There was this post on buzzfeed…
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bradesposito/teach-teachers#.oy8Qarpl5
…asking teachers some questions. Obviously it was meant more for ‘regular’ school teachers, but most of the questions could apply to English teachers. I read the article answering the questions in my own head – then I read the comments section. Let’s just say that the teachers who had put their answers in the comments gave VERY different answers to mine. I have to conclude that either they’re all lying or I am a horrible person. I’m okay with either or both those options tbh.
Here’s the real answers to those questions.
1. Do you ever show up drunk?
Generally no, and never staggeringly drunk. But most people I know have done the occasional lesson on the wrong (or right?) side of sober. Mainly in countries where bringing vodka into the teachers room every time someone has a birthday is a totally normal thing to do.
2. And do you ever show up hungover?
Oh god yes! Especially if it’s a Saturday morning class. And longer serving teachers will constantly moan about how they can’t teach through a hangover as well as they used to.
3. How much did movies like Dead Poet’s Society influence your decision to become a teacher?
Does anyone really decide to become an EFL teacher? Most people I know just sort of fell into it by accident. I got into it because my job in the UK sucked and I remembered really enjoying the bit of English teaching I did on my post-university gap year.
4. Did you ever find yourself attracted to a student?
Of course. Only adult students though. And it’s always fun to look around a class and think ‘if someone put a gun to my head right now and told me I had to sleep with one of these people, who would it be?’
5. Did you ever have any students that you REALLY hated?
Yes. Some students are terrible people and I fantasize about them dying in painful and creative ways.
6. How often do you catch people cheating and what do you do?
All. The. Time. And it depends on my mood. I’m usually pretty strict.
7. Is playground duty the worst?
Something I’ve never had to contend with, but I imagine it would suck.
8. Do you hate other teachers?
Eh, I certainly dislike some of them. But mostly the annoying ones are easy to avoid. And most places I’ve worked there’s been a pretty good sense of camaraderie.
9. Are there in-staffroom romances?
Yes. As well as in-staffroom moments of regret (whistles innocently).
10. Are there teacher ‘cliques’?
Not especially, but there’s usually a partying/drinking crowd.
11. What’s the staffroom like?
Like an office, except with more books, fewer desks and no modern/fully-functioning equipment. Oh, and with people sleeping in corners/under desks.
12. Do you really ‘believe’ in ALL your students?
Some are just names on a register who I never see. I don’t believe they exist. The rest are real enough. And I’d like to believe they all have the potential to improve.
13. Do you really plan lessons?
Not as much as I used to, but yes. I don’t particularly like winging it although I can if I have to.
14. Have students ever tried to negotiate their grades?
Yes. Most recently was a Saudi guy who wanted a certificate saying he was C2 (he wasn’t). I explained I couldn’t give him that and he seemed to accept it but then phoned me every day for a week trying to convince me to change my mind. I once had a colleague who got a text from a student offering to buy him ‘dinner and some nice girls’ if he gave him a good mark in the upcoming test. Never found out what happened there.
15. And have you ever knowingly taught something to a student that wasn’t true?
No, but I lie about myself all the time. I’ve also occassionally given up when a student tried to argue about something and just said, ‘fine, you say it like that.’
Wow. I’ve been Academic Manager for 9 months but I’ve never thought ‘hey, this is great, but I wish people liked me a lot less.’
Bring on the Emergency Cover Situation.
Monday morning I get a phone call from my director. A teacher has suddenly had to go back home due to a family emergency. The director is out of the office all day. I have to find cover for a week’s worth of classes, including 5 hours of classes today. Good luck!
So I rush into school and get onto the timetable files. First lesson, I find someone who’s free. But they already have three classes of their own after that. Is there anyone else? Two other people, both of whom are up to their weekly hours… what to do? Highlight all three of them and move on.
A phone-call from the director – have I sorted it yet? Uh… no. I have lists of people but I don’t know who to choose. He tells me he’s already called the first teacher. He also tells me I can offer overtime when needed. That gives me the kick I need to start deciding who I’m going to ask.
