Frank’s frustrated teaching

“How was the lesson?”

“ Awful!” – said Frank. “It’s hard to teach someone who doesn’t even bother to bring a pen, isn’t it?”

Encouraged by attentive eyes, Frank continues:

I started this one-to-one lesson with a little “get to know you” Q&A. It didn’t really work. How this can NOT work puzzles me.

It didn’t work because I tried to start up a conversation but had only monosyllabic responses in turn. I might be exaggerating but, talking about his work, his home country, his routine, etc, didn’t give me any ‘teachable moment’. Emergent language seemed not to emerge and the scaffold was dismantled.

All in all, I wasn’t able to do what I do best, which is built up a lesson from authentic conversation.

Conversation was not really an affordance in this particular case. Frank’s decision: bye, bye Dogme*, see you in another lesson.

Next step seemed to be trying to engage the student with a resource, something he could read, watch, or else. Based on his profession I decided to present him TED.com, which he didn’t know. And based on my experience, there hasn’t been an adult English learner who didn’t get thrilled about TED when first introduced to it.

We watched a 5-min video, cherry-picked by me, and already used in dozens of lessons. The student enjoyed it but didn’t have much to comment. We went over the script to give him some vocabulary, and… well, whatever (Frank makes that whatever look which speaks more than a thousand words).

And there I went again in a series of questions connecting the presentation to his life, but without much responsiveness from the other end of the table. I noticed he had an iPhone and told him to get the TED app; also, I asked him what kind of apps he had that could ‘in a pleasurable way’ help him learn some English. It turned out he only had games. I gave him a couple of suggestions which were received with a nod and a smile, but… whatever.

Technology was not really an affordance** in this particular case. Frank’s decision: bye, bye, tech, see you in another lesson.

Gladly, there was only ten minutes left, which I basically spent telling the student that he had to engage with authentic materials because one lesson a week is too little contact, and told him a couple of times ‘come on, talk to your work mates’, because he didn’t – because his English was bad.

But if he doesn’t care to improve his English, then why is he taking lessons? It’s hard to understand. He seemed nice, I mean, he was not grumpy; he was actually quite smiley and somehow enthusiastic about being in the lesson. But when it came to have some ‘learning attitude’, I don’t know… really… why he didn’t have any.

It’s incredible how learning attitude influences teaching attitude. I’ve always tried to achieve what Carl Roger’s called unconditional positive regard, and it’s a principle I really think teachers should aim at. But boy, sometimes it’s just sooo hard.

I’ll probably not teach him again soon, or maybe I will. In fact, a small part of me wants to. But the rest of me, thinks that if there’s a next time, I’d probably just photocopy a unit of a coursebook, pitched at his level and on his apparent needs, and that is going to be the learning material.

No Dogme and no tech. This is, in the end, what most teachers in the world do, isn’t it? So, it shouldn’t be so bad.

I’m just thinking Frank is in a very privileged position, and that he’s complaining for nothing, because the kind of difficulty he had is pale in comparison to how the big bulks of foreign language classrooms work. He had one ‘difficult’ student, whereas some teachers have 50! (at the same time!) !!

But I’m also thinking that if for Frank, an seasoned teacher, it’s kind of easy to just abandon what he believes is good teaching and get back to photocopying some worksheets and just follow the rubrics; imagine for teachers who work in more difficult settings? Even if, like Frank, they believe in a Dogme approach (conversation-driven + emergent language) and in the use of technology to enhance stimuli and engagement; teaching can become so exhausting that it’s just much easier for teachers to follow a coursebook and photocopy random worksheets.

*Dogme is an approach to teaching English language teaching

**Affordance is a term that has been used in Complexity and Ecology of language learning/teaching/research. See articles in the Complexity page of this blog. 

12 inspirations for a New Year’s Teacher

 

ONE – Don’t stick with one mindset of what is best practice without testing it often. If you’re using a textbook, teach without one. If you are not, do it. Same with technology; same with common sense.  Notice the difference in learning and teaching; report it on a blogpost or something like that in which you can invite comments.

TWO – Explore a field you’re not familiar with and its influence in your profession. E.g Neurolinguistics.

THREE – Experiment with classroom layout and try alternative locations, like a lesson at a park, or at a shopping mall.

