743. Teaching to catch the core of the problem




One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “I’ve been awaiting for today to tell you about my experience at teaching private classes, as you asked me to do. I have reached a conclusion regarding these classes, look.



Some students used to ask me for private classes, a few years ago. The first premise was they failed the school subject of English, because they did not know how to study the subject of English; it wasn’t like math, history, geography, economics; often they didn’t like the subject, I think because they saw it as something useless: a meaningless textbook, a lot of meaningless exercises, grammar that didn’t mean anything for real life, nonsense texts.



I don’t mean at all that today’s coursebooks of English are dud – I believe they are a really-helpful instrument for learning English... only if students learned how to make a good use of them!



Many times this happened in spite of my colleagues’ nice effort to fulfill their duty as teachers of English.



My private students used to fail a test after another. Nevertheless, when they discovered the book was an interesting and indispensable tool when they plunged into it, more and more, eventually they passed the subject of English.



Now it was a tool to build up realistic English. Soon the exercises passed to be meaningful. I proposed sentences as examples related to their everyday life, with a slight stroke of humor. I explained the importance of mastering past simple because it’s one of the most commonly used verbal tenses when talking in English, isn’t it?



I tried to connect a text about recycling garbage to their real life.



As a general positive summary: they learned how to take the best from the textbook and drills and exercises, and as a result they began to willingly face those exercises, and that fact led them to pass the subject, and a few times even get a good grade.” / Photo from: 10mmmman wordpress com. bald eagle landing down on tree

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