Learn more about our extremely qualified staff below.

Marina Binsack was born in Kansas and grew up in Germany. She moved to San Francisco in 1985, where she lived in the Presidio. Marina received a B.A. in Anthropology with a focus on Archaeology from San Francisco State University in 2002. She studied Greek for five years at university and lived in Greece for one year.

Marina’s first teaching experience was in San Francisco at a nonprofit organization. She had extensive English training through the Peace Corps in Romania, where she taught elementary and middle school children. She also taught for AEON in Japan and a small school in Spain.

In her free time, Marina enjoys dancing, cooking, and traveling. She studied Arabic briefly and can read basic Arabic texts.

Marina enjoys teaching at ELI because of the diversity in the student body.

Betty Grinshtein joined ELI in 2008. Betty enjoys teaching Level 5 while living in the most exciting city in the USA—-San Francisco!

She received her M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in 2005. While she was a graduate student at San Jose State University, Betty was chosen to teach Academic Writing to International Students. Her areas of study included Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and Communicative ESL Teaching Methods. Betty has taught English to adults and college students in the Bay Area since 2005.

Betty also holds a B.A. in Modern European History from University of California at Santa Cruz.

In addition to teaching English, Betty is an avid cyclist, hiker, and art enthusiast. She’s also fluent in Russian, and has been studying French and Polish.

Martin Hodge was born in South Africa to British parents and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. At the age of 18, he started studying Spanish at Oakland Community College in Royal Oak, Michigan. This led him to study Spanish and Business Administration at Wayne State University in Downtown Detroit. He obtained his Master’s Degree at the same university with a major in Spanish with a focus on linguistics. During his studies, Martin traveled to Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil, where he learned Portuguese.

After finishing graduate school, Martin moved to Mexico and taught English as a Second Language for a school year. Then he returned to the United States and taught Spanish for eight years in Detroit, Michigan. In 2008, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and started teaching ESL at the English Language Institute where his specialization is the TOEFL Test.

He enjoys teaching ESL in San Francisco because he likes the challenge of teaching difficult grammar and enjoys the exposure to so many cultures. When he is not teaching, Martin’s main focus is music. He plays the saxophone and studies music theory for his own enjoyment. It keeps him grounded and reminds him what it feels like to learn something new and to struggle with something unfamiliar. It ultimately keeps him in touch with the student’s perspective of learning something like a foreign language. Martin can also be found jogging around Lake Merritt in Oakland, where he currently resides.

Sean Ferguson has been teaching at ELI since 2005. He received his M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in 2003. He has taught a wide range of students from true beginners to students accepted to graduate programs at American universities. He taught EFL in Poland for one year which gave him an understanding of what it is like to live and study in another country.

Sean loves teaching in San Francisco and feels that it is a privilege to interact with people from so many cultures and backgrounds. He believes that teaching and learning are completely intertwined and finds this mutually beneficial process very rewarding.

Sean welcomes everyone to his adopted home, San Francisco, and knows that students who choose to study at ELI will have a wonderful cultural and educational experience.