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sharter
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 878
Location: All over the place
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 Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2010 4:53 pm Post subject: Ha |
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| Hrvatski this is Dave's not roksa.pl ! Is that what you're on about? |
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sparks
Joined: 20 Feb 2008
Posts: 632
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| Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2010 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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| I can see some of you guys are "real" teachers. Congratulations! After 8 years teaching in Poland and 3 in Warsaw, I have to say that I basically look for the jobs which pay the most and require the least amount of effort on my part. If someone is content with talking--that's fine by me. If I can keep them content through their 2 semesters I feel I've reached my goal. I admire you folks who still have the energy and integrity to have things like "lesson plans" and "genuine concern for your students". |
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scottie1113
Joined: 25 Oct 2004
Posts: 375
Location: Gdansk
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| Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2010 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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| wojbrian wrote: |
This is a rough one.
I think it depends on how bad you need the money. No one likes to sell their soul but a business is a business and the customer is always right. |
I strongly disagree. It wasn't true during my 25 years in sales and sales management, and it isn't true of teaching either. Usually, yes. Always, no.
Last edited by scottie1113 on Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Master Shake
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
Posts: 1202
Location: Colorado, USA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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| scottie1113 wrote: |
| wojbrian wrote: |
This is a rough one.
I think it depends on how bad you need the money. No one likes to sell their soul but a business is a business and the customer is always right. |
I strongly disagree. It wasn't true during my 25 years is sales and sales management, and it isn't true of teaching either. Usually, yes. Always, no. |
Are Poles even aware that this "customer's always right" mentality exists? It sure didn't exist under communism, a time in recent history when you had to stand in a shop like a peasant for 10 minutes before the shop attendant would even acknowledge you.
To this day in Poland, I think it's a bit more "business is right." The customers (especially the older ones) are used to being told what they need, what's possible, what's not, what's best for them.
If you can make students believe that the "easy way out," i.e. just conversation, is the best way, then teaching will be easy. The only problem is that conversation is not an effective way of teaching and students won't improve much. |
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sharter
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 878
Location: All over the place
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 6:16 am Post subject: Erm |
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| The whole private conversation thing is a drag....unless she's a hotty! I made lots of lolly in Polska doing recording work. Anyone remember Easy English? Also wrote articles,4 a week. |
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dynow
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 1080
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 6:51 am Post subject: |
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mastershake wrote:
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| The only problem is that conversation is not an effective way of teaching and students won't improve much. |
i think this greatly depends on the student, along with their level. people that are talkative yet receptive to correction, go home and study the mistakes they made in class, have interesting lives giving them something to talk about, etc., can benefit quite a bit from just speaking about this and that while the teacher corrects.
i see it now first hand with myself, I have polish lessons in this way, basically 2 straight hours of just speaking only polish and when i am corrected I write it down and go home and study it, write sentences, etc. and it works wonders for me. granted, I've never had REAL polish lessons, as in a good structured course (do they exist?) so i don't have anything to compare it to, but it certainly has helped me and i look forward to every lesson. |
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Master Shake
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
Posts: 1202
Location: Colorado, USA
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:04 am Post subject: |
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| dynow wrote: |
i think this greatly depends on the student, along with their level. people that are talkative yet receptive to correction, go home and study the mistakes they made in class, have interesting lives giving them something to talk about, etc., can benefit quite a bit from just speaking about this and that while the teacher corrects.
i see it now first hand with myself, I have polish lessons in this way, basically 2 straight hours of just speaking only polish and when i am corrected I write it down and go home and study it, write sentences, etc. and it works wonders for me. granted, I've never had REAL polish lessons, as in a good structured course (do they exist?) so i don't have anything to compare it to, but it certainly has helped me and i look forward to every lesson. |
That's great you've made progress doing this. My Polish isn't good enough to talk for 10 min straight, let alone 2 hours.
So what you've been doing is a bit more than just conversation, isn' it? It involves independent study, giving yourself 'homework' with new language you've learned in class.
Structured Polish lessons for foreigners do exist here in Warsaw and some of the teachers at my school have taken them. I've heard that the lessons aren't great because the Polish teachers practice old-school teaching methodology (i.e. lots of drilling, grammar w/o context, translation, etc.) |
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sharter
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 878
Location: All over the place
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 3:58 pm Post subject: Erm |
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| Polish teachers do PPP type lessons cos most NS are shite at Polish. Polish students usually aren't so bad at English and task based lessons are possible. TBL...the language evolves from the task. PPP is the opposite.TBL is ideal as a teaching method for conversation classes. |
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justflyingin
Joined: 30 Apr 2009
Posts: 100
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| Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 7:52 am Post subject: |
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If the person had enough to say about his work so that he could talk each lesson, I'd gladly let them--if that is what they were there for.
