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724. How d'you do?

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One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “Lately I’m getting more aware of some of my students’ circumstances. I’m referring to kids that never advance or are attentive in the class. They can have problems with drugs or drink, sleep deficit, receiving bad treatment at home, or treating their parents bad. And there they are, with me for some hours a day. A teacher told me, on the other hand, that the family is the first factor that influences on these kids (!). She said some examples to show attitudes that can help, definitely. Look. Dad not only talks with the adolescent about the grades. There can be family meetings, like at dinner, when everyone can intervene and tell what he or she thinks. Dad and Mom listen to that kid, who is asking for being listened to, please! This teenager is eager Dad and Mom and his oldest brother would listen to his worries. He feels insecure about himself. Because of that he dresses that way, and shouts, like meaning here I am, I’m someon...
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3702. How to Get Your Students Pull Their Chestnuts Out of the Fire - Some Hints

  I teach English to adults, but what I’m telling you today I guess it could be also applied to teens.  I just said I teach English, and it’s so, but also I ought to help my students learn that wonderful language. It’s thus because it’s them who ultimately have to learn English, or French, or …  More often now than before I tell my students that they have to be very active at learning English, as old H. D. Brown said (1989). Say, it’s them who have to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We also in Spanish use that phrase, to pull your chestnuts out of the fire.  I’m not going to do it myself. Better said, I should not do it myself.  Sometimes when at the end of each lesson I assign some homework, I tell them they can do this and this but also they could do that, just if they wish to do. It’s them who have to feel what they need most, what they have to do to advance at learning English.  Moreover, about the graded readers or unabridged novels we read, wor...
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3704. Do You Ever Have a Bad Day in Class as a Teacher?

  I’ve written a lot in this blog this far, I hope it may somehow help you teach your lessons. And I’ve also written a great deal on excellence, and we teachers – in principle – wish our lessons help our dear students.  But what if my classes are a disaster, or if some of them are so, or my students put me to the test all the time?  Today I’d like to say something on that. No one is perfect, and what teacher doesn’t have a bad day? Perhaps when you would wish to hit two kids’ heads to each other? I don’t recommend you to do that.  Not long ago – and I currently teach adults – I remember I had a bad day, one of those days when nothing in class seems to work well, or nearly so.  I’m now going to try and say something that hopefully might help out somebody else in our planet. Another teacher I mean.  And I want to point out that all good I have has been received and inherited from somebody else – it’s not my merit.  Some days ago, I was saying, in class I...
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1536. Up the slope

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Mr. H. D. Brown recommended to plunge into the pond, and to communicate in the target language by overwhelming fear.  A teacher I know is happy to see her students understanding and communicating more and more in English. She is like pulling her students up the hill advancing on a slope and gradient upward, little by little, step after step. / Photo from: www akihabaranews com
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1642. Let's delegate some work

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The director of the department of English in that school told me that she attended the sessions with the other teachers of English, delegating some tasks to her colleagues.  She would like to decide she herself but she understood she couldn’t reach all the school big scheme and the team of teachers’ labor.  She was a good listener herself – she listened to the other teachers’ problems, new activities, new ways to make the students participate, positive things that she might not like albeit they were okay.  With time passing she won a big prestige, because she worked so hard and was attentive to the teachers that wanted something from her. And on top of that she was a mom and so had to combine the school labor and her work as a mom and wife. / Photo from: Monday German teachers at dinner www3 villanova edu
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