FOUR – Swap! Teach someone else’s lesson. Invite someone else to teach yours. Make it even better by inviting someone who’s not an English teacher to teach your English lesson, observe and learn.

FIVE – Swap 2! Send a student to observe another teacher’s lesson for an hour, then come back and report to class.

SIX – Bring food to class. Notice the difference in learning and teaching when everyone’s eating. [I once worked with a teacher who strongly believed in this practice]

 

SEVEN – Include “Teach something moments” in the syllabus. I started this more systematically last year and it was awesome, can’t wait to see more of it. Each learner had 5-10min scheduled in the week’s program to teach anything they wanted.

EIGHT – Talk about teaching and learning with learners. Do you have a favorite theory or methodology? Have you studied motivation or language acquisition? Share it with your learners and see what they think.

NINE – Expand the scope of the previous idea and have the class create a document: How We Learn

TEN – Põe a mão na massa! This is an expression in Portuguese that says put your hands in the dough, meaning DO it. Give learners opportunities to create videos, posters, radio shows, illustrations, reading and listening texts, etc.

ELEVEN – Improve the quality of staff room conversation.

TWELVE – Blur boundaries, embrace complexity, promote interdisciplinarity, cherish unpredictability, and share responsibility.

 

And an overarching thought: There’s no teaching without philosophy.

 

This is a list of what I want to do in order to seek professional development and to improve the quality of my teaching and the experience of those who learn with me. Somehow, I wrote the list in an imperative form, like Do This. It may be because of my level of confidence in these things and also because I should really do them, so I’m kind of talking to myself more assertively as though I was a soldier under my own command. In the end, there may be some ideas here that will inspire you to create your own list. If you do, share with me. If you do any of the things I mention, please share with me.

Enjoy the ride — Happy New Year!

11 from ’11 – aborted posts

So here’s something.

Inspired by the 11 from ’11 challenge proposed by Adam @yearinthelifeof, I present you 11 bits of drafts that I didn’t want to finish, publish, think about, etc – in other words aborted blogposts.

A word of warning: there’s nothing so good here. If they were any good, they would’ve been published.

But maybe I’m wrong, so feel free to leave a comment saying which of these you would like to see a full post about, and maybe I can do it if there’s enough encouragement  and inspiration.

 

1. January 27

The title was The non-native English teacher’s accent. Being a non-native speaker I always worried about how my accent would influence learners’ language development. An idea that actually might need even more attention from native speakers.

It’s been five months I moved to London and very often I find myself fighting against my mutable accent.

Some people think it’s funny that I have (or had, I don’t know anymore) a little American accent if I’m from Brazil.

 

2. March 2

This was a post about social capital; and how many of us are educated to invest more in certificates than in building a strong professional (and learning) network.

TEFLboy liked his first two years as a teacher of English as a foreign language and is now considering what the next big move is.

His best friend and mentor ELTgirl always pictured the fortuitious future of TEFLboy, all the potential he had to become a super teacher, even maybe one day to become the president of WAFFLE, their local teacher’s association. She didn’t know whether to advise him to invest in a diploma or to spend his money going to international conferences.

 

3. March 2

I always wanted to write about ‘frozen futurity’ – no, it’s not a new verb tense. It’s how ideas like lifelong learning can give the impression that we’re never ready, thus limiting what we think we’re able to do in the present. It’s about a bunch of other things really that I don’t know how to explain – yet. But it’s fascinating.

Have you ever heard a student replying to a teacher’s question by turning to peers and saying ‘Does anyone know the answer to that question?

Have you ever heard of a student who takes notes on remarks made by other students in the class?

Maybe you haven’t. Because the organization of  our teaching makes it clear that what students say is not the ‘content’ of instruction. Therefore, it will not be tested. And as such, it can be ignored.

 

4. March 21

A criticism of How to teach… books. Aborted because I realized I learnt a lot from them.

HOW TO…

teach when you don’t like it            teach when you’re sick          teach in the summer

teach when you’re hungover         teach when you’re happy      teach when there are better things to do

 

5. March 23

What was to be a number of ideas for professional development activities that could be done in 60 minutes became something else, as you can see below.

A closer look at the whole ELT workshop idea might show that in fact it is one of the least efficient forms of professional development. Because

- it’s short-term.

- it’s top-down – if not in performance, in planning at least.

