At The Hub

The Hub - Doncaster

The image of Oddjob, when I saw him skim his bowler hat through the neck of a statue in Goldfinger, will never escape me and in Doncaster, last year, when I was teaching general English to a student from Lithuania – a dealer in metals - I was reminded of this film. With everyone dressed in black, and the minder of the car waiting outside clearly not there to learn English, my first meeting with Robertas, at Doncaster College, was quite an experience.

Without a classroom for our lessons, I had arranged for us to meet in The Hub where, with coffee at hand and relative peace and quiet at most times of the day, we spent most of our time. Although I was interested to learn more about the metal recycling business, my brief was to help Robertas with his general conversational English and to address problems with his grammar, as necessary.

Doncaster Market

Using tried and trusted resources and exercises that I had prepared in previous teaching assignments, we discussed a wide variety of topics and, by the end of the first of his two weeks in Doncaster, Robertas felt much more confident with his ability to talk in English. A good test of this was when, instead of spending 2 hours in The Hub, we took a good look at the renowned Doncaster Market, discussed the merits of the local products and entered into a variety of transactions with the local traders. 

With such a tight schedule for our teaching programme, there wasn't scope during the week to catch up with missed lessons, as happened once due to his other business commitments, but we compensated by having our last lesson in my own house. Having a car with satellite navigation, Robertas had no problem in finding my village and we spent the last lesson reviewing the work of the last fortnight, using the resources on my laptop computer and the internet.