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nabakow30
Joined: 25 Jan 2006
Posts: 35
Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia
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 Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 12:52 pm Post subject: York School Krakow and sharing |
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Hello all...
Do any of you guys know anything about the York school in Krakow? I've been given reason to doubt that accepting a job there is a good idea....
Also, how do those of you with experience of sharing groups- I mean where each teacher has specific responsibilities eg speaking and writing, rather than just teaching alternately- find it?
I would REALLY appreciate responses to either of these queries. Thanks in advance.....  |
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Tumteetum
Joined: 04 Feb 2005
Posts: 144
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| Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 4:53 pm Post subject: Re: York School Krakow and sharing |
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| nabakow30 wrote: |
Hello all...
Do any of you guys know anything about the York school in Krakow? I've been given reason to doubt that accepting a job there is a good idea....
Also, how do those of you with experience of sharing groups- I mean where each teacher has specific responsibilities eg speaking and writing, rather than just teaching alternately- find it?
I would REALLY appreciate responses to either of these queries. Thanks in advance..... |
I prefer not to share at all but if I have to then I prefer this way as long as your responsibilities are clear and your co-teacher is cooperative enough.
The other way of working through the same book with another teacher can cause problems through cross referencing, continuity and requires more work liaising with the other teacher to explain what was done, how you did it and how it leads into the next part etc. Crap (unworkable) in my opinion. |
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gregoryfromcali
Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Posts: 1207
Location: People's Republic of Shanghai
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:42 am Post subject: |
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| Also, how do those of you with experience of sharing groups- I mean where each teacher has specific responsibilities eg speaking and writing, rather than just teaching alternately- find it? |
I have talked with people who worked there and didn't mind it too much.
But as you mentioned, the idea of one teacher teaching grammar and another teaching speaking is just backwards in my mind.
To be fluent a speaker needs to have all these integrated into their learning process at the same time and to be a good teacher one needs to teach all of the skills you mentioned.
Besides everything we say is based on grammar, so why separate who explains the grammar from who doesn't?
Just my 2 grosse as to why you'd never see me working there. |
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Alex Shulgin
Joined: 20 Jul 2003
Posts: 553
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:45 am Post subject: |
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| gregoryfromcali wrote: |
| so why separate who explains the grammar from who doesn't? |
The real reasons? There are three: firstly Polish teachers tend to be cheaper but schools market 'twin-system' or whatever as an advantage which is so good that students pay the same as for the crappy one-teacher system which has worked for the past 4000 years. That means extra cash for owners and owners like extra cash in their pockets.
The second reason: Polish teachers tend to be easier to push around by the boss and bosses like that too. If you cut a native's wages he'll probably walk but a Pole is far more likely to take it. Take the Warsaw Business Journal/Warsaw Insider for example. When it was taken over two years ago all the staff got scr*wed for 40% of their wages for a three month period. All the foreigners walked and all the Poles stayed.
The final reason is that a lot of native speakers just can not teach grammar because they do not know about grammar. This is especially true with the 'teachers' who have no qualifications or one of those mail-order certificates or one of the weekend courses. But it is also true for people who have just passed their CELTA. I've lost count of the number of people I knew who had taken a CELTA in the previous two years but couldn't name the structures in the first and second conditional. I quite often think that the communicative method was invented to counterbalance the number of native speaker teachers who had no idea at all about grammar. |
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Grrrmachine
Joined: 27 Jul 2005
Posts: 265
Location: Warsaw, Poland
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 11:20 am Post subject: |
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The first school I worked at used the twin method, and their justification was that at lower levels a Native Speaker (how I loathe that phrase) without Polish will have a hell of a time trying to explain the grammar, whereas the Polish teacher can switch to L1 in the event of massive confusion. In this way I concentrated on Speaking, Writing and some vocabulary elements, depending on the coursebook we were following. If you're using an easily broken up book, like FCE Fast Track, this can be relatively simple - kids would walk straight out of their Polish teacher's reading class to have follow-up vocabulary and speaking with me. With other cases, like using Enterprise (which tells you this was a few years back) it was a bloody nightmare trying to work out what the Polish teacher had done, and what I was allowed to do without giving HER a headache for her next class.
And it's a valid point with the grammar - I certainly wouldnt have claimed to be overly confident with the conditionals in my first few months of teaching, CELTA or degree aside. |
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gregoryfromcali
Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Posts: 1207
Location: People's Republic of Shanghai
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 1:28 pm Post subject: |
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I agree.
But at the school I worked at we also used team teaching. Yet the Pole essentially taught the same way the natives did. The natives taught the even chapters and the Poles taught the odd chapters.
As far as natives not knowing their grammar, well reality is they do know grammar they just never had to teach it. Once they've taught it for awhile they'll understand the rules of grammar and how to teach it.
It's no different from any other skill we teach. The more experience you have at teaching something the better you are at teaching it. Yet if you work at a school where you never have to teach it, then you'll never learn how to teach it.
Which I think is a shame since grammar is really one of the few challenges that native speakers face in the ESL field. |
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philobedo
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Posts: 7
Location: Krakow
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| Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:41 pm Post subject: york school |
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i worked there last year. the tandem teaching works fine and if you teach advanced levels or business (and they have LOTS of in-company groups) normally you'll teach grammar.
ask first if they want you to teach outside krakow. Last year they started teaching in bochnia (60 minutes away), brzesko (even further) and other places and you couldn't opt out. they organise transport but i had to leave home 2 hours before my first class.
the staff usually changes fundamentally from year to year, but the few i know there are good people and sociable types out of school.
if you don't disagree with the management you shouldn't have any other problems there... i had a couple of minor run-ins (others had more serious ones) and saw enough to know it wasn't where i wanted to be longer term. i might be sticking around in krakow and i just decided i didn't want to do it there.
hope the info is in time and useful. i haven't logged in here in a bit. |
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