- it lacks continuity – in the social aspect of it as well. The experts come, talk, sometimes eat, and leaves; there’s no follow up.

 

6. April 8

Kind of a reflection post that would mark and celebrate the end of my delightful 8-month break from having a job.

Moving away a bit from a focus on English teaching I wanted to understand where my profession was situated in a broader aspect. Although briefly, I sailed the seven seas: Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Economy, Pedagogy, Research and ..erm… well six seas. In fact, it’s was more of a great aerial journey, and it’s now time to revisit these places on foot, I’m convinced that English teachers can benefit from studying education just as much as studying how the language works.

 

7. April 24

New Teachers | Reform | Subversion

This was gonna be a good one, but got shy after some ELT big fish started a blog-brawl over the relevance of Neil Postman.

In 1972 Postman and Weingartner wrote a book full of potential epitaphs for the yet upcoming death of the ‘teacher-on-a-pedestal’. Nearly forty years ago, they were talking about our changing world and how schools lacked means to keep up with modernity. It seems many educators are still talking about it. Current discourses bet high on technology for learning as a way to improve our paleolithic educational system, and promote learner-centeredness for lack of better remedy against teacher-dullness.

(…)

“Why did you decide to study to become a teacher?”

“I want to make a difference.”

“But if you want to make a difference, shouldn’t you be doing something different?”

8. May 18

the year is 2002.

student: I want to go home!

teacher: Why?

student: Why do I have to learn this??

teacher: Well, you don’t actually. You don’t HAVE to learn anything.

student: No?

teacher: No.

student: OK… good.

teacher: But you can go home if that’s important.

student: Nah, nevermind.

 

9. May 20

A revised and improved version of a comment I left over at Chia Suan’s blog that never happened. The core was how I learned the English that made me a teacher, even though I was taught through a methodology that is considered to be highly ineffective today. The original comment can be found at http://chiasuanchong.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/in-defence-of-callan-and-other-behaviourist-methodologies/

 

10. Sep 23

This turned out to be an ugly unreasonable series of questions to conference organizers, with the main point being that a great conference is made by those who pay to be there, which I’m not sure about and that’s why this idea is as an unpublished idea.

With increasing awareness of active learning (meaning anything from experiential, affective and learner-centered; to critical, creative and collaborative), I have a question:

Why are education conferences themselves centered around keynote addresses? (that is, plenary speeches by ‘experts’)

 

 11. Nov 2

This is actually something I will come back to and finish. The bottom line is that you can’t climb too high as a teacher and although it’s the most important role in education, it’s way down there in the pay scale. Also this post is a criticism to the just released British Council can do-like statements for teacher development with a rank and some very upsetting conceptions.

Along with some other thousands of teachers, I have noticed that the ‘next’ in a teacher’s life, when it involves willingness to make more money, is to get out of the classroom and do other stuff.

This is sad. They [the rank mentioned above] give the idea that in the professional ladder, great teachers should become trainers, managers and writers.

 

How to appraise teachers’ wages?

Like thousands of teachers out there, today I was thinking about my wages.

The thought suddenly moved to other teachers’ wages, followed by a very shallow comparison of what I do and what I think they do, and with the final balance resulting in of course that I should be earning more money for each hour I spend teaching.

Well, I think this is pretty normal, and that there are teachers who think what I do pretty phony and that I shouldn’t deserve all attention and fortune I’m given – or all they think I’m given.

Since this train of thought was gonna get me nowhere, I then started to think how I would like to be appraised in terms of wages. I also thought for awhile about my approach to wages when I was the boss. 

When I was the boss, meaning I was not the BOSS boss, but had power enough to hire and fire teachers, and to decide how much they should earn, my approach lacked a system. Initially, it was based on the market, since where I was, Brazil, EFL teachers with qualifications were very scarce. CELTA or equivalent? What? The Celta they know is a GM compact car who doesn’t run too well on the highway. Anyway, so initially it was market – let’s exemplify.

Managing director tells Willy, in two weeks we start five new groups, we need a teacher to spend 1 hour commuting to this company which is in a not so safe neighbourhood, and then to come back downtown, another hour on a stinky bus, to teach another lesson from 8 to 9pm. And yes, the client wants a native-speaker.

So that was pretty much the start of an agonizing recruitment process where I would see a bunch of gringos who hooked up to a Brazilian girl through a dating website and were now ready to teach after a successful career in supermarket management, real state, waiting tables, housewifing, psychotherapy, you name it.

