The Addams Family had an episode today. One of them is a bit like Gomez, only older. He started to question the value of one particular exercise because it had no overt grammar. I asked him if we should have missed it out, but he ducked that and got onto the old theme of the all importance of grammar, “words we can learn at home – we only need you for grammar. All was well until the teabreak, when they decided unilaterally and without tipping me off, I think led by older Gomez, that they should have half and hour, rather than fifteen minutes.
I don’t think it showed, but I was thoroughly pissed off with this. See, frankly, I couldn’t give a tinker’s fart if they took a whole hour – I’m feeling a bit frazzled by then with the back-to-back classes. But the tea breaks are set for 15 minutes and it’d be my balls on the block if management thought I was letting them have longer. So I told them that going over the agreed time was unacceptable, whereupon Festa and Old Gomez got excited and started shouting. I left the room and got LM in to sort them out.
Which he did, by conceding them a 20 minute tea break. Thereafter they were wee baa lambs.
T3 arrives tonight, and will take Brokeback Mountain next week, so that I can devote my energies, for now, to the Addams Family. I need to do a Second Language Acquisition paper for my MA over the next few months, and they should provide some marvellous data. I’m thinking of some observations on fossilisation, testing, or obsession with Grammar Translation Methodology. Objectifying difficult students this way is a real help.
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