Article in Education Guardian

[lolwhites]

Wonder if this writer's been reading any of our threads?

http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/te ... 06,00.html

[fluffyhamster]

Jim: Okay, now, do these high school kids think that we're cool because they're at a college party...OR, are we those wierd older guys that try to hang out with high school kids when we come home?

Oz: No way. We're definitely not those guys.

(from American Pie 2)


No, lol, that reporter has definitely not been reading any of our threads.

But seriously, I don't think people contributing anything of length (and substance) on the Teacher Discussion Forums are gap year backpackers wanting it all (share options, limo, penthouse suite etc). I reckon that guy had been reading and was referring more to just to stuff on things like the International Job Forums.

Like a lot of newspaper writing, that article is a bit confused/confusing. It starts off by saying that TEFL is extensively promoted as a gap year (by whom, exactly?!), and only later starts talking about teaching as a career, as if that is the way it is (pans out? ends up? ) in real life.

I believe that is would be (a lot) more accurate to say that TEFL is promoted as a proper, long-term career right at the outset by the training establishment (they aren't ashamed of what they're offering, dammit!), with little explicit mention of where and for how long exactly people will be working once "qualified". For example, I did my CTEFLA in the UK, and nobody was talking about jetting off to Japan for a quick holiday with perhaps a bit of teaching on the side; the unspoken agreement seemed to be that times were tough for graduates and this could, in fact, be a better career than struggling to continue with what we studied at university (especially arts subjects) or unemployment in the UK at least (and it seemed that most people were looking for work in the UK, and hoped to become FT teachers at good schools in the UK, rather than work abroad, anyway).

The real problems therefore arise not so much when bratty gap year or backpacking student types start crying for mommy, but when people who actually give a rat's ass about teaching start to ask questions and need better answers than they were given by the shoddy training. Basically a CELTA does not equip you to teach as best you might, and I don't think it serves its purpose even for gap year students. The reporter seems to think that just asking yourself 'Are you actually interested in teaching English?' and merely having 'realistic expectations' about the job will somehow enable us to teach well (or, in his words, "walk the tightrope" and "avoid exploitation", whatever they mean ). I mentioned somewhere else that nobody seems to expect the job to be done well, with a love and respect for the language. Seems I was right about journalists' views at least (if not teacher trainers', at least perhaps their private ones, too. We could start a poll! 'From the teacher trainers you've met, how many strike you as being burnt-out, washed up has-beens who are full of ****?' Actually, I'd have to honestly say only around 50% , but why then do the other half not get back into teaching seeing as they still have so much to give? ).

Perhaps I'm getting hold of the wrong end of the stick here, and I'm not sure I'd want the answer to be basic teacher training the length of an MA (or PGCE or B.Ed or how about a nice juicy degree in Linguistics proper), but learning from experience can be a school of hard knocks, and ultimately experience does not exactly a decent course(book) write (to replace the so-so ones we're all leery of using). I suppose it's kind of refreshing to never quite "know exactly what we're doing/going to do in our next class" (that might be said cheerfully or desperately depending more it seems on the teacher's mood rather than their training), but days, months, weeks, years, five, ten years on into our careers, doesn't it seem a little ridiculous that we can still have so little idea about what exactly it is that we should be doing (beyond making the vaguest of lesson plans that show a firmer grasp of basic mathematics in dividing up the classtime than of English and how it is actually spoken)?

(As you guys know by now, I think the language aspects of courses need beefing up, and methodology re-examined in light of what actually needs to be taught. Maybe the changes would be major, maybe smaller, I can't say at this moment, but I'd prefer there not to be such a huge gap in the way lower levels are taught/"talked at" and advanced students "chatted with", if we could just try to start thinking about general moment-by-moment conversational - particularly lexical - needs rather than lock-step structural syllabuses and patronizing p*ss-take piddling PPP rubbish, all with strictly add-on topics and functions all the time, we might actually go quite a long way to closing that gap in terms of methodology even if degrees, that is, differing amounts of knowledge and therefore "levels" have to remain part of our thinking).

The most interesting part of the article to me was just the few words about TEFL being a "one job fits all default profession". I think with the proper training it could suit more people than it now does, and that training would help people realize that it is not a simple "default" but a career they should be serious about. I can't see that default vs serious career view being corrected until the training not only says it is serious but shows us why it is a serious career, to take seriously and seek excellence in (re. that whole Michael Lewis/Larry Latham thing: 'ultimately the measure of whether we are doing the right thing depends on what else we could be doing. If we do something that helps students, that's great. But if that is done at the expense of not doing something else that would have helped more, then we're doing the wrong thing, even if it's helpful'. ).

Somebody should take this Richard Bradford round the back of Dave's Bar and give him a good kicking for writing that whole damn article, espcially for the way he patronizingly "signs off with a flourish" in his conclusion there:

With the right attitude and expectations before heading off, it might just be possible to avoid becoming just one more disgruntled contributor to the negative feedback on chat room walls.

We get patronized enough by trainers, do we have to start taking it from reporters too? I'm going undercover to see if he got paid by the RSA/UCLES guys to write that piece.

Contrary to what you might believe from all the above, I am a very happy and contented fluffyhamsterteacher. I think TEFL is a wonderful "profession" and "career".

(FH whispering to a long-suffering buddy: <<Dammit I used the scare quotes and emoticons again, they'll be able to tell I'm not being honest for a second!>>)

[fluffyhamster]

I just thought of a couple of possible additional reasons for my dislike of teacher trainers beyond their transparent simplicity:

1) I am actually a shrinking violet (not even a small yet plucky fluffyhamtser), so I get "embarrassed" (= rub my neck and roll my eyes) when asked to demonstrate how I (would) teach when I could as if not more "easily" talk them through it instead (giving reasons and options, "thinking aloud" rather than just plodding through an empty dress rehearsal) and thereby avoid the even more excruciating "feedback" process.