What amuses me is that a great number of them after a short while became very good teachers. Very good on this scale meant the students telling me this teacher is very good!

Well, anyway, when there was this kind of demand, wages had to be increased; pretty much because it was better to pay a bit more then to lose the deal with the client.

What really bothered me at the time was that in theory I could afford to pay more when the situation was critical, even if it was to a person with no apparent qualities in comparison to the staff already in placement, while there were great teachers who just happened to be hired when the demand was lower and who just happened to be in a bulk where a lot of good people were trying to get the same job, which meant lower wages.

This is very simple stuff, you know, offer vs. demand. But why did it bother me when it happened in teacher recruitment?

As I said, this was “initially”, then I came up with a scale with about 5 variables (qualifications, experience in the field, experience abroad, native speakerism, etc…) and use this for a while until the market didn’t allow it anymore. In addition, I started to review, appraise and compensate teachers’ work in on a case by case basis, taking into account individual goals and offering individualized growth opportunities. This was a very good experience.

One thing I learned is that qualifications only serve to get you an interview. After that, it doesn’t matter much. So, if I improved the recruitment process, designed my own tests, spent more time with interviewees, and laid out a good professional development scheme, I wouldn’t need to give a lot of importance to formal qualifications. I would hire good persons, with potential to become good teachers. Well, at least in theory.

So, back to my wages chain of thought. I was wondering what a good approach is. I’ve seen many schools having a scale considering mainly formal qualifications, something like: if you do the DELTA, I’ll pay you 2 pounds more per hour, but if you take an MA I don’t care. And other schools with a more individualized approach, something like I did in the past for a very short time: show me why I should pay you more than others; or let’s set you some goals together and use them as a measuring tool.

I would really like to hear from you, teachers and managers, how wages are appraised in your institution and what you think about it.

I know it’s not common to talk in public about this, but that’s actually the problem: not talking about this in public – by not talking we tend to conform to what we have, leave it unquestioned, and static; all great ingredients for unhappiness at work. Anyway, if you’re not comfortable with talking about the current situation, talk about a past one.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that teachers already complain too much and that the purpose of this post is not to complain, or hear complaints, it is to share experience that may help other teachers think critically about their situation and hopefully to take action.

 

Learner Autonomy (reloaded)

What follows in my next posts here and there are snippets of a recent Learner Autonomy workshop I put together to present at SGI. (+ other related stuff I thought of later)

Morpheus: I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one who must walk through it.

This is kind of what I felt about learner autonomy, except the learners were not always The One.

And except I didn’t always know where the door was.

………..

To conceptualize autonomy is not an easy task. Different people associate it with different things. Responsibility, independence, self- evaluation, etc.

For me, at some point (maybe not now), I thought of individualization. On my part as a teacher, the individualization of instruction mainly.

However,

“Individualisation… (in general) leaves very little freedom of choice to the individual learner. Rather it is the teacher who tries to adapt his methodology and materials to the learner… That is, the majority of the relevant decisions are made for the learner, not by him. It is in fact individualised teaching.”

Riley (1986: 32)

The made for the learner, not by him/her, is something that really hit home and made me reconsider the matter.

Another idea is self-direction – something I particularly like to think I practice all the time. And here’s another quote:

In its broadest meaning, ‘self-directed learning’ describes a process in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes.

Knowles (1975: 18)

It strikes me that learner autonomy, ideally, should be fostered at all levels; and that includes course management and decisions that are rarely discussed with the learner such as, how and when to evaluate.

Have you ever asked learners:

When do you think you should take the tests? Erm… actually, are tests really the best way to evaluate your learning or would you prefer a learning portfolio?

If you have, I admire you.

to be continued

**update: here’s part II http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/blog/learner-autonomy-and-the-classroom-layout/

London Writing

What a great year it was!

On 3rd September, 2010, I landed in London and swiftly hopped on the Tube making my way to Camden Town with only a pack on my back.

Well… my two-piece luggage with 30kg of clothes and books each got lost somewhere between Rio and Paris (?? I flew Sao Paulo to London), anyway…

A month later, with clothes and books in place but still guitar-less, I was on my way to see a flat on an unlikely fortunate day (there was a Tube strike), when the 24 to Pimlico drove by Denmark Street (THE guitar-shop street in London), and well, guess what? I postponed the viewing, got off the smelly bus, and as I enter the first guitar shop, who do I see? Jeremy Harmer.