Half an hour later and I’ve got a list of ten names. I’m feeling pretty confident I can ask these people to teach overtime this week. Let’s go!
Call the first person out into the front office. Explain the situation. ‘Could you cover this class?’ ‘You’d really be helping us out.’ ‘There’s nobody else free at this time.’
The first couple of people are fine. I have nice colleagues and people are okay with helping out. I’m crossing lessons off my list, it’s going okay. But by the third or fourth time I step into the teachers’ room, I notice people ducking slightly, staring intently at their desks, doing ANYTHING to avoid eye contact. I say, ‘xxx, can I speak to you for a minute?’ and I see everyone else relax a little, while xxx sighs heavily and looks beyond dejected as they see their precious free time disappearing before their eyes. Before I’m halfway down my list, EVERYONE in the teachers’ room knows what I’m doing and I have NO friends. Still, it’s not too bad. I’m only asking for one or two cover lessons and people are pretty much okay with it. Stupidly, I’ve saved the most difficult requests until last. The last few people on my list are not going to be happy with me.
Half an hour later and I’m sitting in the admin office, shuffling papers and trying to delay the moment I have to go back into the teachers’ room. I feel like crap. I’ve just ruined ten people’s week. Director calls again.
‘How’s it going?’
‘All sorted.’
‘Great! Well done! Was everyone okay?’
<well, I’m avoiding going back to my desk and I’m more or less resigned to the fact that nobody will be speaking to me for the rest of the week>
‘Yeah, fine. No problems.’ <I am wonder-DOS, I can do anything>
‘Okay, great. I’ll speak to you later.’
‘Okay, bye.’ <I want to stick a spike through your skull>
Holy cow, it’s been 10 months since my last post! How did that happen?
Well, I know the answer to that. I’ve gone over to the dark side, moved into that area of tefl that’s best left unexamined. I’ve gone into management.
The last 9 months have been a pretty steep learning curve. I’m still doing my best to develop the skills to be able to ass-cover and buck-pass like a boss. It’s been a pretty interesting time. I’ve done my first observed lessons as the observer, delivered my first teacher training seminars, made up timetables, sat through meetings feeling inadequate, sat around in the airport to meet new teachers, nodded sympathetically when teachers complain… and a lot more besides.
I’ll have to try and get a few of these experiences up in blog-form soon (ie, the next few months.)
I haven’t posted for a while. This is because I’ve been in London doing the second module of the DELTA. For those who don’t know, this is the bit where people actually watch and assess your teaching and it’s massively stressful. I suspect it may actually be designed to kill us. Still, I’ve done three out of the four Language Systems (or Skills) Assignments and I’ve noticed an emerging pattern which I thought I’d share. So… here it is.
THE 9 STAGES OF A DELTA LSA
Stage 1. The idea. You decide on a topic, something that you think will be interesting and hopefully not too difficult. You check it with your tutor who approves. Full of enthusiasm, you rush off to the library and check out as many books as you can find on the topic. This is the best part.
Stage 2. Reading. The first stage of your reading is generally good. You find out things you didn’t know before, you’re interested, you become convinced that your essay will be nothing short of magnificent. But then you start to notice the inconsistencies between different writers, you get overloaded on the terminology. Things start to get confusing. You grind to a halt and your enthusiasm shrivels and dies.
Stage 3. The first draft. Confused or not, you’re on a clock and so have to start writing. You write down everything you know. It makes sense but it’s not enough.
Stage 4. Revision. You start trawling through the books again, looking for anything that will help make your essay sound more convincing. At first you’re reluctant to include anything you don’t really understand, but as the time pressure grows, you start spewing more and more random quotes across your essay. You come to hate the topic and everything connected with it.
Stage 5. Time!!! As your deadline approaches, you realise you also have to plan a lesson based on your research. You shift your focus. You choose a topic and aim for your lesson. Your tutor approves but this time there’s no enthusiasm, only tiredness and the beginnings of panic.
