The challenges (and joys) of teaching English

Did you know that the following sentence is written in the "unreal conditional" tense of English: "If I had a million dollars, I would travel around the world." ? Well, I didn't until yesterday when I was preparing to teach my adult advanced English class! It's amazing how my understanding of the English language is purely based on what "sounds right" or "wrong" and how I never think about what tense I am speaking with or writing in. Now that I am teaching English, I have to suddenly understand English through the eyes of my students and it isn't pretty. I have quickly learned how hard English is to understand, speak and teach, especially because I have not been properly trained as an English teacher and I'm mostly relying on the textbook and my peers to help me. I have been corrected by my students, I have realized that I speak English incorrectly and I have apologized on the behalf of the English language many times. Mostly, I have become skilled at thinking on my feet and quickly coming up with examples that hopefully partially explain what I am attempting to teach. At least I am able to have a lot of empathy for my students, because I am still in the process of learning Spanish and I still get very confused with Spanish grammar. But to return to my original example, think about the fact that when describing an imaginary situation that would most likely happen in the future, the grammatical structure of the "unreal conditional" requires you to conjugate the verb "I wish I HAD..." in the PAST tense. WHAT??? I often communicate my frustration with the English language to my adult students so that they know that they are not alone in their confusion. However, I find that most often, they are entirely used to craziness that is the English language because they have been studying it faithfully and filling out worksheets for years. I, on the other hand, am encountering the challenges of teaching English grammar for the first time. Thankfully, my students laugh at my jokes and seem to enjoy my enthusiastic, but somewhat clueless teaching style. I like to incorporate fun activities into the class; for example asking them to finish sentences such as, "If I could have any super power, I would choose to..." or "If I had only one week to live, I would...." Considering that most of my adult students are about my age, I really enjoy getting to know them and the opportunity to have discussions with them about their culture and lives. Despite my feelings of frustration and inadequacy teaching advanced English, my experiences in this class and our "conversation club," which is a more informal chance for us to play games and discuss different topics in English with our students, have helped me realize that I really enjoy teaching adults. Who knows, maybe I will look for opportunities to be an University English teaching assistant or something like that for the future. However, I think that taking a "Teaching English as a foreign language" course should probably be in my future before I attempt to teach any more advanced English classes!