Denmark St, Sep 2010, with Jeremy's guitar.

This was the first of many encounters I would have with amazing and inspiring ELT professionals, with whom I was able to socialize and learn thanks to this blog and to Twitter. I know I wouldn’t have done so much in this first year here if it wasn’t for the people I met through blogging and micro-blogging (btw, micro-blogging is a ridiculous word).

There are too many faces to name. Well, I could actually name everyone, but the point here is writing.

In order to build some textual coherence, whatever it means, I will simply say that at the time little did I know I would meet Luke Meddings and end up writing a conversational-piece with him for the excellent Teaching Times (the TESOL France Newsletter); and that I would meet Simon Greenall and end up having him as not only the editor-in-chief but more importantly as the motivator of an unexpected early career in materials writing, which I will be forever thankful.

Writing.

It was a year of writing. The main reason I’ve had these and other opportunities was because I write this blog. It is also probably a reason why I am not offered some other opportunities, but I don’t know about them.

What I know is that the more I blog the bigger my readership gets, and that’s just so obvious now. The more I blog, the more I learn. The more I blog, the more I position myself in the profession and in the world, and then I change, I find new perspectives, watch my language and bite my tongue. All in all, I’ve found a channel of self-expression so important to any professional life, but extremely important to the education profession.

It is also by writing a blog that I see how much I still have to learn and how much I have already learned. With the blog I am able to see myself a year ago and enjoy the learning path retrospectively. It is a photo album made of words.

The real downside is that I don’t know who is actually on the other side; I know some people who read it, but I don’t know if they are reading this. Hence, I rarely have a reader in mind, which makes me feel like talking to myself most of the times and trying to convince myself of what I’m saying has some value.

Writing.

A foundational reason I moved here was that of a master’s in education; which means writing four 5,000-word assignments during the year. I still don’t know how but I managed to achieve top marks in all of them. Half way there, another year to go and an increasing uncertainty of what the heck I’ll do with all this MA thing. It makes is easier when I remind myself that I started it for the learning and nothing else, but that’s also a bit stupid considering all the money I’ll have spent aimlessly(?). We’ll see. In the end I wish the MA studies were less solitary and more open, less formal and more passionate; a bit like blogging.

Writing.

This is a post about writing and not-writing. It is perhaps time to shift gears, not to park, but just to shift gears: I have so much in my head after intensive teaching for 12 weeks that I just can’t write on this blog; it’s the hell of a paradox, let me explain.

teaching n' learning, Saint George Int'l, July 2011

I’m flooded and lost in reflection. What was a great thing, reflecting on lessons, is now jumbling up in a corner somewhere in my brain. I have hundreds of notes I took in lesson waiting to be checked out and expanded, but at the same time I still keep taking notes of new lessons so when I sit down to write in here it’s just so overwhelming that I get stuck, lost.

After teaching such a diverse wealth of personality types, the prolific and the monosyllabic, the down-to-earth and the lunatic. Oh boy, all those languages and nationalities, it was fantastic. After all that I just have so many concepts called into question that it is hard to formulate any opinions about anything at the moment that I sometimes think it’s just better if I don’t write for awhile instead of publishing trash for the sake of blogging.

But it is so hard! I want to write!

After the second hour in Tate Modern everything was art, even what it was not.

So what I’ll do for the time being is to write down the best activities/ideas/resources I’ve used during the summer, which are by and large not my own, but adapted from varied places and people. I’ll leave the complex(ity) stuff aside a bit, leave it chewing cud or ageing in an oak barrel for whenever. There’s a lot of philosophy of education I want to write, a lot about affordances, loads and loads of stuff in teacher education, but they’ll have to wait. I’ll clear my head writing other things for the time being,

However, I don’t want to publish the practical stuff here – this has never been a blog of practical resources and I don’t want to make it one now. Instead I’d like to use another space, more especially someone else’s space. I’ll let you know. And you let me know if you have a place I can bunk overnight blogwise.

