Fab English ideas

This post is a follow up to one I wrote about How Parenting has improved my Teaching. You may have noticed the absence of the verb “improve” in the title, this is at the request of my poor broken offspring.

1. I have a teacher voice

And I’m not afraid to use it, on my children, and even worse on other peoples’ children. My offspring live in constant terror that I will ask someone to pick up his litter, like I did the other day.

2. I also have a teacher look

It is useful for making small children cry, and getting “pleases” and “thank you”s from young people.

3. Every moment is a learning opportunity

Much to their joy terror. The other day my son said something like “I goed”, when I corrected him the whole family, including husband guffawed “ohh, get her, talking about irregular verbs and stuff at the table”

4. There’s NO excuse on the homework front

Rubbish like ” the teacher told us to note it but we don’t have to do it” gets VERY short shrift in this household, to the point where the kids do a bit extra just to get me off their backs.

There’s also no such thing as me writing a note or calling school to explain why tiddler shouldn’t get a detention because he forgot his PE kit. The kids wouldn’t dream of asking that, they know I’d probably phone and suggest a couple of extra hours’ sanction just to be on the safe side. In fact I have very little contact with their schools, their lives – their problems, deal with it.

5. Staying home sick doesn’t exist

I can’t, so they can’t either, end of story.

However I would like to think it’s not all that bad, apart from having dragged brought up a couple of pretty independent kids I like to remind them that

6. If I tell them not to wear that outfit it’s because it really isn’t cool

and I have expert knowledge of exactly how low your belt line should be and how high skirts are this week.

7. They have utmost respect for their teachers

My kids will NEVER ask a teacher if they’ve finished marking a test that was given a day ago, or even a week ago. They also know that any comment about attitude in their reports will not be appreciated.

8. Holiday homework books have no place in this house I’ve spent the whole year behind a marking pile, you don’t really expect me to spend the summer doing that too?

9. Holiday clubs are not for us We might be ready to strangle each other by week 4 of the hols but we WILL spend the school hols together, and there aren’t many working mums who can say the same thing, and that brings me to my final point…

10. Thanks to a summer with me, you’ll be REALLY looking forward to going back to school!

It’s the holidays, woop woop!

This means I can do loads of other stuff and don’t have to think about teaching for ages.

This means I’m thinking a lot about teaching and coming up with some great ideas for next year. It also got me thinking about how all the other things I get up to away from the classroom affect my teaching.

Mindlessly surfing the internet

While it may seem to my husband the bystander that I’m just mindlessly surfing, I am in fact picking up great ideas from a plethora of sources, first of which on my list would be my twitter feed and places like edutopia or the British Council.

Running

Even during the school year I always come up with the best solutions and ideas while out running, it’s a pity that I forget them all in the shower! I read a quote recently about someone saying they ran for “sanity and vanity” and then definitely describes my running; jogging round our local woods exercises my mad dog, clears my brain and stops me snapping (quite so much!) at my family, the added bonus is the extra ice-creams I can eat guilt-free!

I have noticed however that as well as time to think through what’s going on in the grey matter, running also gives me the mental and physical stamina necessary to keep going during a long teaching day.

Volunteering

Having just recently organised our annual village race for around three hundred participants, I can tell you that dealing with about sixty volunteers, not to mention the inscriptions, barbecue, race wardens, Red Cross and the paperwork has taught me an AWFUL LOT! Not least dealing with the prefecture’s (county council) requirements for the heatwave we have found ourselves in recently.

I have learnt patience, determinism and more importantly the simple fact that in order to get people to do what you want, the thing that works best is… wait for this…

Being REALLY nice to them and saying THANK YOU a lot.

You wouldn’t believe how many meetings/ events I’ve turned up at to have someone yell at the few people who have shown up about how there’s not enough people to help, or sat through someone’s rant about how “it’s always the same people who have to do everything” (not surprising there’s no new blood if all you do is moan at them) or even worse, “if you want something doing properly you need to it yourself” (or patiently explain to someone else and help them learn how to do it?)

It may seem blatantly obvious to us, but it’s not to everyone believe me, you can get much more out of people with a positive, friendly attitude, be that chair-lifters or students.

Organisation

This is so hypercritical of me that I’m blushing as I write, as I’m the most unorganised person in the univers, however when up to your eyes in mails and paperwork, on whatever subject, it really helps to tag and file those mails so you can find them again, be it a promise of an ambulance for the security tent or a query from a parent. I would add the to-do list in this section; this cunning device has enabled me to get a good night’s sleep in the weeks before the race.

Of course it works the other way round too, everything I’ve learnt through teaching comes in useful elsewhere, for example I was the only race volunteer who could go the whole morning without a toilet break!

I have this fantastic class on a Monday and Tuesday afternoon; the AEP (Advanced English Programme), or the “anglophones” are they are known to the rest of the school. This is when all the native English speakers, the kids whose parents think they are English mother tongue, and a handful of really motivated L2 speakers get together to do…

…whatever we want!

Well, whatever I want actually. There’s no official programme, no end of year exam, as long as nobody or nothing is damaged then we can do what we like to improve ourEnglish and learn about the world.

As you can imagine, it’s a fun class to teach, we’ve done lots of stuff this year, here’s the programme I “followed” this year. The final production was a group project on the subject of their choice.

After choosing a subject that interested them and researching some answers they studied different ways of producing their newly discovered information; this is where Joe Dale’s great talk at IATEFL’s YL pre-sig event came in very useful, he presented variety of apps that I have previously mentioned.

you can see Joe’s IATEFL interview here and follow him on twitter here.

There are loads of advantages to using apps like the ones Joe presented in the classroom, not only are students motivated and the lessons “fun” , but for me one of the best things is that I’m able to publish fantastic student work without having to worry about privacy issues.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

As this class is for all the students aged 9-15 some of them will be with us for the next six years if they are lucky!! This is even better as it encourages me to try new stuff all the time, no risk of repeating something we did last year.

As for next year’s programme, in our last lesson I asked all the students to fill out a syllabus sheet for me; individually or in groups they filled in the year’s 36 x2hours of lessons on a grid, with explanations and links where necessary. I can’t wait to find out what we’ll be doing!