May 3, 2010
Our staff of 2 moved into the 18th floor of 100 Montgomery St. and were joined for the very intense first week by Mark Degiorgio from Malta. Ten student computers were installed in the student lounge, along with wireless access throughout the school for both academic and personal use of English language students.
May 10, 2010
EC San Francisco officially opens with our first two students. Suzana B. and Edval H. are both from Brazil. Suzana has been working in international sales in Latin America for a medical devices company. She is bi-lingual in Spanish and Portuguese. Her goal is to improve her English to the level of her Spanish knowledge so she can work in sales and marketing globally. Edval is an accountant in his family-run business. He needs English so he can expand his client base to include English speaking clients doing business in Brazil. He already has a client from Australia.
Our first ECSF students are getting a LOT of individual attention!
Our academic program started with two teachers, Molly McCann, from Santa Barbara, California and Alexandra Rollo, a San Francisco native. Molly studied linguistics and Slavic languages at the University of California, Santa Barbara and also studied in Italy. She speaks some Italian, Russian, French and Spanish. Alexandra (Alex) has an MA in TESOL from St. Mary’s College of California. She has lived and traveled in Turkey and the Middle East and taught English in Tanzania in 2003.
May 17, 2010
ECSF grows by 50%! Our third student, Melissa B., also from Brazil, arrives. And we add a third teacher, Dustin Delaney. Dustin is from Montana and taught English in Japan before settling in San Francisco.
May 24, 2010
Our three Brazilians were thrilled to welcome 2 new students, both from Italy. Gabriella B. and Gianmaria are both journalists with very interesting jobs. Gabriella works for a major Italian fashion magazine and is responsible for selecting the fashions to be highlighted each season. Gianmaria is an entertainment journalist and his focus is American film. He interviews well-known actors and directors, such as Morgan Freeman. Both Gabriella and Gianmaria regularly speak and write in English and want to spend their 2 weeks at EC improving their fluency and comprehension.
June 1, 2010
Maria B. from Germany joined EC. Maria is a hairdresser who is changing careers and starting in the hotel business. She is eager to improve English for her new job.
June 7, 2010
Our 7th student, Pedro C. from Portugal is an actor and has appeared in many television productions and commercials in Portugal. He told us that many European production companies come to Portugal to film and one of his goals is to be able to speak English with the actors and production people that he works with there. And our 8th student, Katherine from Colombia started her studies on June 7th. Katherine plans to enter medical school in Colombia, where many courses and even more medical text books are delivered and written in English. She is staying with us for several months so she can bring her English to the level necessary to study in her major.
June 11, 2010
A must do activity for any visitor to San Francisco is a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. On Friday afternoon, Amy Niles, International Student Advisor, took a small group of students to do just that. It was a beautiful day and the views were spectacular! The GG Bridge opened in 1937 and has been carrying cars ever since. Here is an interesting story..in 1987 there was a 50 year celebration of the bridge and they closed it to traffic so people could walk on the roadway. So many people came…more than 800,000 (!) that the bridge actually flattened out from is usual curve because of the weight of so many people. But the bridge is extremely strong and well-built and it regained its curve after the people were off the bridge. (a student as a photo of the activity which I will try to get)
June 1, 2010
We have named all 16 of our classrooms after famous places, neighborhoods, or streets in San Francisco. To make it easier, the names are alphabetical starting with the “Alcatraz” classroom and continuing in a clockwise direction all the way around the school, ending with “Presidio”. The names are: Alcatraz, Bay Bridge, Castro, Divisadero, Embarcadero, Fillmore, Golden Gate, Haight, Irving, Judah, Kearny, Lombard, Market, Noe Valley, Ocean Beach, Presidio. We can’t wait to fill up all our classrooms with students!
June 10, 2010
Students now have access to a great practice tool for English Pronunciation. The interactive software is installed on 4 student computers in the student lounge. We demonstrated it for students and they were very excited to get started learning and practicing. The software is called Pronunciation in English and EC offers it free to our students: http://www.amenglish.com/products/pronunciation/online-version/login.cfm Students can borrow headsets for the computers and like everything else at ECSF, the computers and headsets are brand new!