The Teacher's Monthly

[Guest]

Agree with the annoying Americanisms/ anachronisms. Agree that Let's Go (beginners) is good BUT the accompanying flash cards need careful scrutiny.

One that was brought for a class today tripped me up for a moment....but then it clicked.....how could a smiling brown bear with what looked like a mohican possibly be anything other than 'mummy' ?!?

[Guest]

I was recently asked a question at a job interview which went something like this.

"In a corporate class, you always have two sets of students - the motivated students who use English every day in the workplace and the unmotivated students who never get the chance to use what they've learned. How do you motivate both sets of students in the same room?

I paused for a while and asked the interviewer to repeat the question. Then I answered it.

There is no correlation between a student being motivated just because they use the English language at work. In fact I've often found that the better students are the ones that only use their native Thai between the hours of 9 and 5. 'Motivation' is a very over-used term. If the student is not interested in studying English then they aren't interested. The teacher can do his or her best to create an exciting learning environment or 'arena' but it's the job of the student to actually want to set foot in that arena. And the teacher cannot force them.

I felt that it was an honest answer but not exactly what the interviewer was looking for. Perhaps I should have said "Yeah, I get all the students together and we have loads of games and I make sure that the motivated guys help the unmotivated guys and everyone has a blast and I get them all shouting and debating and arguing".....you get the picture. The only problem is that I'm a bad liar.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If you are thinking of contacting a school about a job vacancy or simply letting

them know you are available for work – sending an e-mail is in my opinion the

worst way to go.

If you are one of the many teachers who constantly wonder why your e-mails never

get answered, the reason is simple – most schools do not have a system where

e-mail is dealt with efficiently and professionally. Very often computer servers

are down (this is Thailand after all – where the phone lines are held together

with chicken wire and gecko spit). Very often schools are rather ‘tight-fisted’

with their internet usage and only allow it to be connected for an hour or so

each day – either that or only one person in the organization knows the password

for the main computer. And what happens if that person is sick?

Very often the Thai staff who deal with incoming e-mails are totally clueless

about how to use Outlook or other database programs which can send letter

drafts, information, etc.

Modern technology might be advancing in leaps and bounds but the best way to

contact a school is with a personal phone call or simply to walk in the front

door. Now you know.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Aaaaaaah, it’s that time of year again – the silly summer camp season, when

middle-class Thai mothers can offload their young brats and send them for a week

of games, eating, stomachaches, and tears. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention

speaking or improving their English because I think that rarely enters the

equation. Schools might well dress up their week-long summer camp as a place

where the children will be exposed to English 24 hours a day, but really Mommy

just wants little Somchai out of her hair for a week.

So why is it that schools want to use native speakers for these assignments? Is

it totally necessary?

There are plenty of non-native speakers who speak English well and would

welcome the chance to be with the kids and earn a few baht. But no, the

middle-class mothers want native-speaking teachers. And the sad thing is that

they don’t even know why.

*******************************************************************

 

I’m currently substituting a Saturday afternoon conversation class for one of my

colleagues that has returned to the UK for a 3-week break.

It’s a relaxed class of about 3 hours in length with just 4 class members –

well, actually it’s now 3 because one lady seems to have dropped out. The whole

afternoon should be a relatively painless experience for students and teacher

alike, but it isn’t. Simply because the class contains two types of student that

I loathe with an unbridled passion. Firstly, the guy of about 30 years old, who

sits there and smiles and is on the whole very pleasant but could study English

from now until Armageddon and he wouldn’t improve one iota. Why?

Because his brain has shut down and refuses to absorb any information given to

him by the teacher. This guy has been making the same mistakes in English for 15

years and refuses to change his ways. He’s been saying “yesterday I go” for a

decade and a half, and I can tell him it’s “I went” till I’m blue in the face

and it makes no difference. He’ll correct himself once and then 5 minutes later,

he’ll be back to his old ways. Linguistic experts and teacher trainers refer to

these mistakes as ‘fossilized errors’ but you can dress them up in whatever

fancy titles you like – these mistakes arise from a plain old stubbornness and

unwillingness to adapt, to think and to improve one’s language ability. I’m not

sure why but it seems to be a trait of 90% of Thai males that study English.

