My Bio

My teaching life

Here’s a quick introduction to ME (Michal Eskayo). I have been teaching ELL students at the community college level in Chicago for about thirty years; I think I need to stop counting! I began my teaching career at Saint Augustine College in Chicago, and now I am full-time faculty at Harold Washington College, one of the seven city colleges in the CCC system. I came to teaching ESL somewhat randomly. I have always loved learning languages and traveling, and after moving to the Midwest from NYC after college, I knew I wanted to go to grad school. Linguistics seemed like a good place to merge my two passions. I mainly teach upper-level students (pre comp 101) reading, writing, and grammar. I also teach a speech class at the same level, which is both speaking/listening and public speaking. I have also taught news literacy and pop culture.

I am hoping this blog is a place for me to share my classroom experiences and some tech information, too. I have always been an advocate of technology in the classroom, and my tenure project at the city colleges was to create studio classrooms. These are classrooms where students work in pods and each desk has a computer. The former has always been more important for me - the configuration of a classroom, and tech is secondary. If students are working collaboratively, they have to be looking at each other.

I hope this blog is also a place for me to learn from followers and those of you out there who are commenting. I always say my best exercises and tasks in class come from those that I have adapted from other teachers. I always seem to be one or two steps behind in the tech world, so maybe those of you reading this can help me keep abreast.

At the end of every summer, I like to say that school and work/teaching interfere with my life. I don't know if I got into teaching because of the summers and great vacations, but I know the downtime makes me a better teacher. I probably got into teaching ESL randomly as I mentioned above, but summers off have afforded me a lot of time to travel. On my first sabbatical, I spent some time in China learning Mandarin, and I have traveled around Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. Africa is my next continent to explore.

Professionally I have always loved presenting at the local and national TESOL conferences. My colleagues and I have spent a long time honing our presentation skills to create interactive communicative presentations; we want our presentations to mirror our classrooms.

Lastly, I just finished eighteen hours in speech communication, so I can now teach Speech 101 at the college. That has been a professional goal for a long time, and I put it off for years. However, early in the pandemic, I started taking online courses at Minnesota Mankato, and they exceeded my expectations. In fact, I learned a lot about teaching online from taking these classes, something I still have never done.

My non-teaching life

A few months after the pandemic started, my neighbor and I decided to set up a chicken coop in my backyard. As someone who grew up in the pavement and tall buildings of Manhattan, I am late to farming, but I love it. I love raising chickens because watching them poke around is very relaxing after a day of work. I also love gardening, bike riding and walking, and I dabble in ceramics. I'm an avid reader, and during the pandemic, I started listening to books. I also still read on paper, though. There is nothing like sitting down in a comfy chair with a cat and a book.

Cheers!

Michal