Old Gomez Leaves the Reservation

The Addams Family yesterday were like lambs. We got a lot of work done. Today there are only two of them, Young and Old Gomez, and it’s been difficult, to say the least.

Old Gomez has the idea that teaching/learning consist in the teacher telling the student things which the latter remembers. I’ve ran foul of this several times already. This belief in the power of memory is exacerbated by his need to tell the teacher about it at great length, with diatribes beginning “You should tell us...”

This all came to a head this morning. I set the class an exercise to do in preparation for the C&G Reading Test, part one – they have to insert sentences into the right places in a text: it tests knowledge of written discourse: chiefly the use of pronouns and discourse markers. They did an exercise yesterday, and did it very well, so I let them go with it today without too much explanation because I also wanted to check their exam instruction reading skills.

And they managed it very well, but as we began to check it Old Gomez got narky that he’d got the first one wrong, and put this down to my lack of instruction. Which was true, on one level, but what one person regards as learning-by-one’s-mistakes is for others a fearful affront and humiliation.

It came to a head when I tried to pull it together and look at the clues to which-sentence-goes-where, (tense, pronoun, discourse marker, key words), and tried to elicit the word tense.

“You must tell us. We don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“You must tell us.”

“No. I’m not going to tell you. How long have you been learning English grammar?”

“More than twenty five years.”

“Then you know this word. It begins with ‘t’.”

He spoke to young Gomez briefly in Arabic and then left the room. Young G followed him. He went to LM in the break and... I’m not quite sure what, actually. I’m not quite sure what his complaint is. But I agreed with LM that I would have a sit-down with him at the end of the lesson. Unforunately, he has not returned and I’m typing this up in the classroom alone.

I’m trying to rationalise this. I told LM earlier that I have never ever had a student walk out of my class in the huff before, and that’s true: whatever faults you could find with my teaching, a failure to keep students on the team is not one of them. He told me that this group in England had approximately a dozen such walk outs.

After only a week or so of teaching this class I got a rather nasty bout of Thatcherite Darwinianism, and it looks like I’m going down with it again. These lads don’t really deserve to pass. Let them fail, nursing as they do their outdated beliefs, and senses of self importance. They can’t get to classes on time or at all. And when they do, they waste lessons telling the teacher how to teach, or making endless complaints. Apparently, Old Gomez was once-upon-a-time quite a big cheese, and that’s what his problem is now. But these things happen, you’re the big cheese, then you’re sitting on the other side of the desk. It’s painful, but no one said life was going to be easy. Adapt, evolve, get on with. And if you can’t, well, toodle oo.

It's rather disturbing, how right wing I've become in so short a time...

The sit-down is now tomorrow at 7.50AM, at my suggestion. The process here is to resolve a dispute with some give-and-take, even though one side of that bargain might have to be fobbed off with something illusory. Frankly though, I can't find any illusions that I want to foist off on this stupid... I want to write "stupid old bastard". Actually, he's five years younger than me.

Tomorrow...