Stage 6. Multi-tasking. Every time you look at your essay, you find things you want to add, or things you want to re-write. It’s still not good enough. WARNING – you will NEVER feel satisfied with your essay. This is the point at which you should stop writing, but of course you never do. Meanwhile your lesson plan is still very much under construction. You start doing mental calculations of how many hours sleep you’ll be able to get while still finishing on time. It’s a small number. You spend an evening quietly weeping over your computer.
Stage 7. The final hours. You wrench yourself away from the essay and focus on the lesson plan. The lesson itself doesn’t cause too many problems but the writing around it – class profiles, commentary, anticipated problems, etc. These will always take at least twice as long to write as you think they will. Sleeping, eating and showering become far off memories.
Stage 8. Deadline and assessment. Fuelled by nothing more than caffeine and adrenaline, you arrive at the school and hit the computer lab. If you’re lucky, all computers, printers and photocopiers you encounter will work perfectly. This never happens. You spend the morning sweating and cursing all technology. Finally, you hand in your essay. Two things simultaneously run through your head; you don’t want to hand it in, it still isn’t good enough, but you’re so relieved to get rid of it, you could cry. You need to get over this BEFORE handing it in, otherwise you could end up wrestling with your tutor. Then it’s off to the classroom. The teaching part of the assessment, which until now seemed almost insignificant, suddenly looms in front of you. You berate yourself for not giving it more time. You spend ages checking and double checking your materials, running through every possible scenario in your head. Students start to trickle in, your tutor sets up his laptop, and your time is up. From now on, it’s all up to fate. Whatever happens, happens.
Stage 9. Aftermath. After the lesson you have feedback with your tutor. By this point your adrenaline has gone and you realise how long it’s been since you slept properly. You can barely remember the lesson, never mind discuss it. Regardless of the outcome of this meeting, your urges are always the same – get drunk, sleep. You stumble home, possibly via the pub, collapse on your bed and pass out. However, as your body is now conditioned to run on no sleep, you invariably wake up in the middle of the night completely disoriented. This is the best time to write your ‘reflection and analysis.’ (Or avoid it by writing a blog post.) And don’t worry, the disorientation won’t last as tomorrow you get to begin the whole cycle again!
This is a ‘live post’ as it were. I’m writing this in a classroom in school. It’s nearly 20 minutes past the time this lesson was supposed to start and so far, I’m all alone.
I’m sure every teacher can relate to this feeling. It doesn’t matter how much you like your student, or how much you want to try out whatever you’ve planned for the lesson. As soon as the time of the beginning of the lesson passes and the student hasn’t arrived, the seed is planted in your mind – maybe they’re not coming. Maybe I won’t have to teach. Maybe I’ll get an extra two hours of not working!
As all the glorious possibilities of how you could spend this extra time start building in your imagination, you have to remember to keep yourself in check. After all, the student could have been delayed, they might be just entering the building now. So you start listening intently for any sound of approaching footsteps. Every time you hear someone, it could be them. But it seems like every time you look up and it’s not them, the likelihood of their arriving diminishes a little.
If they then do turn up, it’s hard to describe that little sinking feeling of disappointment. Of course you were expecting to teach them anyway, but they’ve taken away that little glimmer of hope that you’d built up in your head and so, for the first few minutes of the lesson, you resent their presence.
But if they still don’t arrive…
Well, then (sometimes) a feeling of responsibility kicks in. You have to be seen to want this lesson to happen, to be disappointed or worried that your student hasn’t arrived, to do everything possible to get them into the classroom. So you go to reception or send them a message or whatever. This is crunch time. This is when you’ll find out for certain whether they’re coming or not. (Of course sometimes you know that if you just sit quietly in the classroom, there’s a good chance that nobody will notice and you can pass you time by… oh, I don’t know… writing a blog post.)
Some schools have policies where if a student hasn’t arrived after a certain time, the teacher can leave. Unfortunately this isn’t one of those schools. It’s now been almost 35 minutes. I should go and ask reception to call him… or I could just stay here and keep writing.
