Job Discussion Forums

[amewburn]

After ten years in Indonesia I thought I had heard all the bullshit from schools, but GCIS takes the cake. It�s too long a story to tell here, just post your email and I will send all the details. Suffice it to say I lost almost 2 juta and 2 good Aussie textbooks I loaned to a teacher there. Probably the most amazing thing was when I took over a Primary One class to help them as they were short of teachers. It was the first day of the new semester and many students didn�t have books so I just started playing games like �I Spy� with them, with a small twist, after the word was guessed they had to write it on the whiteboard. All was going well with words like desk and pencil, but one student spelled table �TABEL� I corrected the spelling but was immediately told by the Principal that I should not have done so and hadn�t I heard of �Creative Spelling� near enough is good enough. The Principal was an American woman who has been in Indonesia for 2 years, she still didn�t realize that the student wasn�t being �Creative� at all, just spelling in Bahasa Indonesia. I wonder what the parents will say when they find out they are paying lots of money for their children to learn to spell in Indonesian and not English. When you teach a young child a mistake, they often carry that mistake for the rest of their lives.

[Atoms for Peace]

Surely by criticizing the student's "misspelling", the teacher has shown a blatant failure to keep up with the times. A simple extension of the American "Multiple Intelligences" theory could be used here. Surely the student is exhibiting "calcium-carbonate" intelligence, and rejecting the western-imperialist-capitalist "spelling rules" tyranny...

[amewburn]

You failed to see the point. She was not misspelling the word, she was simply spelling it in Bahasa Indonesia, but in an English class.

[Atoms for Peace]

No I wasn't missing the point - hence "misspelling" in quotes. I entirely agree with you that the principal was letting trendy theory and pop-psychological bunk blind her to the real reason why your student made the error. I wonder if she would go so far as to allow "sekolah" or "buku"

[ezekiel]

Wow..thanks amewburn interesting stuff..it makes me sad that people like that principal should be allowed to work as a teacher (let alone a principal)
It is total tripe, of course, as Atoms For Peace said..as a fairly experienced teacher, I believe there is a lot to be said for teachers 'not correcting all the creativity' out of a student when they are speaking or free writing and encouraging some fluency instead (correcting errors later on), but ignoring and failing to correct blatant spelling mistakes during class feedback because the student (no matter what their age or level) 'tried' is not much short of a crime..especially considering the amount these families pay for a native speaker!

salam

oh, and good to see a topic actually connected with teaching English, for a change!

[Llamalicious]

[amewburn]

Sorry Atoms for Peace, I misunderstood you. I must have drank too much "Jamu" again. I don't think that "Buku" or "Sekolah" would have been acceptable, but I am fairly certain that "Seks" would have been.

[ESLninja]

amewburn, this was a primary one class - were they completely new to the language? or had they been using it for a couple of years of Kindy?

[amewburn]

From what I could ascertain after speaking with them, they had been in GCIS Pre-school for 2 years. They spoke English quite well, but like so many Indonesian students, their written English was not as good.

[ESLninja]

OK, the reason I was asking is that with small children who have no writing skills (ie not even in their own language) the teacher may make a choice to emphasise getting them to write something, even if they spell 'phonetically', just to get them producing written work. Then later you can work on getting them to use received spellings.

In your case though it looks like they were using the correct spellings, but the wrong language

Perhaps the Principal was using the principal I mention above, but just didn't convey it well.

[ezekiel]

ESLNinja is that really a valid method for teaching children? In my experience with teaching kids, and I have two myself, I see that the younger a student is when they are taught something erroneous, the more difficult it is to let go of that bad habit..as I said before, I am all for 'fluency versus accuracy'when doing freer practice in class but feedback sessions must be accurate whether students are 5 or 50..

It kind of reminds me of a former American colleague who used to teach young learners..one day, whilst watching him do the alphabet with a group of small kids, I noticed that as one small boy reached 'zee' he pronounced it "zed"..the teacher immediately and vocally corrected the boy, saying "NO, zee!" to which the boy dutifully replied "Zee." Not only was the boy corrected in front of the class despite not having made a mistake, but the difference between the U.S. 'zee' and British 'zed' was not illustrated in front of the class.

salam

[amewburn]

You are correct Salam. I also have two (Adult) children, and although they may not have been the brightest students, they have good jobs and did not have to be taught "Creative Spelling" or any other crap that they are trying to introduce these days in the nameof education.
I am all for creativity, but it has its place, for instance when they are learning to use computers. I wonder however,if you can become a computer programmer using creative spelling.
I repeat what I said earlier, if you teach children mistakes at an early age, they often carry these mistakes with them forever.

[evegoodmon]

[pauleslteacher1]

To amewburn... You said that you lost 2 juta with that school... How did that happen?

[Henry_Cowell]