Creative, effective  online lessons with an experienced, knowledgeable  teacher    

I have 20 years’ experience teaching general English in Poland. My lessons are creative and precisely targeted to address the areas you need help with. I design my own lessons (see an example below) to help you speak, pronounce and write better English. I also draw on a wide range of engaging, up-to-date materials, including from the Economist and New York Times. I have experience teaching in-company, large small groups in academic settings and individuals. The first lesson is complimentary.

1. Exams: Matura, FC, CAE, CPE, IELTS, TOEFL
2. General English
3. Vocabulary building
4. Pronunciation
5. Preparing to work in English/business-focused English
6. Conversation-based classes
7. Mastering question forms
8. Writing classes for professionals
9. Writing for academic purposes
10. High-proficiency fluency training

A sample of the original materials you’ll get at The Ochota English Pages:

Whenever we have a long weekend, I like to go out to my place in the village. I don’t do much-just take it easy and get some rest, and maybe go for a long walk out through the woods. If the city has me feeling down, getting away from it all really does wonders for me.  One of my neighbors out there, Dorota, is blind and has an army of chickens and a cow. She’s a veterinarian, and employs an assistant, Beata, who sees just fine. Another of my neighbors is Greg, a German who retired after getting filthy rich selling windows in Warsaw. You read that right: he made a fortune selling windows in Warsaw.

There’s a condition my doctor calls ‘malaise’- feeling out of sorts, like you just can’t get it together, or you can’t put your finger on exactly what’s bothering you. You have a low-grade infection, maybe. Maybe you’re running a fever below the knees. If it’s the city that’s got me stressed out, it can take me days to get over it and really unwind, though if I get out into the woods and the mud and the swamps for a few hours I cheer right up and come back smiling. ‘Don’t track that mud in the house’, Greg will say when I rap on his door. But I digress. Walking in the woods: that’s how I get over the ‘malaise’ of city life or modern living or whatever you want to call it.

“You don’t need to be dying to take a few days off work,” Greg points out, leaning on the fence, the cow’s head poking through the slats beside him, chewing away, the very picture of serenity.

“Just call in sick,” he says. “No sweat.”

“Mental health days,” Dorota adds from behind the firepit, winking at no one, her martini sweating elegantly atop a brick. “They’re big in the Netherlands, you know.”

“Meeeeee time!” Beata shouts out from a cloud of chickens all acluck, scrabbling and pecking up their food as she doles it out in cupfuls. “Make the call!”

I’ve come to appreciate this wayward fireside counsel. So much so that perhaps I am feeling a bit under the weather. My nose may indeed have just taken a turn for the runnier. Yes, I must be coming down with a cold-or just enough of one to make facing the real world too great a burden to take on. Maybe I’m not so sick that I need to take an antibiotic, or stay in bed for a week. There’s no need to see a doctor. Let’s not get carried away, after all.

Ruminate on this country fact, instead: Last winter, when I couldn’t shake a nasty chest infection, Dorota wrote me a doctor’s note, good for a full three days. She and Beata and I promptly took our skis over to the big cross-country loop nearby and skied for the whole afternoon, right out in the sun-10 kilometers in all, up and down the hills until I was worn out and soaking wet and had coughed out any trace of an infection. I was sick as a dog the next day, but right back on my feet within a week.

Greg moved out of Warsaw a long time ago, the city having stressed him out so much that he needed therapy. Now he helps Dorota with the cow and the chickens. Sometimes he chases them; sometimes they chase him. He left the business world behind and became a nature writer and a consultant, though he mainly consults with squirrels and birds and “bulletins from immortality.” When he needs to blow off some steam or has writer’s block, he bangs on his twenty-piece drum set, which you can hear from three big hay fields away. While it’s possible his playing “keeps the pigeons away and the rodents at bay, as he’s fond of saying, it for sure puts me and the chickens on edge.      

Seth Stevens
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