This is where it comes from. Not the certificates. The graft.
The handouts are the way they are because of how I learned. They are not born from a theory book; they are reverse-engineered from twenty years of struggle, failure, and eventual fluency.
The raw data
I am knocking on the door of 50. I come from Poland. And if you add it all up: the failures, the schooling, the graft, and the immersion, I have been building this specific skill set for the better part of two decades.
I certainly didn’t start as a prodigy. I began at 13, in the 7th grade. By the time I hit the final grade, I managed to scrape the absolute lowest pass grade possible. There was one curious anomaly: I excelled at dictation. My teacher couldn’t wrap her head around it and made me sit the test again. To me it was logical. I was attending music school at the time. I had the ear; I just didn’t have the rules.
Back then, Russian was the staple in Polish schools. I couldn’t have cared less.
The false start and the spark
Secondary school was four years of two very different worlds.
On one side, there was the private course. My teacher was a passionate Anglophile: a man who simply loved the taste of words. He played us the Rolling Stones and made us dissect the lyrics. It was fun, but it was chaos.
On the other side was the state school. The typical coursebook, repetitive exercises, and absolutely zero speaking. The teacher was kind, and I remember her fondly. But the method was sterile.
The circuit breaker came in the second year. A short exchange in Germany, staying with a host family. Suddenly I had no choice. I was left to my own devices, forced to communicate or starve, metaphorically speaking. That was the moment something shifted. I realised language wasn’t a subject; it was a tool.
I eventually took my Matura exam in English and passed with flying colours. Admittedly, my kind teacher may have assisted with the trickier sections. A debt I still acknowledge.
The deep end
After failing my first university entrance exam, I took a year off to focus on English entirely. That is when I met Jacek.
He was my guru. A former judo wrestler, a human volcano of energy, and a monolingual dictionary obsessive. He had no time for fluff. He didn’t teach grammar; he threw us into deep water. The group was sitting at a comfortable C1; I was a shaky B2. I pushed.
I remember telling him I wanted to study English formally. He looked at me and asked: “What for? Do you want to be a teacher? Do you want to study grammar?” I disregarded the discouragement and enrolled in a Teacher Training College anyway. In terms of method, I took more from Jacek’s sink-or-swim approach than anything I read later.
The grind and the notebooks
College was ten hours a day of lectures, self-study, and a significant amount of partying. The environment was electric: recent graduates and PhDs who actually wanted to be there.
This is where I developed the habit my current students probably hate me for.
Every time I came across an unfamiliar word, I went to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and wrote down the definitions. Not just the word: the definitions. By the end of college I had over ten thick, large-format notebooks filled with them.
That mechanical repetition is how I learned to communicate ideas without buffering. I acquired the patterns. I didn’t need fancy words; I needed the foundations of the language to be solid. This is why I encourage my students to do the same. They resist, until they realise they are speaking without thinking.
The academic detour and the real world
The Master’s degree at a reputable Polish university gave me a piece of paper and very little else. It felt like a gathering of people who viewed practical application as beneath them. If anything, it taught me to value the practical over the prescribed.
The real education came next. Several years between the UK and Ireland: tending bars, working in international insurance, qualifying as a financial adviser. Living with the language meant it eventually penetrated everything. It made me close to native, knowing full well that native is a birthright, not a certificate.
I am writing this from Cambodia, teaching online and travelling. The handouts at esltutorhub.com are what twenty years of that process looks like when it’s finally made useful to someone else.