Tags archives: teaching

 

How I celebrated the Royal Wedding

 

I took the royal wedding as an excuse to make the kids excited about doing work while they thought they weren’t actually doing anything. We learnt some royal family-related vocabulary like “king”, “queen”, “palace”, “crown” and made simple sentences like “the king lives in a palace”, “the princess wears a crown” and things like that. Then I told them we were going to make a poster celebrating the wedding. I told them what Kate & William look like and they had to draw them as I spoke. It was good fun.
When the heir to the Spanish throne got married (yes, we have kings and queens in other countries too) it wasn’t that much of a big deal. Yeah, the media went nuts as they always do and some crazy people spent hours in front of the palace trying to catch a glimpse of the couple, but I don’t recall any street parties, “proud to be Spanish” moments or stupid souvenirs. And we certainly didn’t get a day off work. I don’t know if that’s because we just don’t care about the Royal family as much as the British do, because we’re not as good as taking advantage of any opportunity to get wasted, because we’d seen enough of the bride when she was a newsreader or because our royal family lacks members as AWESOME as Prince Harry. Yours truly and my dear Erica celebrated by going to a punk rock show metres away from the place where the wedding was happening. We are that cool.

 

 

>Bad men

>This afternoon I was in a bookshop when one of my 2nd grade students came to say hello with her little brother while their mum was queuing at the till. The conversation went like this:

Little boy: My mum says there are lots of bad men.
Me: She speaks the truth.
(kid looks scared)
Big sister: She’s right.
Me: But I’m your sister’s teacher.
Little boy: That’s ok then. (sits next to me) So, what are you doing here? Buying a teaching book?

Their mother looked a bit concerned when she saw her kids sitting down next to a stranger and happily talking to her. The little boy was as adorable as his sister. When he left he said “I want you to be my teacher, but I already have one”.

 

>English class

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English class
Originally uploaded by misterymoor
First of all, I must make clear that I did not in fact teach this class. I witnessed it and didn’t tell the teacher to stop. This took place when I was working in Eastbourne 3 years ago. I was in charge of a group of Spanish teenagers who went there to learn English. My job was to make sure they went to their lessons, that they didn’t get drunk, got to their classes on time, to solve any problems they might have, etc.

One day, one of the teachers asked me if it was okay to teach them how to swear in English and I said it was. Now, why did I agree to this? It’s not because I wanted to take a hilarious photo and upload it to my flickr, but because they were screamed at all the time. Basically, they got into quite a lot of trouble with English teenagers, which was partly their own fault too because most of them were insolent bastards, but I still thought they had the right to know when someone was being rude to them. Besides, sometimes people said perfectly normal things and they thought they were being told to fuck off, which resulted in them screaming at them in Spanish. Charming.

I wouldn’t teach that. Hell, I didn’t even tell the kids how to say “ass” when we studied the parts of the body last week! I did draw an elephant’s bottom for them, though. They absolutely loved it.

 

>THIS IS ART

 

>misconceptions

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This is what two of my second grade kids drew when I asked them to draw themselves wearing a Halloween costume. Instead, they pictured themselves on a killing spree. Nice. Notice how the dead guy on the bottom picture says “I am dead. I am Paco”. Paco is the kid who drew the top one. First he drew a zombie and wrote “This is Jesús. He is a zombie”, so the other guy drew him dead. Should I tell them off for this? My reaction in the classroom was to think “oh well, there’s not a big difference between a blood-sucking vampire and a murderer” and “at least they’re learning English”, but the more I look at the photos the more I think I should have lectured them.

Jesus is a murderer.

 

>shy kids

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One of the second grade kids I teach looks exactly like Allison from The Breakfast Club, which automatically makes her my favourite.

She is extremely shy, but she is doing really well now. She’s gone from being too scared to answer my questions and just blushing while staring at the floor to being more active in class, putting a lot of effort into her work and socialising with the other kids. Having been really shy as a kid myself, I really feel like my role with this kid isn’t exclusively trying to get her to speak English. I always try to talk to her for a bit on the way to the classroom and checking on her often during the class to see if she has any doubts that she was too shy to ask out loud. I’m amazed at how quickly it’s working. It’s as simple as a “Wow! What a beautiful drawing!” or a high five. I love high fiving the kids. High fives are great.

University has taken over my life to the point that work has become a form of escapism.