Truth or Dare: Confession time!

[fluffyhamster]

OK, admit it, you're a regular on Dave's, and that means you've missed half your life and are now a moany old sod (or sodess) who's forgotten what it was like to be a beginner teaching: sometimes you get beyond just looking like this: and do actually "try" to help when a poor helpless little newborn/stillborn newbie doesn't seem to know what a "search engine" is, let alone that EFL might in fact not mean "English as a First language"*, but generally, you show little humour or pity in your conduct on Dave's. In other words, you're a ruthless, efficient language-killing language hunter-c*m-sick syntactical stuffy sod of a scrooge (that is, a Big-grammar hunting taxidermist) who needs to lighten up.

Ooh hello. I was talking to myself in the mirror, imagining I was metal56 or <<SIGH, SWOON, SLOBBER SLOBBER>> even Stephen Jones. But even though I cannot claim to myself be a Great Old One of Dave's just yet, I too need to decompress a little.

So, I thought a fun way to do this would be for whoever wants to to tell everyone else what he or she was like as a newbie. Me first I guess.

-I didn't "spot the difference" i.e. the mistakes regarding the use of 'its' versus 'it's' in my pre-CTEFLA interview grammar test.

-Pehaps in connection with 'it's', I found the idea of the copula a bit mind-bending at first (I could've probably given many examples of adjectives, but I hadn't really thought about how they were related syntactically wihin sentences to nouns through the verb). I wanted the adjectives to be the verbs! This could be because I'd studied Chinese, that has "stative verbs", but I think it was something deeper than that. (Stative verbs are adjectives that form the predicate without 'to be', 'although in the affirmative, when no more substantial adverb is to be supplied, they need to be supported by the unstressed adverb hen (3) 'very, quite'.' Colloquial Chinese (First Edition) by P.C. Tung and D.E. Pollard. Routledge: London 1982. Lesson 1, pg 13).

-Finite and non-finite elements in the verb phrase, auxiliaries and partciples also took a bit of getting used to. I found Leech et al's explanations in English Grammar for Today quite helpful, but there might be potential dangers "tense-wise" in thinking of V1 in the VP as being the "finite" element (not that a teacher with half a brain will necessarily fall into them). That was a nice little book that I bought whilst at university, but unfortunately I forget and left it in China.

-I never really understood enough about modality (and I still don't), and find the ones regarding "obligation" strange.

-Same thing goes for that 'Would you like any tea?' versus 'Would you like some tea?'. I got the feeling that only one of them was considered the nicer way to make an offer -some, right? - but I "didn't" fix it in my brain. I mean, in a 'tea?' context at least, why contrast them as a pair at all if only one is used? My brain switched off, it seems. It's a fairly sensitive B.S detector, perhaps.

-I also got irritated by the overkill exponent-wise of expressing probability of rain etc, and when you're irritated, it's a sure sign that the activity isn't that well designed in helping things make clear sense.

-I was never satisfied with the explanations offered for the passive or use of question tags, or intonation generally.

-I wish more attention had been paid to pronunciation and how the orthography of English "fits". This is perhaps too specialized an area for intial training to tackle, but inexperienced teachers can soon find themselves teaching students who quite badly need help with the basic bottom-up skills involved in reading, pronunciation and spelling-writing.

-Present Perfect is an absolute chesnut, always fun for a round of conkers.

-The biggest mystery must've been why the decent books that I was starting to look at, buy and try to get into, especially ones on Discourse Analysis, weren't on the course.

See, it's so hard to keep it lighthearted! What started out as a confession turned into a veiled rant...but maybe the problem isn't so much initial comprehension as fully carrying through with all the ramifications, entering the doorway deeply. Regardless, still pretty dumb, and still so much more to learn, me.


*If you know what the hell I'm on about and referring to here, you're a right regular moany old sod alright, right down to the charcoal biscuits.

[woodcutter]

Are you trying to make me feel better about starting dud threads by outdoing me? I'm touched, but the karate thread was just too overwhelming!

To take a more light-hearted approach to this general theme, I have had no serious troubles in my job since the end of my first year and a half....before that I was in hot water for poor explanations (not enough use of the board I now think), playing too much music and being boring in the opinion of Mexicans (which I blame on lazy preparation and lack of a bag of tricks to cover the tracks) (and certain Mexicans, if I'm honest). Oh, and of course Avalon didn't like the fact that I wouldn't swallow everything whole, and nor did Leicester University, lest I seem to be blocking that out!

I'd like to hear the teething trials of some of the old guard.....

Some of the things you mention, Fluff, never get resolved......

[fluffyhamster]

Ooh, somebody's read the "karate" thread! Whaddya think? Comments should be made wearing a gi (tracksuit will also do, unless we end up tussling, in which case it might get ripped off and nipples seen), in the dojo, in five minutes' time.

[revel]

Good morning all!

I had just quit my job as office manager at the largest Broadway costume sweat-shop in NYC and was thinking about becoming a bicycle messenger when a friend telephoned me to offer me my first job as an ESL teacher. The class was a small group of wealthy tourists who had little or no idea of how to speak English. I spent hours trying to plan classes that would be different, fun, interesting, and in the end ended up hating what I was doing, bored to tears and boring to tears as well.

