Piece of cake: How a Montreal teacher used YouTube to teach English idioms

MONTREAL — Teacher Nick Galanogeorgos is known affectionately as Mr. Nick, and his unique teaching methods have made him so popular with students, they would prefer the school year not end. “Because of his classes, everybody understands me and I didn’t give up, never. All the time I was motivated to learn more and more,” said Ani Dumitrache, who immigrated to Canada from Romania speaking no English, but can now carry on a conversation with ease. Mr. Nick’s secret is he doesn’t just teach the basics of English, he teaches the idioms like “out of this world” or Tthat’s the way the cookie crumbles.” He said as his students would watch movies, they would always come back perplexed the expressions they heard. “They would ask me questions like ‘make a bundle, down in the dumps, have a blast,’ and I started to put it together and say it seems to be a lot of idioms, a lot of expressions that are giving them trouble when they’re watching movies and it takes away the context,” said Galanogeorgos. Because some of his students were down in the dumps during the pandemic, Mr. Nick decided to take online learning to the next level.…
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