And next...

Exams in early June. Assuming the actual papers can get here, and I'm sceptical. Documents seem to languish in bonded warehouses for months at a stretch en route here.

But, assuming that they do, we have a few weeks thereafter to without students to catch our breath, and learn the lessons of the last three months or so, and put together a programme for the next batch of students.

It's all very complicated, with a vast range of variables. Those students who pass at C1 level, are out of our hair as such, and become, really, our colleagues here, running their own classes in due course. Those who fail, may or may not be given another bite of the cherry. The B1 and B2 students who pass will move a rung up the ladder. Those who don't, well, again we don't know. There's much talk of sackings.

Here again we come against a serious possible culture clash, which Fraggle Rock doesn't seem to fully appreciate.

It's true that, in this country, if a decision is made to sack you, that's it, you're sacked, and there's no disciplinary procedure - you're down the road, goodbye. For ever. And that includes your family, friends, and your family members' friends... I exaggerate, but you get the picture.

Now, there are some students here, Old Gomez for example, who are crying out for such aggressive treatment. I'd happily kick his arse out of the gate personally.

But. And it's a big but. These blokes didn't get where they are (or rather, where they were before this college got underway) on merit. Obviously. So they MUST have powerful connexions of some description. There are wheels within wheels of which I and people like DoS and LM are dimly aware. People like HD and PTI have no understanding of such overwhelming cultural differences.

It's going to be blood and snots.

Snapping

One of those days which is paradoxically liberating and depressing. Actually, the last few days have been a bit like that.

I've flicked through Ellis The Study of Second Language Acquisition to the final chapter, which begins around page 600, and is on the subject of SLA and formal instruction. When you cut to the chase, it comes to this: everything you do in the classroom amounts to (almost) nothing.

And so it goes with the teaching here. I had a really bad do with Old Gomez first thing this morning. The "good morning" I got from the class was distinctly frosty. This is in part due to the stress they get from exams, even mocks, but mostly because of PTI's antics yesterday. He called a meeting for all of the students, with the object of berating them about punctuality. To underline his dissatisfaction, the clueless bastard began the meeting by slamming the door as he entered the room. We don't know exactly what was said, but proceeding lasted well over an hour, and scuppered our afternoon exam schedule. It left the students very pissed off.

The first evidence came yesterday, when Fester told LM that he thought I was not an "active" enough teacher. Fuck knows. Though actually I have been trying to take a back seat to avoid any outbursts from Old Gomez.

And so this morning. Like I said, a frosty reception. And as I started the lesson, eliciting as usual the day and date, Old Gomez kept on reading a letter he had in front of him. I asked him if we could start the lesson, and he said, after a very long pause, Yes, I am listening - and went back to his letter. I cannot explain it, but I snapped. I said, perhaps we could continue the lesson when he was ready, and left the classroom.

So, over the next hour or so, LM acted as go-between, I calmed down, and we continued with another morning's miserable teaching.

I later learned from LM that I hold the record for teaching this class - remember that they've had a year in England. Mostly, teachers beg to me moved on after a few short weeks. Often, they flee the classroom in tears after a few hours.

In any other situation, Old Gomez would be down-the-road. Not here. Not with the Government paying his wages, and a senior manager somewhere going to work each morning with a song in his heart because he managed to outmanoeuvre Gomez onto this project, and out of his own hair, into mine, and under my skin.

I also learned later, that LM, having an academic interest in motivation, took this job to see if innovations in teaching - particulary the use of a VLE - could motivate incorrigibles like the Addams Family. Unfortunately, he got to Libya and found that things like VLEs were figments of an SMT meeting's imagination, and that the reality is, you're stuck in-between a whiteboard and the Worst Class In The World.

Anyway, having got the gold medal for teaching these bastards for a record eight weeks, I'm to be given a break from them in a classroom reshuffle next week. Hamdullah!

Edited Class Notes IV

I’ve missed nearly two weeks of notes because of a sudden change in course. Briefly, the management decided that ALL students would undertake C&G examinations at the beginning of May. This means that our methodical plod through International Express was replaced by urgent trotting through the C&G achiever book – which isn’t a text really suitable for communicative learning, so I’ve been spending time adapting the materials for classroom use.

This week is testing week at the end of block one, so I also had a test to design.

And we’ve managed to move from the temporary-temporary classrooms to the temporary ones.

Yesterday we had testing. Today I’m having the students re-write work for their portfolios – which I should have had in place earlier, but am instituting this week.

A standard error correction was introduced last week, too. This morning, the students got their first work back marked according to the code. The new classroom is nice and big in the local style so we able to have a table at the back to do one-to-one error correction and discussion, whilst the rest of the class get on with other work. It’s all beginning to shape up nicely.

So much so that I think we can dispense with the unkind comical names now – a teacher’s self defence against a prima facie rather daunting class. We are all on-side now, as it were. However, I still need to maintain anonymity for blogging and academic purposes. And, I do not want to edit past entries because that would feel like dishonesty and would anyway mask a commonly used but little discussed psychological technique.

So from now on, Old Gomez is “Nouri”; Fester is Abu Hamza; Young Gomez is El Mansur; Pugsley is Farouk and Mustafa – always a kind man who didn’t need satirising – is still Mustafa. I’ll maintain those identities in the research I do for my MA.

Which brings me to the placement test. The difference in marks between candidates is tiny – about 3%. And the errors are all in the same area, (grammar – the present perfect and question forms). Which means that the teaching of those points has not succeeded.

Working through the corrections for the assignments it’s clear that Abu Hamza in particular needs to work on articles. And also basic concepts of sentence structure, (S>V>O), and tenses. It's interesting in that it raises some potentially big questions about communicative teaching: he would say that he never learned any grammar during his time in England, and the methodology employed was no doubt communicative. Is there the glimmer of a case here for overt grammar teaching for some learners, in some contexts?

They're Creepy and Their Cooky

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.