I decided that if I was going to do such work I would have to 1) find out how to do it correctly and 2) come to enjoy it. I spent two years at the New York Public Library reading books on linguistics, taking notes, applying my new knowledge to my classes. I remember one night I was mugged in Central Park and was more worried that the muggers would take my four notebooks of knowledge in my backpack than the last $6.00 that I had before pay-day in my money purse.

The jobs I could get for a couple of years were all in private language "agencies", that is, an office with a couple of "classrooms" and ads in the paper and connections in Europe, where the students were either wealthy tourists or Japanese Insurance salesmen and other types of businessmen. I sat through long "conversation" classes, gave basic grammar classes, even bluntly babysat, until I got a hold on what it was I was able to do to contribute to each learning situation, based on my knowledge, skills, personality and capacities. I began turning down those private classes and sallied forth to get a job in a serious Academy with a real administrative structure where the objective was not to fill hours with useless "conversation" but rather guide students through a sylabis that would contribute to their gaining agility with the use of English. About this time I discovered Grant Taylor and the Streamlines series of books, both unfortunately forced out of print by the plethora of look-alike Cambridge/Oxford/Longman zombies that are currently in use world-wide.

In the end, then, of the 23 years I've been teaching, the first two were spent learning what to do, being a terrible teacher but fortunately with sympathetic and patient students; the remaining years have been a constant recycling of my work, the accumulation of that bag of tricks, the fine tuning of my presentation and my perception of students' wants and needs. The most important thing I learned during those two years was, as mentioned, the necessity of loving this work or the demise of revel as an ESL teacher. I evidently chose the former over the latter.

peace,
revel.

[metal56]

I used to get stoned and drunk a lot, miss lessons, not plan well, seduce students, use my grammar books to prop up a wonky table, pretend that I was only doing ESL till I could get my first novel finished, miss classes to go down the beach, and spend all my cash, which meant that I could make an excuse about not being able to get home to England for Christmas.

I've still gotta get that novel done.

[fluffyhamster]

When I said 'confession time', metal, I didn't actually mean wash and then throughly air your scuzzy old fratboy panties for us all to see, smell and gag in horror and disbelief at. But thanks for sharing.

Anyway, now that the pants are out of the laundry bag, what caused you to totally turn your life around and become the shining light and beacon to millions of admiring teachers and zillions of (previously p*ssed off) students? Did you pick up a copy of Ultimate Power or something? Did Mario Rinvolucri speak to you on the road for pilgrims?

Ah, hang on, I think I've maybe sussed it...perhaps you're just inventing a romanticized or possibly even "fake" past, so you can write "that" book - perhaps it'll be an "autobiographical" novel or a self-help, "Transform you teaching!" type of guide, following Tony Robbins' lead/"example". (I still find it hard to imagine he was ever an overweight slob 'washing dishes in my bathtub', because he never once visited me to wash my dishes. The b*astard).

[metal56]

Anyway, now that the pants are out of the laundry bag, what caused you to totally turn your life around and become the shining light and beacon to millions of admiring teachers and zillions of (previously p*ssed off) students?

Fluff, when and if the above takes place -shining bacon and stuff - I'll be able to answer your question. Till then ...

[fluffyhamster]

Anyway, now that the pants are out of the laundry bag, what caused you to totally turn your life around and become the shining light and beacon to millions of admiring teachers and zillions of (previously p*ssed off) students?

Fluff, when and if the above takes place -shining bacon and stuff - I'll be able to answer your question. Till then ...

That, metal, is known as a "Spontaneous Illicit Collocation", a term taught to me by John McSinclair of the University of Baconham on his MA MWAH MWAH course.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mwah&r=f

[lolwhites]

When my teenage students in Spain wanted to know some rude English expressions I taught them the worst things you could say were "pants", "wibble" and "strike a light".

[fluffyhamster]

What the hell is (a/to/be) 'wibble'? Sounds fun whatever it is!

I wish more attention had been paid to pronunciation and how the orthography of English "fits". This is perhaps too specialized an area for intial training to tackle, but inexperienced teachers can soon find themselves teaching students who quite badly need help with the basic bottom-up skills involved in reading, pronunciation and spelling-writing.

That is: one of my students in Shanghai once asked me if I could teach him how to guess/be sure of the pronunciation of any harder/unknown words he might meet, without needing to look up almost every one of them in a dictionary. I could've said, 'You should try learning Chinese, mate!', or 'You should check in the dictionary to be sure, and there's usually so much more to learn than just the pronunciation, anyway' etc, but I didn't. I thought it was an interesting, and a perfectly valid "request" at the time, even though I was then just a newbie with little more than a copy of EF's Rapid English, and John DeFrancis's rants I mean books to "guide" me (what could I have suggested or done to help?)...but it still does seem a valid question to ask of any "qualified" English teacher, newbie or not (and I'm still not in much of a position to answer it!).

Regarding spellings, anyone get caught out with that 'pronounce' vs 'pronunciation' lark? I keep typing 'seperate' when I mean 'separate'. And who spells 'merely' as 'mearly'? etc.