EC New York English Language School

RE-POSTED FROM MARCH 10, 2009

The students actually sat through this for an hour!

Every year, Valentine’s Day is celebrated on February 14 in many countries around the world.

In Japan, the holiday is followed up with a second holiday called White Day that comes exactly a month later.

With this second holiday coming soon, the NY EC BLOG has decided to talk about what we did during our last Valentine’s Day!

The 1970s were reborn at EC NEW YORK this past Valentine’s holiday as students and teachers joined together to play two great “couples” games from classic American T.V.

First was “The Newlywed Game,” in which married couples matched answers to see which couple knew each other best.

(Who was the winning couple? Two classmates ― Massoud and Yuka ― who had been brought together at the last minute to play the game! Ha!)

The second game was the ever-popular “Dating Game,” in which bachelors and bachelorettes searched for love through revealing questions.

Sample Question No. 1: “Bachelor No. 1, it’s 10,000 years ago. You and I live together in a cave. What do you do?”

Sample Question No. 2: “Bachelor No. 3, do you believe in true love? Really? REALLY?”

Sample Question No. 3: “Bachelorette No. 2, if you were a wild animal, what would you do to me?”

Clearly, the intention of the host and players was not romance but comedy.

Check out the costumes that a few of the participants wore for the funky occasion. Yikes!

The rumors are true: We love the Seventies!

Meet Matilda!

If you live in a big city like New York, it’s important to have friends. If you can’t find the time to make friends, you can do what many New Yorkers do: Own a pet!

Almost every park in the city has an area where dozens of dogs are allowed to run free. It’s called the dog run and it provides dogs hours of entertainment.

For every dog that runs wild in a dog run, there’s a cat in the window of an apartment, wondering silently about the big world outside.

Some cats live in stores, usually pet stores or delis, and sometimes those cats make short trips onto the sidewalk! Housecats as brave as tigers!

Even though I love animals, I have neither time for dogs nor room for cats. I’m just too busy and my apartment is too small.

Therefore, whenever I am lonesome for the comfort of animals, I take the 6 train to the 68^th Street subway station and walk over to Central Park.

That’s the location of the Central Park Zoo – the home of a few dozen exotic animals gathered from around the world.

Matilda is a sloth that lives in a building at the Central Park Zoo. Because she’s a sloth and usually lives in the jungles of South America, she prefers to live in the Rain Forest building.

Inside the Rain Forest building is an indoor jungle environment. For Matilda, the warm air full of birds and butterflies is just like what she’d find at home in Colombia or Brazil.

All sloths are arboreal, which means that they spend most of their time in trees, and Matilda finds plenty of branches to climb in the Rain Forest building.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem if you want to visit Matilda. The zoo provides stairways and platforms that allow visitors to climb up into the trees to see her up close.

Look at these amazing pictures of Matilda!

Not another New York social climber

Matilda’s a two-toed sloth, so (in my opinion) she’s cuter than her cousin, the three-toed sloth.

Sloths probably earned their interesting name because scientists believed they slept more than 15 hours a day.

However, recent scientific studies suggest that sloths actually nap about 10 hours a day – which is about the same as the luckiest human beings.

I envy Matilda.

In this busy city, she’s living peacefully, quietly eating the leaves of her little habitat.

Keep eating, Matilda! Keep napping.

The Central Park Zoo is located on 5^th Avenue at 64^th Street. For $10, you can see polar bears, penguins, reptiles, exotic birds (and local birds too), and Matilda, the two-toed sloth.

Text composed by Mr. Michael Lyons. Photographs snapped by Ms. Sharon Alk.

Upside down... but still cute!

Hello! Each month, the EC NEW YORK BLOG talks to one of our current students. This March, we’ve decided to talk to Natalia from Medellin, Colombia.

Natalia from Colombia

EC NY BLOG: Hi Naty!

NATALIA: Hello!

EC NY BLOG: Naty, we’ve heard so much about Medellin — basically that your home city is really beautiful. What else can you tell us about it?

NATALIA: Medellin is simply wonderful. It is a city of almost three million people. The population is incredibly friendly and happy. We like to receive foreigners and make them feel at home. The weather is wonderful — warm enough to enjoy a swimming pool or a nice walk. It is also a green city; it is full of trees and plants everywhere.

The city is surrounded by beautiful vegetation such as roses and orchids. Each year the city has a flower festival in August. During the festival, multiple parades are held.

EC NY BLOG: It sounds very different from New York City in the winter! Why did you choose our school?

NATALIA: I have two older sisters and one of them has been living here for 12 years. She is married and has two beautiful children. So, at the beginning, I came to New York City to spend my vacation with them but, later on, I started thinking about doing a short course that would help me to prepare for the TOEFL. Immediately, my sister thought of Cambridge (Blog’s note: Cambridge is now EC NEW YORK

) where she and a cousin had learned English.

