Experiences of a teacher of English

We teachers seem to work for those low-achiever students who deserve our attention, both at face-to-face teaching as well as at remote teaching. Well, we also take care of high-achievers, right?  At present I’m reading a book about history geniuses – awesome. Michelangelo, Diego Velázquez, Isaac Newton, Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein, Antoni Gaudí, Steve Jobs, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Gerardo Diego…  Well, you know, quite many of them and others… were rather bad students at school! Are we not having geniuses in our classrooms? We may have some…  What I mean is that our schools should also foster our dear students’ creativity. Do our schools kill creativity? What are our schools like? What do they resemble?  Because of that we have to assist and attend high-achievers.  Quite many years ago – and I teach English – my school assistant principal told me to hand out extra worksheets to the students that finished before their classmates and eventually got wit...

We live in a tough situation, because of the Covid-19 crisis, yet this crisis is getting out the best from so many people. Also from so many teachers, all throughout the world. Thank you teachers.  Also I wanted to tell you today about an anecdote which helped me think, some days ago. It has been rather long since I have taught face-to-face.  Some days ago a nice and kind relative of mine, who suffers some mental illness that makes him pretty slow at thinking, asked me please to help him work on his laptop, one he has not employed for long… And I found myself at thinking, Okay, what can I do for you? For facing the computer screen, that person could do a multiplication of tasks! Where to start from?  Up to some extent I was at a bit difficult or embarrassing situation, but thank God soon I thought I could refresh my teaching job with that person’s help, and I taught him some basic tasks he could do, with the icons that appeared on the screen, and I told him like a first l...

Every teacher in principle wants his or her students would learn, right? Yep, it’s so, I would say.  Sometimes in the classroom or on remote teaching we teachers might be focusing on our teaching, but up to what extent do we track our students are actually learning? I know most of you operate that way and are concerned about your students’ learning.  Okay, in my career as a teacher I have encountered mainly two scholars who have made nice emphasis on learning strategies, applied to learning a language. Those writers are H. D. Brown and Rebecca Oxford.  We teachers should learn about learning strategies, thus we could help our students more fully.  Learning strategies are operations employed by the learner to aid the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information. ... They are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations. Those words appear on...

Now and in the context of benevolence love, and as a continuation of last post I would quote an interesting piece of advice from that interview between Angela Watson and Robyn Jackson. Please notice it… (The link to the website is on post #3544). How do you show students you are CHOOSING not to engage? A long time ago I wrote a couple of blog posts, and the title of the series was, Are You a Discipline Problem? And it was directed at teachers. It wasn’t to blame teachers, but it was to make this point: A discipline problem is anything that disrupts instruction. Anything. Which means that a child can be a discipline problem, but it also means that a teacher can be a discipline problem. When you choose not to escalate the situation as a teacher, you choose not to become a discipline problem, because the moment that you start getting in the last word with that student, you now are playing that student’s game. What you’re trying to do is get the student on your page, not get on the s...

As I said on last post, on this blog I have written a lot on behavior classroom management. Also you may have noticed that I have shown I have had a lot of affection to my students. It is love of benevolence: Seek what is good for those persons. It is not my merit – I have learned that from others.  Okay then. We teachers, when we have to reprimand a student’s disrespectful attitude in the classroom, should speak with that individual aside, apart the class, in a private situation.  My dad used to say that we would get more with an affectionate word than with a lot of quarrel. And it’s really so!  On last post I included a link to an interview between Angela Watson and Robyn Jackson. It’s a great article and you may learn a lot.  As well I have met some great teachers who precisely were pretty normal, regular and ordinary. And they had that great affection toward their students. With prudence, but affection anyway.  There were behavior problems in their classroom...