2) Teaching is not easy wihout their help, but it seems to get even harder (to make sense of) with their help. But even though it's a thankless job, who could say no to embracing the "easy certainties" of the dogma and pulling the wool over people's eyes. It must be a right laugh, and the pay's not bad either. So, yes, I am jealous and I want to exact some measure of revenge on the whole rotten TEFL establishment.

3) They can be ugly as hell, and they are often unbearably smug with it. One therefore cannot but harbour a sneaking suspicion that some of them are stupid too beneath their veneer of experience - it's like they've stopped thinking since they stopped teaching for real. We might even be shocked, if we could look inside their heads, to find their thoughts are full of nothing but the tea and digestive biscuits they will soon be getting back to in the comfy staffroom.

In English generally there is a saying, 'Those who can do, those who can't teach'. What do you say about only all those already within teaching, though? How do we "carve them up" into neat quivering little diced "sets"? How's about, 'Those who can teach, those who can't train'?

If you're really bored now you could have some fun thinking of what the "missing" elements before 'teach' and 'train' could be i.e. What is it that teachers can (still) do that trainers can't (anymore, presumably)? The answers to this game might give us an interesting insight into TEFL as a career, but perhaps they'd be too obvious to make the game enough fun to "seriously" play.

[revel]

Hey all!

Bah! That article hardly rates any comments. Pity it was written and more of a pity that it was "published". I hope no one reads it and takes it seriously. Just my opinion there.

peace,
revel.

[lolwhites]

I agree with revel - it's astonishing that a "respectable" paper such as The Guardian should have seen fit to run the article. The most ironic thing about it is the writer claims not to be standing up for the cowboy schools but goes on to effectively say "but that's what the market says", conveniently overlooking the fact that if one employer starts to cut corners and start selling courses on the cheap (to the detriment of their staff), rival institutions are forced to adopt similar practices or lose students.

[fluffyhamster]

The most ironic thing about it is the writer claims not to be standing up for the cowboy schools but goes on to effectively say "but that's what the market says", conveniently overlooking the fact that if one employer starts to cut corners and start selling courses on the cheap (to the detriment of their staff), rival institutions are forced to adopt similar practices or lose students.

Yes, but you know what they say, any job is better than no job. Welcome to the sweatshop of the world!

[revel]

Hey all!

I don't know why (nor do I really care too much), but this year non-state schools can not keep the kids in regular classes until 1.00 in the afternoon. Morning classes have to end at twelve. This change left parents in a spot, what are we going to do with our kids for an hour? The answer? Came from the APA (Asociation of Parents, like the PTA in America, in theory at least), have them do extra classes .... in English, in computers, in maths, in reading/study skills. Several local academies made bids to fill that hour in the non-state schools and the academy where I work won that bid. Since it was a bid, the choosing of my academy was not based on the program offered but rather on how much that program would cost the parents above and beyond the regular tuition, books, school uniform and transportaion fees they are already paying to have their kids somewhere safe while mom and dad both work. In negociating that cost, the boss skimmed over the economic needs of the teachers, for example, not including the transportation time involved (I personally "lose" 45 minutes a day going to and from this school to give a single hour of class), or the multiple holidays that cut in on the wages of any teacher who is paid by the hour taught instead of the day spent (which seems to be the majority of us). I naturally protested. How did the boss convince me to take the job? Look in the thread called "Quitting my job" for more details.

Being "fair" to the boss, though, have to take into consideration that it was the APA who decided who to grant the contract to. Since part of the program concerns English classes, the boss had to take into consideration that many parents would be taking their kids out of the private academies since they would be paying for English classes in this extra hour at mid-day. The boss claimed (could be true) that he (read the secretary) had to telephone 40 parents to convince them that they not take their kids out of the academy. The boss says that had another academy won that contract, we potentially would have lost 40 students, which is five classes, which is ten hours of class a week. That's a lot in the town I work in. At least one of those classes lost would have been mine, I suppose. And I suppose that, though the program offered was interesting and as is often repeated, at a reasonable price, it doesn't matter that discipline problems and low moral on the part of the twelve teachers who are marginally paid for the work makes for marginal/low quality in the classroom. This program was not developed with an eye on the educational needs of the kids but rather the baby-sitting needs of the parents who just can't get to the school before 1 to pick up their offspring.

Since the boss is in this for the money, his attitude can be understood. Since the teachers are in it for the money as well, one can understand why those four hours a week (plus another three or four in transportation and let's not talk about preparation etc) are important to them. Those of us (and we are few) with a vocation for teaching simply have to hang in there and hope to combine quality teaching (which we can't help wanting or doing) with social, economic realities on all sides of the coin (boss, parents, students and teachers and school administrators). Changing the attitudes of those five componants needs some serious sitting down and reaching consensus, but both students and teachers are excluded from this process, and since students and teachers are the ones really doing all of the work, it just seems natural that they should be the last ones to be consulted, doesn't it? Isn't that how things generally work now-a-days, the rule of the few over the masses?

peace,
revel.

[lolwhites]

Revel - why don't you contact The Guardian and invite the writer to come and work in your school for a couple of months?

[woodcutter]

The problem is exactly the opposite to that imagined by Bradford, as FH mentioned. The people who wish to teach well are the ones who moan, for the travel is always a given. However, I'm not really into boss bashing. Students bring a very weird set of expectations into the classroom sometimes. Teachers often simply refuse to deal with the reality of that. The local housewives want a coffee and chat club? Well, give it to 'em.

Put a sign on the door for one hour though - "Coffee and Chat Method" .