Beside the Point

This funny and moving memoir interweaves stories of an English teacher's encounters with his adult students who came to the San Francisco Bay Area from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Peru, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, Venezuela, and Vietnam to study this "foreign" language.

"Teaching English as a Second Language is a good gig. It's satisfying to sharpen one's understanding of a linguistic point and then present it to a class with lucidity and life. But getting that point across is not what this book is about; it is about what happens in the endlessly unpredictable world beside the point--where surprises spring from the quirks of languages (theirs and ours), and, of course, from the quirky humans who speak them." -- from the author's prologue

Philip O. Chomak was born in Brooklyn, New York and taught English to international students for thirty-eight years, in Oakland, San Rafael, and Berkeley, California. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Chomak studied story writing with Nobel-Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. He lives with his wife in the Bay Area.