I had planned to do only one month but quickly changed my mind and decided to stay longer. Today, I have been in the school for almost four months and I feel very happy. I have had a wonderful experience.

"I love this school!"

EC NY BLOG: Well, thank you. Please tell us more about why you like our school.

NATALIA: I have had three amazing teachers. Joan is my grammar and writing teacher. She’s a nice, talented woman. She is always eager to make us learn and lovingly corrects our mistakes. All her classes are very well prepared and organized.

Mike, my TOEFL speaking teacher, is a passionate teacher who gives all his energy in class. He is also a special guy at the school — someone who helps the students in trouble and prepares all the fun events for students to enjoy.

Finally, Amy, my fluency and pronunciation teacher… she’s an intelligent, fun teacher. Her classes are totally enjoyable, so there’s no chance of getting bored. She is strict and makes you work but is at the same time incredibly sweet.

I would just like to talk about each person in the school. I only have good things to say. I feel that in a short time I have created a strong bond with them. I love this school.

EC NY BLOG: Thank you, Naty! We feel the same about you.

Thank you, Naty!

Please answer the grammar phone!

Now let’s learn another secret behind a mystery of English grammar…

Sometimes to make life easier, we can reduce adverb clauses.

For example, it’s nice to say:

While walking to school, Johnny saw his friend.

We understand from this sentence that Johnny was walking to school because Johnny is also the subject of the main clause.

Upon realizing that she had forgotten her Metrocard,

Yuko ran back to her apartment to get it.

Again, we know that the subject must be Yuko because the adverb clause can only be reduced when the subject of both clauses is the same.

So be careful! Never say,

Upon ringing, I woke up.

In this case, the telephone rang, and I woke up. The subjects are different.

We must keep the full adverb clause:

When the telephone rang, I woke up.

And that’s another mystery of English grammar explained by Mr. Michael White.

Be sure to visit us again to have…

ANOTHER MYSTERY OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR EXPLAINED!

Max Fish Exterior

Hyo Jung had come prepared for her class with a question for her classmates: “If you had one day to live, what would you do?”

Bravo, Hyo Jung! You used correct grammar to ask an intriguing question.

Students confessed many interesting final requests when faced with mortality: emergency trips back home to see their families, emergency marriages to ex-boyfriends, and big parties.

The conversation eventually collapsed into laughter as one young man talked about his desire to spend the last of his money dancing and romancing.

The conversation reminded me of a wonderful bar in my neighborhood. The bar I am thinking of is MAX FISH and my neighborhood is Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

I have lived on the Lower East Side since 1992 – a long time ago when rent-stabilized apartments were more common.

The Lower East Side (or L.E.S.) has gone through many changes since I moved in. It was a dangerous place back then and I had to be careful walking down its dark, empty streets. These days, the neighborhood is popular and prosperous. On Saturday nights, the L.E.S. fills up with tens of thousands of people visiting its many bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and art galleries.

MAX FISH – a bar that opened in 1989 – was there before the neighborhood became “cool” to people who are not so cool. The bar has changed little in its 20 years. The drinks are still cheap, the lights are still bright enough so that you can see the weird artwork on the walls, and the customers are still mostly art students or musicians.

Fake human skulls still decorate the ceiling of MAX FISH. I am not sure if other people notice the skulls, but I always do. To me the skulls mean this: Celebrate this night of being alive because time is short. Our lives on this beautiful earth are not forever.

MAX FISH is worth a look if you like new types of art, fashion, or music. It is located at 178 Ludlow Street (off of Houston St.). You can take the F or V trains to Second Avenue and walk there easily.

Smiling Reminders

Posted by Mr. Michael Lyons

I was preparing my elementary grammar class for an upcoming test on modals, and we were reviewing the previous night’s homework. For one exercise, the students had to complete a sentence with the most appropriate modal and another verb. A student, Nicolas, read: “We might use more solar energy in the future.”  Seeing a chance to mention more modals, I said, “I think we will, because we must.” Since this is a very important topic for our world, I didn’t stop other students when they started responding to these comments, as their responses soon turned into impassioned discussion. From time to time, I thought of my duty to steer the talk back to grammar, but everyone grew more interested and animated, as the discussion turned to many surprising ideas: global warming, nationalism, religion, the pyramids of Egypt, God, the oceans, the natural world, the age and size of the universe. I was amazed that everyone in a basic level class was able to express complicated ideas so clearly, and delighted that they even had such ideas.

I was amazed and delighted–but I can’t say I was surprised. I teach, after all, in New York, the capital of the world, where people from every village in every nation on Earth feel equally at home, and where the most ambitious, curious and talented people come to make themselves better, including the people who walk through the doors of our little school.

The bell soon brought me back to reality, however, and I realized that although any conversation contains very useful grammar, we’d spent nearly an hour on very ungrammatical themes. I would have to work more in the next three days to present the topic fully and prepare them for their test. For me, though, engaging in fascinating ideas and getting excited by my students’ minds were worth the extra effort. I think the same goes for the students.