This is stupid. I should feel annoyed. After all, it’s a Saturday and I bloody hate having to work Saturdays, he’s my only student of the day and if he doesn’t show up, it’s like I’ve dragged my ass out of bed for nothing. But right now none of that matters. He’s probably not coming and I’m not going to have to teach and that’s one of the nicest feelings 🙂
Right, let’s go and see what reception says…
I find it useful for my teaching to be also studying a language myself. Obviously I need to learn it for life outside work, but it also keeps in my mind what classes are like for my students, which I think affects my teaching in a good way.
The first time I noticed this was in Bratislava, my second year teaching. I started learning Slovak as an absolute beginner and studied for 10 months. Without wanting to sound big-headed, I think I was one of the stronger students in the class (my previous experience with Russian helped a lot) but I was so surprised at just how little of what the teacher said, I understood. Almost nothing! Instructions were just a wall of sound out of which, if I was lucky, I’d pick up a few words which would allow me to deduce what the task was. If I didn’t catch those, I’d rely on the teacher’s gestures or demonstrations. In my own low level classes, although I’d always made an effort to keep instructions simple, I’d always assumed they were more or less understood. After my own experiences with Slovak, I made a lot more effort to demo tasks with students, and really stressed the key words they’d need to understand a task. I’ve never used instruction checking much (most teachers I know, don’t) and still don’t because, especially at the really low levels, it just seems to complicate things. But I think my way of giving instructions has really improved.
Now I’m learning Italian and last week a whole other question came up. This is a high beginner-to-Elementary class and I joined the class late. This means I’m missing a LOT of the simple stuff. I can follow the lessons but I get stuck, mainly with vocabulary and things like conjugating verbs which the others did at the beginning of the course. In this lesson we were doing the past tense for the first time. We started by looking at two postcards. From this reading, we had a gap fill which basically involved copying the past tense verbs. So in the postcard it would say ‘Oggi ho passato una giornata molto intensa,’ and the gap fill would be ‘___ __________ una giornata intense.’ The exercise was simply scanning for the words and copying the verbs. I’m sure the text was very simple. Possibly the others understood it from their previous lessons. But I didn’t have a clue what any of it meant. But I could see that the point wasn’t necessarily to understand the text, but to notice that the past tense was formed by combining either the verb ‘be’ or ‘have’ and the main verb. But should this pattern really have continued throughout the entire lesson? It was all kind of similar. I could see that it was following this clear PPP pattern, and I could totally follow it. I got the grammar rule, practised it, produced it in a controlled activity and most of the time I had not the faintest idea what I was saying.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since – how much did I really benefit from that lesson? Okay, I now more or less understand how to make the past tense in Italian. Can I use that in conversation? Not a chance. I think here I was really surprised by how much I could seem to follow the lesson, learn what was being taught, produce the target language, and still be completely lost. I mean, I managed every task and did better than some of my classmates. I’ve learnt a new grammar rule. But I can’t communicate any better than I could at the start of the lesson. It’s really making me wonder if my students are often just completing exercises without understanding anything or learning anything. And often it seems like the point is to encourage them not to worry about understanding everything, and just to focus on the getting-by aspect, which is an early stage of language learning.
So, in a few weeks, with a bit more vocabulary and functional language behind me, is it possible that I could revisit the past tense and suddenly be able to use it perfectly because of the foundations I laid in this lesson? I guess I’ll never know.
But it makes me think that I’d really like to learn a language up to a higher level, just to see if this stuff really is beneficial later on in the process.
There’s an advert in the metro at the moment that’s driving me insane. It seems to be for some kind of Android/ smart phone app to get local travel information. Who knows. Anyway, it’s called
Wi-Mi
I’d pronounce that /wi: mi:/
But ‘Wi-fi’ I’d pronounce /waɪ faɪ/
In both cases, the ‘wi’ is short for ‘wireless’ (although a quick google search tells me Wi-Fi is not short for ‘wireless fidelity’ but just a trademark term.)
