Job Discussion Forums

MGreen · Joined: 22 May 2007 Posts: 81

BC, he's talking about university level grade 3= juniors, not little kids. And, yes at good universities most students in the English Department are not only familiar with Swift but also Marlowe, Mansfield...

At the university level, my students expect me to teach them in a western way, this doesn't mean shoving American or Western culture down their throats. It means modeling best practices in the field of TESOL.

arioch36 · Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 3589

SIlent Shadow

barry3000 · Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:04 am Post subject:

Me too kev , me too... not with the spanish but the Chinese...yes I could string a few odd sentences together... some of my grade 4 primary students who have been studying English alledgedly from kindergarten, could only come up with this the other day... "Barry, what's your name?"

tatterdemalion · Joined: 02 Aug 2007 Posts: 78 Location: Yangzhou, China

My group of 100 students divvies up neatly into six categories:

-Average boys -- they give a half-assed attempt, better at talking than writing, willing to ham it up a little in English. 20%.
-Spoiled boys -- they screw around all class, won't stop talking in Chinese, and sometimes ignore the fact that I'm giving a test unless I come around to their seats and loom over them. 20%. I took one of the worst of these and got him to be somewhat more vigilant, but in a class of 56 I can't do that for everyone.
-Average girls -- studious but shy, willing to give some effort, quite decent at writing but not so good at speaking unless prodded and persuaded. 40%.
-Spoiled girls -- kinda like the spoiled boys, above. 5%.
-Fearless Leaders -- for some reason these are mostly boys -- good as long as the spotlight is on them. Clever enough when I'm favoring them with attention; as soon as I turn away they're goofing off. 5%.
-Nerds and geniuses. 10%. These are my favorite students by far. Most of them have a little awkwardness with their own culture and it gives them motivation to try to engage with mine. I think they're confident because they have more to prove and less to lose. (I grew up a nerd, so may be projecting.) Some of them are good at English because they started with an advantage; others only because they apply themselves, and enjoy the ability to work with their minds. I have two students who answered my discussion questions ("Have you ever gone to a zoo? a museum? a historical site?") with vivid descriptions of visiting these places in their dreams -- because they grew up in small towns, one of them on a farm, and didn't have the chance to see such sights. These same two started at the beginning of October with rather poor English -- and got better to the point where if I want to ask a question with linguistic subtlety and get a good answer, I'll pick one of them over everyone else in the class.

Work habits except for that one category of girls are universally pretty lousy and I haven't figured out WHAT to do about it. It may simply be a side effect from having students who are shoved around like horses all day go into a Western-style classroom and let it all hang out.

Learning habits, on the other hand, vary across the spectrum (the nerd squad has the best learning habits, the spoiled boys the worst.) How studious they look is not nearly as important as how well their minds 'lock on' to English.

Still, even with the less promising categories, curiosity is present. I may have simply lucked into it, or gotten them to come out by starting with discussion topics about cell phones and gradually moving towards ones like travel and ecology. I'm going to have to ditch Harry Potter one of these weeks and do a geography lesson instead, though.

arioch36 · Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 3589

tatterdemalion

Where do you teach? I have found overall that my students have overall decent study habits. Always a few lazy boys. But this is at the university. At the international college of the university things tend to get progressively worse ... the more money they (their parents) pay, the worse they are

Nemesis · Joined: 10 Oct 2007 Posts: 122

Nemesis · Joined: 10 Oct 2007 Posts: 122

bearcanada, I'm sure you meant well.

Better luck next time, trying to "make' a discussion.

You can do it!

Nemesis · Joined: 10 Oct 2007 Posts: 122

[CONTEXT: Digging through the past posts. Frustrated with the idiotry of western folk attempting the "apologist" angle for absurd realities].

jimoin · Joined: 21 Oct 2004 Posts: 455 Location: Dalian

Earlier someone posted that the students are deserving of mockery and contempt because they choose to be apathetic and show no interest in learning for any reason other than to pass exams. But I think that is not fair - this is a result of a crushing oppressive culture in which elders, parents and teachers are always right and that's what they want. I think it's a natural human reaction to fall into apathy and nihilism as a result of that. But it sure makes it one heck of a job for us FTs to break them out of that!