Conversation has its value. I have a few students who have no contact with English except the one hour a week they come to me for this conversation/contact with a native speaker. I'd GLADLY take the 100 zl/hour--but I don't ask that much. It's a whole lot easier to just talk with the average adult than actually work through a grammar lesson with a child, or keep a 7-year-old interested.
The problem is, I don't differentiate in how much I ask, so the easy person with conversation only pays the same as the more difficult-to-keep-interested child.
The funny thing is, I'm usually quite interested in what the person is doing, where they've been. I can talk about that stuff (and listen to them talk) for hours and hours. Is it really that boring? When one of my students comes back from a trip, I ask them to tell me about it--all of it. I ask them questions, etc. For most of my students, learning to communicate is why they are there... |
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dynow
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 1080
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| Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:48 am Post subject: |
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mastershake wrote:
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That's great you've made progress doing this. My Polish isn't good enough to talk for 10 min straight, let alone 2 hours.
So what you've been doing is a bit more than just conversation, isn' it? It involves independent study, giving yourself 'homework' with new language you've learned in class. |
sure, it's more than conversation because I work independently at home regardless. 95% of the Polish I know I learned on my own.
basically shake, I will come to the teacher with a topic or a set of similar verbs and we will talk about it and I can ask all the questions I want, giving me something solid to go home and study. one of the worst parts of studying Polish for me in the beginning was I would have question after question that went unanswered, and instead of getting it worked out and moving on, i would simply avoid it till I somehow learned it later on, which terribly slowed down my progress. with these lessons, I write down my problems, come to class and just fire away till it's all worked out, then go home and study it.
being able to talk about your life and what's currently going on in it is priceless. it's what you will most likely be asked to talk about when you meet someone along with the recent past. by having these conversations with my teachers, i routinely hit a verb or form of the verb I'm not familiar with and the lesson allows me to work out those small "holes" in my Polish.
of course if someone is not at a level where they can converse, the lessons are going to be mostly boring and painful doing mainly grammar. my first year of studying Polish was straight grammar, writing sentence after sentence to practice cases, and MAN am I glad those days are over.
justflyingin wrote:
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| The funny thing is, I'm usually quite interested in what the person is doing, where they've been. I can talk about that stuff (and listen to them talk) for hours and hours. |
which is another added benefit I get from my polish lessons. I'm generally quite interested in other peoples' lives as well, and by sitting and listening to people talk to me in Polish during a lesson, I can simply stop them when I miss a word. I write it down, go home and study it and all it's forms, on and on.
with English you can sit in a lesson and through osmosis learn words and phrases (especially verbs) a bit easier, but with Polish, everything has to be completely methodical, writing down the words, going home and studying them inside and out....otherwise you'll never be able to use the words yourself. the language is just too difficult to learn any other way, which is why conversation in general, when outside of class, helps me very little. people say to me sometimes, "you have to speak more, that's how you learn!" but i generally don't learn anything except how to become a little more fluent in the words I already know. as far as new vocab.....i have to write it down and study it or it goes in one ear and out the other in a very short amount of time. OR, for example, I hear a new verb, find out the meaning, but then can't conjugate it.....and i forget it 10 minutes later.
yeah.....Polish is a world class a$$ ache. |
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scot47
Joined: 10 Jan 2003
Posts: 15343
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| Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 4:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Thank God that I am in the Middle East and not in post-Stalinist Poland, grubbing for a living. |
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sparks
Joined: 20 Feb 2008
Posts: 632
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| Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Funny, I sometimes ponder moving to the middle east for the money but I don't think that I could exile myself to such a geographical and cultural wasteland on purpose. |
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Master Shake
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
Posts: 1202
Location: Colorado, USA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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Ya. I've thought about mid-east too. But when I actually looked into it, the only drawing points were the salaries and vacation time. Some mid-east jobs advertise that they pay to send you home during your vacation.
It's a bad sign when a place's key selling point is how much they will help you to get away from there.
To me, it sounds like doing time in a minimum security prison with a few 'field trips' thrown in.
Enjoy scot47 |
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justflyingin
Joined: 30 Apr 2009
Posts: 100
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| Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:09 pm Post subject: |
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| scot47 wrote: |
| Thank God that I am in the Middle East and not in post-Stalinist Poland, grubbing for a living. |
Without meaning to hijack this thread, maybe you could tell us what took you there (and where is there)? Have you taught somewhere else and what are the biggest differences? Do you only have male students? |
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