I had a three and a half hour lie-in and still got up just before 10 am! It was a delight to get up in daylight and not the darkness as usual. The sun is now struggling through patchy cloud and a four day break (one cannot really say ‘holiday’) is stretching before me.
I need the time to try and evaluate my approach to school. People in my school work themselves into frenzies as if their very livelihood depended upon in. Which of course it does! But I imagine that they are hoping to be in the institution a little longer than the ten months (tops) that I envisage as my future stay. United Nations Day 2010 seems a very distant prospect at the moment but as soon as the calendar shows the first of January 2010 then the goal is very much in sight.
Our school can easily be compare to a junkie. We exist for exams. If there isn’t a mark that ‘counts’ then whatever you are doing, by definition, isn’t important and can be safely ignored. We teach packets of knowledge which are spewed back by pupils in the form of test answers and then are promptly forgotten.
Every so often the school has its fix of exams when the entire places is turned into a corral of jumpy, nervous, wide-eyed punters looking for their next fix. As soon as they are given their drug of choice, neatly stapled in the left hand corner and they can start filling in the gaps then they settle down and get on with life as they know it.
Every topic you introduce, every aspect you explain is questioned by one voice or other asking, “Will this be in the exam?” I, of course say yes to everything because I know that most of the pupils have the attention span of a retarded goldfish and the only ‘things’ that they give any importance to concern the number and design of my ties. Ask them to retain a passing knowledge of the phrasal verbs that I have painstakingly explained with examples and vivid anecdote and you are onto a looser. Ask them to describe the last twenty ties that I have worn and you will have a catalogue accurate to the last detail, texture and colour!
So our school lurches from exam to exam like a dog going from lamp-post to lamp-post with teachers frantically building the next lamp-post so that the dogs can . . . well, you can see where this image is heading!
The knowledge that we have to teach is contained in cataclysmically boring (but colourful) text books which are treated with all the reverence which is not accorded to The Bible in western society. To deviate from The Book is a crime more heinous in this part of Catalonia than saying that fuet (an absurdly popular Catalan sausage shaped assemblage of congealed animal products) is composed almost entirely of tasteless fat!
Unit by unit, with grammar of increasing incomprehensibility, and exercises of growing fatuity in the workbooks, the relentless succession of fairly meaningless exercises and the insistence on the retention of a remarkably archaic vocabulary continues until they take their series of external examinations.
So far so tedious. The real question is how I am going to cope with the remaining months in the school. The idea of teaching English as a Foreign Language with the text books that we have for the next ten months is something akin to a nightmare. Any deviation from the course outlined in the texts is greeted by the kids with absolute panic and plaintive cries to get back on course.
I think that I will have to turn to technology to keep my sanity. I have attempted to get the school to link my laptop into the whiteboard system program so that I can prepare stuff on the computer and show it in class. I have now been provided with a long lead that should, in theory allow me to link up my machine to the board. After the break I should be able to try it all out and that may be one of the ways in which I survive the tedium of language teaching.
There is of course the money. That should keep my mind focused!
I need the time to try and evaluate my approach to school. People in my school work themselves into frenzies as if their very livelihood depended upon in. Which of course it does! But I imagine that they are hoping to be in the institution a little longer than the ten months (tops) that I envisage as my future stay. United Nations Day 2010 seems a very distant prospect at the moment but as soon as the calendar shows the first of January 2010 then the goal is very much in sight.
Our school can easily be compare to a junkie. We exist for exams. If there isn’t a mark that ‘counts’ then whatever you are doing, by definition, isn’t important and can be safely ignored. We teach packets of knowledge which are spewed back by pupils in the form of test answers and then are promptly forgotten.
Every so often the school has its fix of exams when the entire places is turned into a corral of jumpy, nervous, wide-eyed punters looking for their next fix. As soon as they are given their drug of choice, neatly stapled in the left hand corner and they can start filling in the gaps then they settle down and get on with life as they know it.
Every topic you introduce, every aspect you explain is questioned by one voice or other asking, “Will this be in the exam?” I, of course say yes to everything because I know that most of the pupils have the attention span of a retarded goldfish and the only ‘things’ that they give any importance to concern the number and design of my ties. Ask them to retain a passing knowledge of the phrasal verbs that I have painstakingly explained with examples and vivid anecdote and you are onto a looser. Ask them to describe the last twenty ties that I have worn and you will have a catalogue accurate to the last detail, texture and colour!
So our school lurches from exam to exam like a dog going from lamp-post to lamp-post with teachers frantically building the next lamp-post so that the dogs can . . . well, you can see where this image is heading!
The knowledge that we have to teach is contained in cataclysmically boring (but colourful) text books which are treated with all the reverence which is not accorded to The Bible in western society. To deviate from The Book is a crime more heinous in this part of Catalonia than saying that fuet (an absurdly popular Catalan sausage shaped assemblage of congealed animal products) is composed almost entirely of tasteless fat!
Unit by unit, with grammar of increasing incomprehensibility, and exercises of growing fatuity in the workbooks, the relentless succession of fairly meaningless exercises and the insistence on the retention of a remarkably archaic vocabulary continues until they take their series of external examinations.
So far so tedious. The real question is how I am going to cope with the remaining months in the school. The idea of teaching English as a Foreign Language with the text books that we have for the next ten months is something akin to a nightmare. Any deviation from the course outlined in the texts is greeted by the kids with absolute panic and plaintive cries to get back on course.
I think that I will have to turn to technology to keep my sanity. I have attempted to get the school to link my laptop into the whiteboard system program so that I can prepare stuff on the computer and show it in class. I have now been provided with a long lead that should, in theory allow me to link up my machine to the board. After the break I should be able to try it all out and that may be one of the ways in which I survive the tedium of language teaching.
There is of course the money. That should keep my mind focused!
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