Cool things that happened today

…actually, these are cool things that happened yesterday, since finishing at 9pm doesn’t leave much time for reflecting on anything except stroganoff in the pub next door, but still: here is my response to Mike Griffin’s blog challenge.

•  I neutralised an incident with a phone in my teens class without any drama.

• Two teens with serious attention-span issues played a word stress card game for over 30 minutes without getting distracted.

• The teens were fascinated by the schwa, which they’d apparently never heard of before. They started asking about other symbols on the phonemic chart and if we could have a lesson on it next week.

• I realised how many class in-jokes the students have created in the last six weeks that actually relate to lesson content, suggesting a desire to bond with me and each other. (Slightly less cool thing that happened today: felt guilty again about leaving at the end of the month.)

• I also realised how much I’ll miss teaching them. Call me a masochist, but I think teenagers are great. They have strong opinions without being closed to new ideas, they’re optimistic and open to any kind of silliness you set in front of them. Don’t get old, you guys… *sniff*

• The man who totally dominates my adult class is learning to speak less when given subtle cues (and, ahem, occasionally direct instructions) from me.

• Consequently two women who were pretty much silent six weeks ago are speaking more, and using Georgian less, than they were before.

• Sexism has been a recurring theme in this particular class, and the external monologue guy has delighted in winding me up with ‘jokes’ about domestic violence. However, last night he said he thought no marriage could work unless the man and woman were equal partners in it, which I found reassuring, and on a similar note the two women told stories of how much better life is for them than their mothers, and predicted even better things for their daughters. Hurrah!

• I noticed how often I laugh in the staffroom (between endless placement tests and other stresses). I’m always grateful for quirky colleagues – and IH Tbilisi isn’t short of them.

Teach us like this

Two posts in a week! The world’s gone mad.

Actually, it feels like my advanced class has gone a bit mad. When we returned from the tea break on Friday, it was clear that something (else) was afoot. A deputation had been organised.

“Laura, there’s something we want to tell you.”

Heart beating fast (obviously all I was hearing was, “Laura, you are a TERRIBLE TEACHER”), I put down my mug and pulled up a chair to hear what they had to say. It was this:

“We don’t have enough grammar to cope with this book. That’s why we only got Cs in our test. You think we’re advanced level, but we’re not. In class we want you to explain basic grammar in detail and then give us exercises, and make extra grammar worksheets for us to do at home. That’s what the Georgian teachers do.

Why do we always have to guess things? Just tell us the answers. Don’t teach us any vocabulary in class, because we can learn the meanings of words at home and check them in the lesson by playing word explaining games. But no other games! The only ones we liked were the word explaining games and the prefix and suffix dominoes.

Don’t do listening in class either. Do grammar and writing, because we can’t make correct sentences when we write and this is our biggest problem. You should give us written tasks each week, and we email them to you, and you send them back with comments. Is that OK?”

Wowsers, right? I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. I’m a terrible teacher and they hate this class. That was pretty much me on Friday night.

But now (Monday afternoon), having spent the weekend thinking on the conversation, I feel quite excited about what happened. I realised they don’t hate the class, as thirteen of thirteen have just re-registered for this term; they just felt comfortable saying what they wanted. And how often is this likely to happen? Having students who can and will articulate their needs is a rare blessing, so I should see this as an experiment rather than an indictment. I have a few comments on their comments, though.

First, I’m under no illusion that they’re advanced level. Since whole levels are completed in just 50 hours here they’re understandably upper-inty, so they’re right to say they don’t have enough grammar to cope with the book prescribed by the school. We’ve been using SpeakOut Advanced which is, I admit, a chewy little biscuit, and I often can’t do the exercises myself.

Second, the ‘word explaining games’ they mentioned are back-to-the-board and a card game version of it. I’m not sure why they got the seal of approval when other games are “a waste of time”, but the dominoes, I suspect, were successful because they were taken from an upper intermediate resource pack and were therefore of a more suitable level. And by ‘guessing things’ they meant deducing meaning from context, which to be fair is hardly a walk in the park when (as in SpeakOut) at least 50% of the lexis in any given exercise is new.

Third, their writing, unfortunately, is as bad as they think it is, and they do indeed need more practice. But when I’ve set written homework before only two-thirds of the class has handed anything in, and the half-arsedness was tangible.

Am I correctly interpreting the messages they're trying to give me? They find the class too hard, they didn’t like getting Cs and they find aspects of CLT infantilising? As graduates, they've passed all the way through an education system which prioritises rote learning and examination grades* so their feelings are not exactly surprising, but do I indulge the request or challenge it? Do they want better integration of technology? Some of the students bring iPads to class, yet the teaching centre has nothing so high-tech as an OHP between 25 teachers. Do I need to look into flipping my classroom...?! 

Basically, with thanks in advance, I’m soliciting advice from my PLN:

What would you do with this class?

* Perhaps Michael Gove would like to do a field visit.

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.