And back to the 1-year-in-London thing, it’s been a great journey! I love how cheap junk food is here, love people standing only on the right side of the escalator, love the self-checkout at the supermarket, love the way women dress in the summer, love being able to taste different cuisine, my favorite now is Greek! Love the pubs, thanks Ken Wilson for introducing the Dove (I even moved west to be closer). Great tweet-ups! It’s now easier to go to IATEFL (but it’s still very expensive!). And lastly, I’ve been enjoying the new challenges in teaching, writing and the bloody accents mate!

So thank you if you read me this year and double thank you if you commented on or offline. See you in other corners and I’ll be back as soon as the thinking dust settles. I predict very shortly (arf, all the fuss for so little).

first week, Sep 2010

Foo Fighters gig, Wembley Arena, April 2011

IATEFL's Dogme Advocates (+ me), April 2011

Ken, Luke and I thrilled after our impressive vocals on The Weight by The Band (take a load of Annie, or is it Fanny?) - Summer 2011

The word is half someone else’s

One of the deepest, poetic(quest), and most insightful paragraphs on language theory and dialogism I’ve ever read. Enjoy, and have a good pondering (and a good weekend). À bientôt!

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not , after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker get his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. And not all words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated –overpopulated –with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

(Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 293-294)

Listen

  I was a brilliant student in the first couple of years of primary school. However, on the third year, at the age of 9, I started to feel my motivation was evaporating. I remember my mom went to talk to the teacher because she promptly realized I was losing interest. The teacher, obviously, hadn’t realized that, but could give her the hell of an answer, ‘I feel unmotivated too’.

I couldn’t move to another school so I stayed there until the age of 11. When I turned 12 I went to a private school downtown and then moved once again to a better private school to do high school. But something was never right, I had lost interest completely. I didn’t enjoy any of the subjects. I was not a bad student, neither did I have any learning difficulties, but what I did was to study the minimum I needed to pass, or in many cases not to study at all and then at the end of the year cram like a lunatic and pass the big finals. I always passed.

I never really liked my teachers at school, I mean, to consider them role-models. There were some well-intentioned teachers but they couldn’t get to me and motivate me to find usefulness in their subjects, there were some nice teachers, nice as people, but there was an ingredient missing in their teaching . Their job as I saw it was to tell us about the content, test it, and carry on with their lives. My job as I saw it was to memorize some 60% of the content, regurgitate it in a test and then carry on with my life.  Now I know it’s nothing like that, teaching is one of the most difficult professions there are; and being a student half or your day is the most burdensome thing to a teenager.

On the other hand, I had a few interesting teachers at the English language school, the main difference was that they bothered to be more interested in my life, despite the enormous quantity of display questions (i.e. the ones aimed at testing your grammar and absent of any social function, like Would you buy a Porsche if you won the lottery?), there was time to talk about things we liked, life experience and ambitions. In my English course I was able to give a presentation about ‘the history of the guitar’, I still remember that! Boy, where else would I have done that? Not in the schools I went to I’m sure. I had teachers who also played music and they motivated me a lot to do so and sometimes even after class we talked about music and Fender guitars. Some other teachers had traveled a lot and I loved to listen to their stories, my favorite lessons were the ones with cultural insights and the ones in which they brought some American sitcoms for us to watch, at that time it was not so easy to find authentic materials, especially videos, there wasn’t YouTube at the time and we didn’t have cable TV at home.

My English teachers saved my life in a way. When I finished compulsory schooling I celebrated that I was finally free from spending half my day and half my life not having fun (and by having fun I include learning something I like). But among all this exaggerated hopelessness I knew one thing and I knew it well, English. I finished one type of school and went straight to another, ironic as it may sound for someone who didn’t enjoy school, but this time I stepped into the classroom as a teacher, an English teacher, and I was happier than ever. The first school I worked with had three rooms only, which couldn’t hold more than five students at a time, we had one coursebook series only, one grammar book (guess which one?), no photocopier, no training, and a 4-dollar hourly wage; and I was freakin’ happy!

Eventually, I became a career English teacher. I wonder why…

On Friday, two days ago, a student on her last day in my English course said.

Thank you, Willy. Maybe you’re a good teacher (we laughed together when she realized she’d said maybe).

You’re very calm and you pay attention to all the students, that’s very good.

