I went to Sheryl Crow’s concert to write about it for our local newspaper, The Oregonian. It was an incredible performance. She had so much energy that all 6,000 people there were standing and many were singing. Read my review if you’d like to hear more about it.

Backstage, Sheryl agreed to do an interview for English, baby! I tried to explain it to her beforehand as best I could, but she looked a little surprised when I mentioned her teaching English once we started recording! She was a great English teacher though. She’s very mellow and down to Earth. She seems like such a nice person.

The video was a hit with our members. Many of them are big fans of Sheryl Crow. When I teased them with one of her lyrics on our facebook page, a lot of them guessed correctly which artist I was talking about. But I was surprised to see some comments on the English lesson from members who hadn’t heard of Sheryl Crow before. I guess there are some corners of the world she hasn’t rocked yet!

I was happy to see that some Sheryl Crow’s longtime fans here in the US were into the video too, even though they’re high level or native English speakers and don’t need the English tip. My/be Angels, a Sheryl Crow fan site that has been around for more than 14 years, added us to their video page. Probably the most unexpected place to pick up the video so far was this Argentine Rolling Stones fan site. They picked it up because Sheryl talks about playing with Keith Richards in the interview.

We’ve got more famous English teachers lined up so stay tuned!

Last night the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics to win their second NBA Championship in a row. It was also the second for Sasha Vujacic, a point guard from Slovenia who was one of the first NBA players to appear in English, baby!’s celebrity English lessons. He and Kobe Bryant are good friends and they did a lot of celebrating after the victory (as you can see in the photo).

Sasha had a bit of a tough year with some injuries, but in the last few seconds of last night’s game, he made two free throws to secure the victory. Bu could he ever really have missed? He is of course, “The Machine.” Here’s the English, baby! lesson in which he explains the meaning of his nickname.

After the game, lots of reporters wanted to talk to Sasha about the free throws. This article has a video that shows his post game interview. It sounds like he will enjoy his summer!

The Phoenix Suns were here in Portland to play against the Trailblazers in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. I had approached some of them about doing celebrity English lessons for English, baby!, but hadn’t heard back. I figured they were probably too busy staying focused.

But then one of my friends posted on facebook that the Suns were hanging out at Grand Central Bowl. This was very exciting news because it’s just across the river from our office and we know it’s OK to film there–we shot some scenes for the beginning and end of our Winter Olympic videos there.

Everyone was gone for the day from the office, so I sent a taxi for Devan at her house. Normally she just acts in our lessons, but she was the only person available to hold the camera! On the way over to Grand Central, I made a plan to have Channing Frye introduce me to Steve Nash so I could interview him. I came up with some questions.

The facebook post made it seem like the whole team was at the bowling alley. I pictured them bowling against each other in small teams. But when we arrived, we found there were only a few players, Amar’e Stoudemire, Jason Richardson, and Jared Dudley watching the NBA Playoffs on TV.

Quickly, I had to come up with new questions for each. After gathering some courage, I walked up to Amar’e, explained who I was, and asked if he’d like to do an interview. He was nice as he declined, saying, “Nah, I’m good.” Jared overheard me explaining to Amar’e that English, baby! gets a lot of traffic in China.

“How much traffic do you have in China?” Jared asked.

I told him and gave him my card.

“I’ll hit you up sometime,” he said.

“Oh come on, let’s do an interview right now.” I replied.

He agreed. But as we began to set up, I realized that in my hurry to get to the bowling alley to catch the Suns, I forgot to put a tape in the camera! Jared said he was going to hang out and watch the rest of the game (Milwaukee was playing Atlanta). So we ran back to the office and came back. He was still there, and still happy to be interviewed, thank goodness! What a good guy. And what a good interview too. He’s a natural on camera. No wonder he makes daily videos and posts them to his twitter account. He even let Devan get a picture with him, which you see above. Without further ado, the interview video. You can see the whole lesson here.

Normally, I go into these interviews knowing what the lesson will be about. But in this case, I tried something different and asked Marcin to pick his favorite basketball slang on the spot just before we started shooting. He chose “beat a shot.” Watch it below or see the full lesson here. Or you can even read about it in Polish on Marcin’s official website.

That night after the interview, I went to the game and watched Marcin and the Magic fall to my Portland Trailblazers. Marcin had a great game though, and every time he dunked or blocked a shot I stood up and yelled “bring down the hammer!” Then I went back to cheering for the Blazers. I must have confused a lot people around me.

Among our gold medal victories, you could count the two lessons we created with gold medalist figure skaters Zhao Hongbo and Shen Xue, who helped us teach “lift” and “head over heels.” The Willamette Week newspaper took note of these lessons. But China is completely head over heels for them. One of these got more than 60,000 views on 56.com in the first week, and the other was just posted on the learning homepage at china.org.cn!

Zhao Hongbo and Shen Xue are Olympic legends. But we also had the pleasure of meeting some young athletes at their first games. Half pipe snowboarder Liu Jiayu taught our members what it means to ride “goofy” and along with her teammates Sun Zhifeng and Cai Xuetong, what it means to “drop in.” I’d say these count as gold medals as well if only because CCTV (Chinese state television) was there for the lessons as well and did a story about the athletes testing their English skills upon arriving in Canada.

Without a doubt, our funniest lesson of the Games was “cold as ice” which we filmed at the men’s luge competition. “Pass the torch” was also a standout because we got to interview someone who carried the Olympic torch. These must be worth silver.

So in the bronze category are all the lessons we created without the help of a competition or athlete, but on our own with the people we met in Vancouver. These Olympics were such an incredible party–the streets were always packed with people from all over the world. We met a lot of them in our lesson on “break the ice,” when we went shopping for ice skates in “cheapskate,” and when we raced them on the ice at Robson Square to illustrate what it means to “fly by.”

Our local NBC affiliate even did a story about our Olympic victories. It’s a great clip, and it was so cool to see our logo in the center of the NBC Olympic Zone!

Of course, there were times when we took some spills, had to smooth over problems, and got distracted with our heads in the clouds. But in the end, I succeeded in saving my friends, which was the goal all along! It’s cool that everyone from NBC to CCTV and EducationNews.org to our local paper took note!

And we can’t forget, that like any good Olympic team, we had a great sponsor. Thanks ETS! TOEFL – go anywhere from here.