Help! I've forgotten how to teach!

Well, gamarjoba. I’m in Tbilisi, and very pleasant it is too. Lest anyone is interested: it is currently 20-25°c in the daytime; you literally can’t move for BREAD; sheets of toilet paper are twice as long as they should be and light switches are upside down; and here is where I am right now (International House staffroom):

IH Tbilisi staffroom

But this blog post will be less about the fascinating city I’ve ended up in and more about my shaky return to the EFL classroom after a two year absence. Teaching, it turns out, is not quite like riding a bike (I blogged about this back in February).

Actually, although I say return to the EFL classroom, really this is my first EFL job apart from a disastrous three-month stint in a Chinese university that I’ve attempted to scrub off my CV. In London I taught – if you still believe these acronyms hold water, and I kinda do – ESOL, and Sri Lanka and Malaysia were ESL contexts (an aside: Georgia, as a post-Soviet nation, is culturally more baffling to me than either Sri Lanka or Malaysia as post-British colonies, and there’s something a bit wrong about that). So I guess one of the first challenges is getting my head round the fact that I’m truly teaching a foreign language here, in spite of Tbilisi’s scattered environmental Roman script and English-menus-available-on-request.

I definitely went into my first class on Monday with my ESL hat on (Lord knows I wish that was an actual hat, alas no) and I think perhaps that was at the root of some of the problems I had. The students were very weak for Upper Intermediate, I decided, and this was going to be an issue because the designated coursebook for the level, Speak Out, is already extremely dense and challenging, and we have only sixteen weeks to get through it, and there was no way we could possibly…

…aaaand breathe.

As I flopped down in the staffroom during the break, babbling agitatedly about levels and testing, my three wonderfully sane and rational co-managers pointed out:

(a)  I’m not in Borneo any more (in case the BREAD was too subtle a clue). Although coursebooks, testing and other remnants of a somewhat bygone education system are still the norm in Georgia, they need not dictate what I do in class; our purpose is still to teach. (Huh? And no-one’s going to complain if I don’t complete every single exercise?)

(b)  As an ADOS, I actually have the power to change things – or at least, I have the ear of the person who waves the wand of change. Novel.

(c) The students have just returned from a three-month break in which they were likely exposed to minimal or zero English, and they therefore appear weaker than they are.

We're not in Borneo any more

I’m still not sure I can guide students though a whole level in 100 hours when for many of them, the material is interlanguage+2 and requires considerable scaffolding – but the obstacles are definitely not insurmountable. I’ve spent the last couple of days drawing up a sample syllabus and mapped test, based on the book. Yesterday I also suggested (in a hamster voice, I suspect, as it was my first management meeting and I’d already sat in Someone Else’s Chair) a move towards continued assessment, which wasn’t immediately balled up and chucked out the nearest window, so time will tell.

There will be other, more personal challenges too. I noticed a lot of rustiness in my own classroom practice, for example:

* I talked way too fast. My CELTA tutors were calling me out on this nine years ago.

* The students all spoke over each other and I felt powerless to stop them (‘Welcome to Georgia’ – DOS), although things were slightly better in the second class when I knew their names.

* My instructions assumed far too much prior understanding and I think I may even – once – have checked them with ‘Is that clear?’

* I had to look up the rules for indirect questions. For me that’s less shaming than not looking them up, but I’m pretty sure I knew them a couple of years ago.

* My boardwork was shocking, like a kid had set about the wall with a crayon. In the absence of IWBs or OHPs, I’m going to need to plan what to do with my shiny white metre-squared much more thoroughly.

* The last time I taught a language class I hadn't joined Twitter, and now I know how very very very much I don't know, I'm apt to be hypercritical of a perfectly acceptable lesson :) But maybe this is good?

Respect my authoritaaii.

On the plus side, one thing that hasn’t disappeared is my love of teaching. The five classes I’ve taught so far have been a pleasure, in spite of cringing at myself every few minutes, and the students have left each one smiling. I’ve convinced myself fairly thoroughly that these were smiles of pleasure rather than bemusement. I've realised I actually learnt a lot about pronunciation in the last twenty months, having been forced to focus on it in Borneo, and I'm now hearing and challenging stuff that would previously have passed me by. And another huge plus is that the majority of students here are professional people with study skills and opinions and pretty strong motivation to learn. It’s nice just to feel that I’m not dragging horses to water.

So no, teaching is not like riding a bike, and I might need stablisers for a while yet, so I feel fortunate indeed to be surrounded (both physically and virtually) by such knowledgeable and supportive educators. As for the other part of my job, 'managing' - well, haha, there's a project of many years' duration, if I'm ever batpoop-crazy enough to apply for another senior post. At present I have the authority of a handkerchief, so expect more posts as events warrant.