ¡Hasta pronto!