The other two students in the class are both teenage and female, and both of

them are forced to come here by parents who think they have their daughter’s

best interests at heart. So while their friends are window-shopping in Siam

Square and drinking cappuccino in Starbucks, my two little teenagers are

listening to me explain the subtle (far too subtle) difference between ‘little’

and ‘a little’. And they ain’t interested. And neither would I be if I were in

their position.

What’s the answer to this dilemma we face of having to teach classes of bored

teenagers who just don’t want to be there? I’ve struggled to come up with a real

answer. I’ve spoken on the phone to their parents in the past but this usually

achieves little or nothing – the teenager is often the apple of Mommy and

Daddy’s eye and the last thing they want to do is drag her arse over the coals

for not participating in class. Besides, the fact that the little angel is out

of their hair for a few hours may well be the only reason they send her.

We could step up the entertainment value I suppose and dress up as a cartoon

superhero and play games for 3 hours. But that still wouldn’t bring a smile to

the faces of my two girls, in fact I’ve seen happier looking bloodhounds.

I’m often asked by people just looking to rile me “Do you enjoy teaching?”

My answer is “ it depends on the last lesson I taught”.

It is that simple. Finish the day with a group of motivated and enthusiastic

office staff who want to know about graded adjectives while taking notes

diligently – it’s the best job in the world. You can’t imagine a job more

satisfying as you make your weary way home on a crowded bus. But finish the day

with a bunch of time-wasters whose boss has told them ‘Study English or else!”

and it feels like time to get back on the phone to England and ask for your old

job back. Driving a forklift at British Leyland never seemed so appealing.

Of all the thousands of students that you’ve taught in Thailand – how many of

them would you label as really committed and motivated? Come on, seriously –

it’s not many is it. And believe me there is nothing more soul-destroying than

putting your heart and soul into a lesson plan and seeing it go down like a pork

cutlet at a bar Mitzvah because the class can’t conjure up a single degree of

enthusiasm. And I don’t care how good a teacher you are, you can only do so

much.

In the dark days when I gave English lessons at my home, I taught basic

conversational English to a brother and sister from 4.00pm to 5.30pm. Their

father thought I was the best thing since bread was sliced and he, being a very

nice man, was the only reason I did it – apart from the fact that he paid me

very handsomely. His kids were quite frankly a pain in the arse. They would sit

there swiveling on their chairs while wearing vacant expressions, and I counted

down every painful minute on the wall-clock behind them. It ruined my whole

Sunday. At 9.00 in the morning I would think to myself “oh no another 7 hours

to go”. At 1.00 “oh no another 3 hours to go” – you get the picture. Life’s too

short to put yourself through that kind of ordeal but I did for some 20 weeks or

more. And when Daddy came to pick them up in his Volvo at 4.30, he would take me

discreetly to one side and inquire about their progress. And I was always came

out with the same old cobblers. “If they were my kids I would take them into the

forest and shot them painlessly in the back of the head” except it came out as

“Oh they’re making wonderful progress”

I remember the students calling me up at 3.30 one afternoon to cancel that

day’s lesson. Normally I would demand the fee from them for canceling the lesson

so late, but with this pair of students, I was so relieved, so utterly dancing a

jig around the room and playing air guitar relieved, that I thanked them for

calling and put the phone down a happy man.

I think it’s called the joys of teaching at home.

It was my own fault that I put myself in the position of teaching two teenagers

on a Sunday afternoon when everyone else is out enjoying themselves. I should

have taken a leaf out of John Sovereign’s book. JS was an old teaching

acquaintance who made a great success out of teaching at home. He would

interview potential students in his living room and ask them one simple question

– Do you want to study English or does your father want you to study? If they

gave the wrong answer, JS would rise from his seat, walk slowly to the door,

open it, and gesture in the direction of the rest of the world. Thanks but no

thanks. The guy had balls. And I admired him for it.

Before I put this subject of motivation to bed, there is another group of

students I always have difficulty with – Thais over the age of 50.