You have no idea what it means to me to hear someone say ‘Willy, you pay attention’. In the end, that is what really matters. I don’t really aim at being an expert in grammar or at knowing all the methods and approaches; I don’t really mind working with a coursebook or not, if there’s technology available or not; if the thinking we do in the lessons are critical, of higher order or inconsequentially silly. These are all important considerations of course, but secondary.

A teacher’s job starts by listening.

(I was completely unaware of this song until some weeks ago when my students asked to do it as a lesson activity)

Silence and control (part II)

In 1 minute, write down anything that comes to your mind. GO!

(1 minute later)

In 2 minutes, talk to the person next to you about the things you wrote. GO!

(2 minutes later)

In 1 minute, write down topics you’d like to discuss in this lesson. GO!

(1 minute later)

Tell me.

(they did! yey!)

Then I took notes of the topics each one suggested, for every topic that came up I asked if anyone else would like that, some topics needed to be narrowed down a bit in scope and students actively contributed to this process. For example someone said films, then they decided it would be better if everyone made their own Top 3 and found some trivia about them. It was also decided that my job was to bring some vocabulary related to films.

Other topics were: books (which unfortunately we didn’t have time to do); music (we had a great discussion about what genre best represented each decade, from the 60s to the upcoming 20s); British history (we didn’t do it either mainly because I told them that I would not be lecturing in a speaking focused lesson, so if they could come up with something they could do about history that was aligned with the objective of the lessons, fine, eventually they didn’t); and the best of all relationship (that was one of the most interesting lessons, here my job was to provide some idioms used to describe relationships).

And that was it. We had the a syllabus for the week with everyone’s ideas. Oh, happy day!

The ‘relationship’ lesson:

Students were interested in finding out how youngsters behave when trying to hook up with someone in their respective countries (France, Italy, Russia, Ukraine and Brazil).

Since no-one was married I later brought up the topic of marriage and asked how they saw themselves in this ‘situation’

Everything was going alright except for one student who was stereotyping his countrymen as perverts and his countryladies as whores, this would be okay if there wasn’t another person of the opposite sex (read: woman) from the same country who evidently disagreed pissed-off-ly. However, since this dude’s comments were so hard to believe students were mainly taking them/him as a joke when then …

the topic of homosexuality came up. One student told the story of his classmate who has two dads and how terribly bullied he is at school. Some other students made short comments and were all seemingly okay with the topic, I mean, we were talking about homosexuality not as if it was a taboo topic, i.e. very openly and naturally, and extremely respectfully until the same dude said:

bla bla bla… if the gay people and the normal people … bla bla (and I interrupted)

I said, sorry but you can’t say that.

He tried to rephrase, though he thought I’d said it because there was a mistake in his sentence.

I interrupted again, and said No, you can’t say gay and normal; think about it!

Now he understood it was not a grammatical mistake. But he insisted on having the argument and said something really atrocious.

A couple of students started to look really pissed off.

I said, Ok this is too much crap, end of story, change the topic, I don’t wanna know.

there was Silence… (control)

I looked at the clock, 10 minutes left. I don’t even remember what happened in those last 10 minutes, probably there was me mumbling some homework and then letting them go 5 minutes earlier.

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this episode. I struggle to give students a voice and to allow them to express themselves in meaningful ways even if it’s the most bullshitical thing I will ever hear, it doesn’t matter, it’s their voice. But this… I couldn’t take it.

 

The films lesson:

To cut a long story short: A disaster. (for me, not for them. I explain)

So each student had their Top 3 movies. They took turns talking about them, they invested in their speech I could see that, they thought about it carefully, they self-monitored, they asked for words and all that. But there was no conversation. For me, there were 6 monologues. When one mentioned a film others hadn’t seen, no one asked questions; when it was a film more than one of them had seen, still no comments. I did most of the follow-up questions myself and tried to engage them fruitlessly.

What’s the point? I thought to myself. They chose the topic, but all they wanted was to tell ME about it and know if they made any mistakes?

Tomorrow there’s a new group, some students went home on Friday, some will stay another week and new ones arrive on Monday. The only thing I can hope for is that they are a wee bit more interested in the lives of others.

that’s all for now.

>>I worry I might be giving the impression that I don’t enjoy these conversation lessons. In fact, they’ve been quite a learning experience for me,  and that counts so much. I could only stop enjoying teaching when I cease to learn from doing it, if ever.