So why do I automatically change the pronunciation to match the second syllable. Why not the other way round? Why not /waɪ maɪ/? Or, as I assume the ‘Mi’ is for Milan, the city I’m in, why not be loyal to both words and pronounce it /waɪ mi:/?
Are there rules about this kind of thing?
And, apart from me, does anyone on earth care? I kind of hope not because it’s quite sad. But I also hope they do because I want to know the answer!
That nagging little voice is starting in the back of my head again. It doesn’t usually come around this quickly, but as this is only a short term job I’m in now, I’m going to have to start the dreaded job search again. So I logged onto tefl.com with a kind of sinking feeling in my stomach. I don’t know what it is, but tefl job adverts either enrage or depress me. I was wondering why exactly this was, as I quite like moving to newer and (hopefully) better places and I’ve never had trouble finding a job. But then this landed in my inbox and answered all my questions.
[TEFL.com] JobALERT! United Kingdom: Are you an amazing summer school DOS?
I opened the email and read the advert.
“We need an utterly amazing, enthusiastic, well qualified and
experienced DOS to help us consolidate our great start at our
outstanding new residential summer course venue in North
Yorkshire.”
Maybe it’s just me but I find that incredibly patronising/insulting. I looked through other adverts and there were loads more along the same lines.
“If you can work hard and play hard, smile a lot are a positive person and can teach English from ‘breakfast to bedtime’ then please apply for an EFL teacher position on our website.”
“We are looking for energetic teachers with friendly personalities and responsible attitudes to join our exciting programme and to create a fun, but safe learning environment for our students.”
“If your idea of fun is a classroom full of demanding teenagers (13 – 17), keeping them entertained AND learning…”
Really – who wants to teach ‘from breakfast to bedtime’? What kind of teacher doesn’t have a ‘safe environment’ in their classroom? And who on earth likes entertaining ‘a class of demanding teenagers’? The answer – NOBODY!!!! EVERYONE in EFL knows that summer schools are for teachers in low paying crappy jobs to have the chance to earn a decent wage for a few weeks and hopefully save enough for a holiday or a flight on to their next location. It’s also an excuse for language schools in Europe to not keep their teachers on over the summer, thereby reducing them to ‘temporary worker’ status and reaping the benefits of whatever tax savings that gets them (and of course not having to pay them over the summer months.)
But it’s not just summer schools – there seems to be this trend in language schools for them to word their job ads as though they were trying to attract retarded 4 year olds. They may as well say
‘Who likes jelly and ice-cream? If you’ve been a good boy this year, with the potential to turn into Batman-Jesus, apply right now to Super Funtime ZOMFG It’s English! Xi’an.’
But then there’s the problem that the job they’re offering is generally crap – long hours, low salary, zero benefits/perks. But they still try and put the glossy ‘woo hoo kids, look at this’ shine on it. So you end up with something like this.
_____________________________________________________________
HEY! ALL YOU SUPER-COOL FOLKS OUT THERE!!!
Are you so totally unbelievably awesome that you can manage 34 teaching hours/week?
Are you a dynamic, enthusiastic, caring, friendly, sensitive, fun, interesting, knowledgeable, freaky party monster who can entertain, babysit, change, feed, burp, teach and mentor a class of 20 aggressive young offenders?
Are you flexible enough to cope with the trials of living off a wage that McDonalds employees would sneer at, in one of the world’s most politically volatile, and expensive, cities?
If so, email us and after two or three weeks, we might get back to you and ask you to complete the world’s longest application form, go through three interviews and mud-wrestle a tiger, but please note that we won’t answer any of your questions until you’ve successfully completed the application process.
Due to the unbelievably overwhelming amount of highly trained talent applying for this job, we probably won’t bother to even acknowledge your application, even if you fit our selection criteria perfectly. Live with it.
_______________________________________________________________
It just doesn’t seem like a good way to attract people.
I wondered if I was just being overly cynical – after all, every recruiter has to try and make their jobs look attractive. So I went to the website of my old local paper back in the UK and had a look at the job adverts there. There was nothing even close to the things I’d seen on tefl.com. Most ads just gave the job title, the qualifications they were looking for in a candidate and the details of the job (it’s deeply suspicious how many tefl jobs ads tell you absolutely nothing about the working conditions they offer.)
