Once more TEFL leaves me with a feeling of abject grief. Having spent the last 5 months of 2009 convinced that I'd hit upon a winning formula for getting my flock to speak my mother tongue without any of us breaking into too much of a sweat, I mark their end of term tests and find that my prediction that all of them would achieve at least 75% was nothing more than wildly optimistic grope in the darkness, with scores ranging from 68.5% down to a frankly degenerate 30%.
My cunning recipe involving making recordings for them to listen to at home (at least once a day, no more than 7 minutes per recording) appears to have fallen on deaf ears, as the lazy fucks obviously haven't been doing any such thing, despite cleverly lying en masse to me that they were diligently following my linguistic orientations. Where do you end up once you've gone past your wit's end, I wonder? I passed that milestone some years ago.
To swing wildly away on a tangent for a moment, the relevance of which shall become clear shortly, my recent back problems have been greatly alleviated by a Japanese woman who lives on our avenue. After looking at my tomography for a fraction of a second, she told me my lumbar problem was caused by a lack of assertiveness. I end up giving in to things to avoid conflict, and then regret it as Rome burns around me and I rather wish I'd mentioned that playing with matches can be dangerous. "We all have our personal space," she spoke wisely, "and you must learn to defend yours." I am trying, and lo and behold my spine is responding to my new emotional equilibrium.
And, if only for the sake of my poor spinal column, I'm going to be defending my space like my life depended on it, and I shall be a lot less forgiving of the assorted excuses I've been hearing as to why my sponges have not managed to soak up any Inglês this week - "I was on holiday this week, so I didn't have time..." they harp, or, "I've just got back from holiday, so I didn't have time..." or even, "Next week I'm going to be on holiday, so I didn't have time..." It would be perfectly acceptable if I didn't care as much.
I am already preparing my oratory-cum-ultimatum for the first lesson of the semester. They shall rue the day...
My cunning recipe involving making recordings for them to listen to at home (at least once a day, no more than 7 minutes per recording) appears to have fallen on deaf ears, as the lazy fucks obviously haven't been doing any such thing, despite cleverly lying en masse to me that they were diligently following my linguistic orientations. Where do you end up once you've gone past your wit's end, I wonder? I passed that milestone some years ago.To swing wildly away on a tangent for a moment, the relevance of which shall become clear shortly, my recent back problems have been greatly alleviated by a Japanese woman who lives on our avenue. After looking at my tomography for a fraction of a second, she told me my lumbar problem was caused by a lack of assertiveness. I end up giving in to things to avoid conflict, and then regret it as Rome burns around me and I rather wish I'd mentioned that playing with matches can be dangerous. "We all have our personal space," she spoke wisely, "and you must learn to defend yours." I am trying, and lo and behold my spine is responding to my new emotional equilibrium.
And, if only for the sake of my poor spinal column, I'm going to be defending my space like my life depended on it, and I shall be a lot less forgiving of the assorted excuses I've been hearing as to why my sponges have not managed to soak up any Inglês this week - "I was on holiday this week, so I didn't have time..." they harp, or, "I've just got back from holiday, so I didn't have time..." or even, "Next week I'm going to be on holiday, so I didn't have time..." It would be perfectly acceptable if I didn't care as much.
I am already preparing my oratory-cum-ultimatum for the first lesson of the semester. They shall rue the day...
Comments
That said, I guess you'd want to be on pretty secure ground when asserting that 7 minutes of English a day is likely to result in scores of 75% and above...
I'd probably not spout off too much, myself, and limit myself to saying, "This term, I will only be making recordings for those who request them." Then, after a couple of weeks of nobody requesting them, I would really kick off and lay a thick underlay of guilt down as well. There's no point in living in a catholic country if you don't make as much of the guilt trip as possible. You don't see that written in many teaching books, I warrant.
And the Japanese woman is right in one way - we should never avoid conflict (unless we're going to come out of it absolutely hammered...in a bad way). Conflict results in change, sez I. That said, I think I might be tempted to exercise my newly-found assertiveness by asking her, "AND WHERE'S YOUR BLOODY LICENCE TO PRACTISE? GODDAM QUACK!!!"
Diarmuid - thanks for the comment. I agree, the 7-minute rule (which is totally arbitrary) is a tall order, but my reasoning is that 7 minutes is better than no minutes - though in this case I miscalculated badly, which is not uncommon.
When I ran and English school, that's pretty much what I did...