Johnnitta Durham

Eleven years in a real classroom

I am an English teacher in the Dallas Independent School District, and I have been in that classroom every school day since 2014. Teaching thirty teenagers at once will teach you something no methodology course can: the exact moment a person decides they are bad at English, and how quickly that decision hardens.

Almost nobody who struggles with English is short of knowledge. They are short of permission — permission to speak before the sentence is perfect, to guess, to be corrected without it feeling like a verdict. That is the thing I actually teach.

How I got here

I graduated from Texas Woman's University in English and professional writing, where I also worked as a copy editor — which is a polite way of saying I spent two years learning exactly how sentences fail. I am certified in English 7–12 and ESL, so the grammar, pronunciation and confidence work we do is grounded in the same standards that shape a Texas classroom.

Before and alongside my public-school work I taught at college level through North Central Texas College in Corinth, so I have sat on both sides of the standards: the ones schools are held to, and the ones a real adult conversation is held to.

I still teach in Texas. The Noodle Tutor is the evening and weekend side of my work: live 1-on-1 lessons online, for adults and older students anywhere in the world who want the attention a class of thirty can never give them.

Why "The Noodle Tutor"?

Because my best lessons have never looked like an exam. They look like a shared meal — relaxed, curious, unhurried, with the rigour underneath where it belongs. Somewhere in my second year of teaching I noticed my students spoke most freely in the ten minutes before class, over food, when nobody was assessing them. So I built my lessons around that feeling and kept the standards exactly where they were.

How lessons work

Your first session produces an error map: a written list of the patterns that most affect how easily you are understood, ordered by impact. Every lesson afterwards works down that list, and we re-check partway through so you can see what moved.

Lessons are conversational, not lecture-style — you speak for most of the hour. I interrupt selectively, never on every small slip and always on the ones that block meaning, and you leave with notes, a correction log, and homework aimed at exactly what came up.