So clearly tefl recruiters have differently wired brains to other recruiters, although it has to be said that they probably wouldn’t put out ads like this unless they actually worked. So I don’t know if the existence of these monstrosities says more about the industry, the recruiters or the teachers themselves.
Last week I was suffering from terrible insomnia. I think I only managed to average 3.5 hours sleep/night all week. This made work a little difficult, especially as my timetable is… somewhat crowded. By the time the end of the week rolled around, I’d pretty much given up hope of producing anything that was pedagogically convincing (or even coherent.)
I arrived at my class on Friday morning, after an absolute bitch of a commute where the bus driver just had to stop for 10 minutes to yell at a driver who cut him up. I’d slept poorly, I was underprepared and starting to feel like if the week didn’t end this absolute second, my head was likely to fall off. As the students started to trickle in, I experienced a strange out-of-body floating sensation of the kind that people normally describe having before near-death experiences. I watched myself watching them, taking out their books, chatting on in their L1. Most of them said hello to me as they entered but were then content to ignore me and talk among themselves. It occurred to me that I could probably stand like this, staring vacantly into space, for 2 hours and they’d be happy amusing themselves. It took a few minutes for me to remember how to speak, and which words I needed, but eventually I managed to start the lesson. Instructions were kept to a bare minimum.
‘How are you today? Great! Now, did you do your homework? No? Oh well. Right, first we’re going to review what we learnt last lesson. Take these cards…’ and then I totally forgot why I was giving them the cards or what they were supposed to do with them. Silence.
Luckily, this particular class are ‘experienced learners’ (ie, they’ve been taking English classes for ages because they get to skive off work for a couple of hours, but don’t really give a shit about it, never do their homework, spend 90% of their class talking in L1 and, consequently, never improve much, not that this troubles them in any way.) So they just took the cards and, without waiting for my explanation, figured out what to do on their own and got on with it. It took me a few seconds to realise that they didn’t need me (and wouldn’t really need me for the next 15 minutes or so.) I think I actually sighed with relief.
Thinking about it later, I thought there really should be some kind of methodology that a teacher can fall back on when, for some reason, they’re barely alive during class. It’s something they don’t prepare you for on the CELTA.
As this method clearly doesn’t exist (or at least isn’t well known enough to be taught in your average teacher training session) I feel like maybe I should start developing it. Unfortunately, I’m still very sleep deprived and I think anything I come up with right now will just be incoherent gibberish. I want to say it’ll combine elements of Dogme (let the students dictate the lesson content), the Silent Way (teacher says nothing) and the later stages of the Natural Approach (ie, once the learner is independent of the ‘knower/parent/teacher/living zombie who’s taught 32 hours a week for the last 4 months) but to research these methods well enough to be able to manipulate them like this would take time. Time which I don’t have as I have to be up at 6.30 tomorrow to go and teach 7 hours of Elementary Business English, Foundation IELTS, CPE and Beginner General English… sigh.
I’ve actually just flitted over here from Tumblr. Tumblr was fine and I could post stuff there but… well… the majority of the blogs there seemed to be just random pictures and nauseating ‘inspirational’ quotes interspersed with icanhascheezburger.com pictures and the occasional short rant about how a former bff was actually a back-stabbing bitch.
Maybe I didn’t give it a chance. Maybe there was good content out there I just never found it. Maybe this place is exactly the same. Who knows…
But this is my first blog, which is related to work. I teach EFL and have done for about 5 years. Sometimes I get nerdy little questions about TEFL, or I notice things that interest me. Other times I couldn’t give a flying fuck about second language acquisition and prefer to laugh at/ bitch about the many irritations that go with teaching abroad (namely the students, the locals, the school manager and the other teachers). And I want somewhere to write about all these things. And if anyone else feels like taking the time to read it… great!
Let’s see how wordpress compares. I’ll copy over my Tumblr stuff.
tefalump 