Cindy Hauert

Cindy Hauert is based in Mönthal, Switzerland. I first met her through ETAS, and was immediately impressed by her boundless energy and enthusiasm. Cindy is the sort of person who just gets on with things. You will see what I mean when you look at her website here and read more about a project she runs in Zimbabwe here. In this article she describes a typical Wednesday.  

Wednesday’s my heaviest teaching day and it starts at 5:45 when my alarm goes off. I have breakfast even when I don’t want it because I won’t be getting any lunch. I leave the house at 6:45, rolling a suitcase which holds my laptop, speakers and other paraphanalia, plus the books and materials I’ll be using that day.

I drive in my 12-year-old Nissan Micra (298,908 k’s on the odometer and counting) to the first company. This is a small group, mixed-level, some of whom use English daily with the Parisian headquarters. The company is a paper merchant and I’ve been teaching there for 15 years. With this group, the approach is “bizniss lite”. Quite often these are “dogme” classes with the participants deciding what we’re going to work on. It could be a discussion about the paper market, changes in the company’s strategy, or just gossip about the management! I use the input for vocabulary building or sometimes a grammar refresher.

Back in the Micra and off to the next company, a large printer. Not the easiest branch to be in at the moment. Major re-organisations have been unfolding for the last few years, but somehow nobody’s gotten around to cancelling the English programme so I’m still hanging in there—I’ve been teaching here since 1996. I have 3 groups, ranging from A2 to C1. One nice thing is that I have my “own” classroom, equipped with an aging computer and white board (non-interactive). A couple of my IT students also helped me set up a page on the company collaboration network, called English Workspace, which functions as a kind of VLE. I use the spare time before my first class to check my email and maybe even have a glance at what’s going on in Twitter.

The first group comes in punctually (it’s Switzerland, after all) and we always begin with some small talk. The topics range from politics to sports to holidays—I let the group decide. Then we use a coursebook, Lifestyle, for our lesson. Again, the “bizniss lite” approach works well with this group, the members of which are from different departments: Finance, Pre-Press and Sales.

The next group is completely different. It’s the highest level group I have right now, a good C1. We use the Economist website a lot—they especially like analyzing the Daily Charts. They’ve gotten so good at this that the class runs itself. Today they delight me by spontaneously starting a mobile phone debate: “THIS is a tool..THAT’S a toy…”. “It is not!”. I always learn a lot from these guys.

The third group is one of those just-for-fun classes. Nobody’s much interested in business topics, and even though they could all use more telephone and email practice it’s a struggle to steer them in that direction. Rather have a chat about holidays and hobbies. At this point I’m beginning to flag and I’m sorry to admit that I don’t often have the strength to argue.

I have a short break to gobble my packed sandwiches and then it’s off to the next company. This is a one-to-one with a Sales Director, one of those very clever guys who’s managed to avoid getting to grips with his English for years. Now his recent promotion has left him stranded at a barely A2 level-- not really adequate for dealing with his Chinese partners, which is what he has to do now. Still, he tries every trick in the book to put off the hard work of speaking English. We usually have bi-lingual conversations for about a half-an-hour before he finally buckles down and we can start to work on meeting skills and presentations. I like him, though. He’s got a great sense of humour and can laugh at himself, a rare enough quality in people at his level in my experience.

Coming in on the home stretch. I arrive home barely in time to let my last two students of the day in and switch on my computer. This lesson is a 2-hour one with two young women who are doing a Swiss qualification for managers’ assistants (Direktor Assistentin). Although my husband and I often refer to these two as “the chicks”, as in “Don’t forget the chicks are coming this evening,” they are not airheads at all. They are paying for their lessons themselves and take them very seriously indeed.

Lessons finally over, I’m “uf de Schnurre” (Swiss German for completely kaput). But I still have to pack my bag for tomorrow’s lessons before checking my email, and finally to bed.