Students in this age group are often so nice and so respectful, yet rarely do I

come out of a lesson feeling as if I’ve taught them anything. Learning English

or re-learning English is often something that seemed like a good idea at the

time but it remains a very secondary need. They don’t need it to go and look for

a job. They might want it for travel I suppose, but ‘the cat is sitting next to

the box’ is not going to get you very far in Belgium.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

After teaching Thais for literally thousands and thousands of hours, I’ve become

rather astute at picking out the good and bad students as soon as I enter a room

on the first day of class. You’ve probably developed a talent for this too. Good

students sit near the front of the room. They have both shoes firmly planted on

the floor and their feet still inside ‘em. Their desktop is empty save for a

sensible spiral-bound notebook, the course textbook, and a selection of quality

pens and pencils in a clear plastic pencil box. Poor or disinterested students

sit at the back of the class (actually, sprawl rather than sit). They have

nothing at all academic on the desktop, not even the course textbook. There is

however a state of the art mobile telephone. Their lime green flip-flops nestle

untidily under the chair while they adopt a sort of bare-footed lotus position

and they wear a ‘good, here come’s the entertainment’ expression. Funny innit.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Let’s compare the expressions ‘warm-up’ and ‘lead-in’ because they are very

often confused. A lead-in is where a teacher starts the class with a story, a

drawing, a Q&A session or whatever, that leads subtly into the topic of the

lesson – so the students minds are focused on the lesson objective even at a

very early stage.

A warm-up is an exercise to simply liven students up on a dull Monday morning.

It can be a boisterous game, a totally inconsequential discussion or as one of

the best teachers I’ve ever worked with used to do – what student can make the

best animal noise? (His impression of a trumpeting elephant could reduce any

class to tears of laughter)

I’d always felt uncomfortable with warm-ups on the first day of a class – faced

with a group of 10 people who don’t know you, don’t know each other and dread

the prospect of speaking English in front of others. It’s even worse with Thais

who at first have to ascertain where they stand on the ladder of social

hierarchy before they can start interacting comfortably with their classmates.

Teachers books are full of wonderful ideas that don’t work in a Thai classroom.

I always love the one where you ask the students to walk around the room and ask

each other questions in order to find out information – Who has seen a movie

this week? Whose Grandma wears false teeth? And what you invariably get is 9

bewildered people huddled in a small group like refugees and one guy standing

slightly to one side picking his nose. It never works!

What about getting each student to stand up in front of the class and introduce

themselves to a bunch of total strangers? “Hello my name is Lek and I am

graduate from Bangkok University. I have one older brother and one younger

brother and my father is a merchant – he has a business about wood. And my

mother stay at home”

If you want to sit through that 10 times, you’re a better man than I am. It

doesn’t work anyway.

It’s taken me years to perfect a warm-up that works. I go into the class and I

tell them a 5-minute story about my life with illustrations on the whiteboard.

The story of how my mother was poor and couldn’t take care of me, so she pushed

me down the river in a small boat before a pack of wolves found me, etc, etc.

I deliver the story slowly and deliberately and draw appalling pictures and

explain vocab as I go along. After 5 minutes they realize it’s a total lie but

they’re roaring with laughter anyway. The ice is broken. They haven’t spoken a

word of English – it doesn’t matter. They don’t know my real name – it doesn’t

matter. They don’t know where I’m from – it matters not one jot. They’re

laughing, they’re relaxed, they’re in a good mood – they are ready to get down

to business. That’s a warm-up!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This next section is sure to cause controversy and debate but I happen to think

that I was very wrong on the following occasion.

A couple of years ago, I was academic director of a well-known language school

in Bangkok that underwent a complete restructure and change of management. The

school had not been particularly successful up to that point but it was a school

built on very sound principles. Students were rigorously level-tested and placed

at exactly the right level for their ability. If we didn’t have a level for you

to study in, we didn’t take your money – as simple as that. As regards teachers

– we had full-time staff and part-time staff. For most of the year, everyone was

kept happy with a schedule that suited their needs but at those times of the

year when lessons were thin on the ground (Xmas and Songkran) the full-timers

got the lion’s share and the part-timers went hungry. I was proud to be in

charge of a school that adopted these principles because I considered them to be

totally appropriate.

When the new manager came in, he abandoned those principles. Students could

study in any level that was ‘reasonably’ near their actual ability, and you sent

your BEST teachers into a classroom to teach. And the best teachers were the

ones who got the MOST student requests. Whether the teacher was part-time or

full-time didn’t matter at all.

