the english teacher diaries

Before I say anything at all, please let me take a moment to make a disclaimer: my job is AWESOME, and I really have nothing to complain about.

Except when sometimes I have to go teach private lessons (this happens three times a week for a total of three and a half painful hours) and they kick me in the ass because although I speak english I really don´t know the first thing about the rules of grammar, and the truth is that I have never in my life passed a grammar test, so really in the end I am not at all qualified for this job because what ends up happening is one of my students is a little too enthusiastic about learning english and comes to class with questions like "What is the difference between past perfect continuous and past perfect simple" and the only response that comes to my head is "What the HELL is past perfect continuous?" but of course I can´t say this so I have to pull something out of my ass like, "The past perfect continuous is used to indicate that there is no definite ending", which is probably the most vague answer I could give the poor man but at least it makes sense, even though really all it does (unsurprisingly) is lead to more questions, such as "So when should I use past perfect continuous?" and this is when I have to actually come up with a concrete answer but of course I don´t have one because I don´t KNOW what past perfect continuous is so I have to beat around the bush in hopes he will in some way evince which verb tense he speaks of, and when I finally get him to come up with the answer (which I´ve been manipulating all along but he has no clue because he was lost long ago in my frantic rambling) I begin to feel REALLY bad about taking this guy´s money, because truly, I am a feces of an english teacher.

(And this is why I love my REAL job at school because I get to play with five year olds teaching them things like "Cows are herbivores!" (science) and "My puppet is here!" (english) and "Please stop running around the classroom!" (art), and this has nothing to do with the god forsaken past perfect continuous tense and everything to do with fun and excitement (hence the !!!))