Silence and control

London, 7 July 2011

EFL conversation lesson (B2 upper-intermediate)

in the room: 1 teacher and 8 adult learners

(after the initial chit-chat)

So… we’ve had interesting lessons this week, we talked about many things, and… you know, I chose all the topics. I was thinking that maybe for today and tomorrow you could choose the topic of our conversations, after all this is a conversation lesson and you must have things you’d like to talk about, and learn related vocabulary, practice some expressions used to talk about these specific things, maybe about your culture, jobs, I don’t know. What do you think?

(silence; some nodding; some indifference; some blank looks; some smiles)

What do you say if each one of you choose a topic? I’ll write them up on the board and we’ll see what common interests you have and build the lesson from that. So, what would you like to talk about?

(silence, 5 seconds)

(teacher feels uncomfortable and wants to keep talking though he manages not to and waits)

(silence, 10 seconds)

(teacher starts to feel itchy, nearly utters a slightly aggressive c’mon!!)

(silence, 15 seconds)

(teacher is now pissed off, but manages to look cool, he simply talks to himself If these guys come to a conversation lesson and there’s nothing they’d like to talk about we’ll be silent for 1h30, fine)

(silence, 20 seconds – a record breaker of teacher-students’ silence in classroom non-activity)

(he can take it no more…)

So… any ideas?? (he says with a big smile which hides itchy uneasiness)

Erm… I don’t know… I think it would be nice to talk about the government interfering in people’s lives. (says the blonde with an intonation of hopeless uncertainty and a look  of why do I always have to talk first in this group?)

::::::::

Interestingly enough, a week before that I taught the same course, but with different people, and I barely had to open my mouth to initiate any kind of discussion, students would do it eagerly.

The thing is, it was supposed to be pretty easy because you know, by the time they come to my lesson they’d had 3 hours of coursebook-oriented lessons, they are upper-intermediate, they can talk, none of them have any mental disabilities, they don’t look starved, the lesson is after lunch, it’s EFL, it’s holidays for most of them, they’re all literate and seem to have had privileged education in their home countries, and more than anything they chose to be there because afternoon lessons are elective as far as I know. But it’s not easy! Because they won’t talk if they were not asked a direct question.

It must be difficult for them for some reason, reason which unfortunately we don’t have much time to uncover. And it’s also difficult for me to deal with it for reasons I understand very well.

But it’s okay, I know some people come with high expectations of having no control, of granting the teacher full responsibility for creating content that is enjoyable and conducive to learning, even though this content might have nothing to do with their lives. As a teacher who does his best to understand his students’ referential points, I do understand such expectations.

In spite of it, a good teacher in this circumstance would be able to (or at least try to) identify his learners’ needs and interests and plan accordingly anyway, even if most of them will be there for a week only? But why would he do it?

:::::::::::

Realizing the difficulty of such approach her teacher tries hard to implement and also understanding that such approach has been beneficial to her in the previous week, the youngest (stated) and brightest (according to my judgement) person in the group suggested we chose the topics beforehand in order for them to have time to prepare “something to say”.

Most of them agreed that it was a good idea. Another student suggested it would be interesting to know more about each other’s culture since they come from different places. Deal. Their simple task was to think of questions they’d like to ask classmates the day after.

::::::::::

The day after:

A quarter of the group had thought about what they wanted to know about each other.

No-one volunteered to kick off. After the awkward silence the teacher couldn’t take all over again, he improvised a genuine question to the youngest student, the one who suggested the whole thing. Her answer was quite good and generated a lot of comments, it also prompted questions from some students who hadn’t thought about anything.

Conversation nearly died about 7 times at least. The teacher had to ask most follow-up questions to keep the ball rolling because students were unable or unwilling to do so.

Some students when addressed a question from a classmate answered them looking at the teacher instead of at the one who asked the question. Weird.

There were interesting questions and interesting answers, most of the group was focused, they were paying attention to each other, they asked about some vocab they didn’t know, took notes. The teacher reformulated some incorrect phrases, etc. It was not a bad lesson, but not one I’m proud of either.

:::::::::::

Needless to say, this is a simplistic account of these classroom events, especially because I didn’t say what we did on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and because in each one of us (teacher and students) there are a whole bunch of cultural baggage, learning stories, expectations, frustrations and so on… but still, I’d like to figure out how to do better and get more from them. If you have any similar experience or advice, please comment.