I was outraged.

A situation quickly developed where the ‘superstar’ part-time teachers got

lessons whenever they wanted and the full-time teachers had schedules with huge

gaps in them. Meanwhile, EVERY teacher complained that they were teaching too

many classes of mixed ability. I found myself arguing with the manager every

single day and it wasn’t long before I decided to quit.

In the passage of time I’ve realized that I was wrong. The manager had been

brought in to turn things around and make the school profitable. And that meant

abandoning principles. Business is business. Private language schools are not

charities – they are there to make money. You don’t make money by turning

students away because you don’t have a suitable class and you don’t make money

by sending average teachers into classrooms. I had two choices – to toe the

company line or to get the f*** out but I chose to stay on and moan and bitch

and try to keep some sort of quality and standard. But quality and standard had

never made this school any money. I learned a very important lesson - the

welfare of the students sometimes has to come a very poor second.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Guest]

>They may be annoying to you Phil, but many Asians these days prefer American English.

I hate to point out such an obvious fact but there is no such animal as American English. Regardless of what microsoft would have you believe.

Rather like saying this Champange didnt come from France. If ii did not come from the Champange region of France it isnt Champange but white fizzy wine instead.

[Guest]

Well, you may not regard it as "official", but American English is spoken all over the good ole USA.

[Guest]

Mr Lucky American English may be spoken all over the usa (deliberate lower case); it is not however understood by as many people in other parts of the world as British English. Many more people say bonnet and bumper than hood and fender. Your empire extended to let me see oh yes the Philipines!

There was time when half the globe was painted pink, our lasting legacy is International English. The americans have brought us baseball cap and McDonalds......hmm!!!!

My two most annoying american English hates are.

1) "Gotten" (the Brits stopped using this as soon as the Mayflower left port.)

2) "off of" As in the ship was off of the coast of Maine. This really pisses me off.

As for Thais preferring american English, they can't tell if you come from Wisconsin or Vladivostock, so how can they express a preference?

[Guest]

quote:

---

Originally posted by coquetislander:

Mr Lucky American English may be spoken all over the usa (deliberate lower case); it is not however understood by as many people in other parts of the world as British English. Many more people say bonnet and bumper than hood and fender. Your empire extended to let me see oh yes the Philipines!

There was time when half the globe was painted pink, our lasting legacy is International English. The americans have brought us baseball cap and McDonalds......hmm!!!!

My two most annoying american English hates are.

1) "Gotten" (the Brits stopped using this as soon as the Mayflower left port.)

2) "off of" As in the ship was off of the coast of Maine. This really pisses me off.

As for Thais preferring american English, they can't tell if you come from Wisconsin or Vladivostock, so how can they express a preference?

---

Hey man, what's your problem? Please explain the use of the "deliberate lower case" when referring to the USA. What's that all about?

FYI, I never said that Thais prefer American English, just that the vernacular does exist, whether you like it or not. BTW, Thai's may not know what they prefer but I bet they have whole lot easier time understanding an American accent than a British one.

You sound pretty angry, pompous, and snooty, as well. Sorry to have GOTTEN you so pissed OFF OF.

[Guest]

Bangkok Phil:

I enjoy your postings very much! Thank you. It seems, you are into a keen competition with stickman!

[shotover]

quote:

---

Originally posted by coquetislander:

Mr Lucky American English may be spoken all over the usa (deliberate lower case); it is not however understood by as many people in other parts of the world as British English. Many more people say bonnet and bumper than hood and fender.

---

I know my British and Australian (deliberate upper case) relatives use the term "bonnet and bumper", I don't know about Canadians. However, the USA has a considerably larger population than these countries. Which other English speaking countries use "bonnet and bumper"?

Shotover

[Guest]

What pisses me off is when I must wait around for an hour and a half for a student that wants a 2 or a 3 hour lesson, then she answers her phone every 2 minutes. I don't bother saying anything as "she did infact turn up". If I did say something, then she might not turn up at all.

grung tep.. city of angels.

[colonel Kurtz]

Another informative `teachers monthly`.

Forklift driving for Britsh Leyland?love it!