Experiences of a teacher of English

  For those of you who are in the northern hemisphere I wish you teachers all a nice back to school.  Today I’d like to say something about classroom management. I do know how some teachers have to struggle to keep a working pace at high school, at the classroom. I’m typing something that might perhaps help you out, if Granada now earthquakes let me write – I mean, we are okay, just we’ve have ten days of some small earthquakes, a few bigger ones. My mind goes to Venezuela, Colombia, Perú and Indonesia and their people, and I keep praying for you all.  Well, I guess in class the main point is the teacher achieve to keep his or her students working, studying, learning. And a lot of you teachers already are attaining this, and you could tell us and share with us about that point.  I’ve already written a lot on classroom managing in this blog, and clear is it that you cannot be those young people’s buddy. You cannot enter the classroom and, so as to gain your students, ...

  I know that you want to become a good teacher. One who makes his or her students think, right?  This latter thing may seem obvious, but do our dear students really think? Do they invest all their cleverness capabilities upon learning in the best possible way?  In order to achieve our dear students would think, and more if they are kids, we have to teach them how to think. If they settle down to study their books, we may be heading in the right direction.  We as teachers may think in a loud voice, say, to teach them to think, in class.  I was remembering that when I taught kids at the first school where I began to teach, we had, in accordance to their parents, there in the nineties of last century, a plan for educating them. It was not one more school subject, like math or literature or biology, but they were weekly sessions about topics where we made them think: ethics, how to solve problems, virtues and values, situations they might face as teens, etcetera. I...

  Today I’m trying to say something that may help you if you teach college students or adults or even kids.  Something I’ve lately observed is that the teacher has to let those students do, he or she has to allow them to do, by combining authority with indulgence, authority with clever lenience.  First premise: the teacher must become an authority, a moral authority in class. And that’s gotten if the teacher becomes somebody who can say things that positively influence upon his or her students. That teacher achieves that things fall on good soil, only if he works hard and sets an example of a person who has something that really makes his students learn how to work fine. I mean, that teacher is someone you can rely on, because he has gotten that authority, which is moral authority.  Do you know what I mean? I’ve seen teachers whose students do what they are told to do because their teacher is a moral authority and has prestige – he is somebody that deserves to be lis...

  I have found apparently very plausible postulates from two education aces which seem – only seem – incompatible.  They both are Spanish education aces, Gerardo Castillo and Gregorio Luri. And they do know a lot on educating our students, both in theory and in practice.  Castillo puts, in a book about fifteen world geniuses, that schools, or better said, teachers should foster and promote their students’ creativity. Namely Isaac Newton, Thomas A. Edison, Antonio Gaudí, John Ford, Joan Miró, Alfred Hitchcock, Steve Jobs, well, they were considered as bad students (!).  Gerardo Castillo says that it was like schools systems were possibly boring for those geniuses when they were schoolboys.  Thus that education expert says that creativity should be fostered at school, or some creativity should be thus fostered at schools, together with regular set education. Anyway, let’s note that creativity stroke.  In the meanwhile another education expert – I believe they...

  Are you a teacher yourself? I mean, a second or foreign language teacher?  I’m going to tell you something today which hopefully may help you with your lessons. Let’s see to it.  It’s common to say that we language teachers have to have our students practice the language they’re learning and we should not confine our teaching to teaching language facts. And that’s okay. We should not confine our teaching to grammar and little else.  Yep, that’s right. However, let us not think we cannot teach those grammar facts, like for example verbal tenses or the use of the comparative of irregular adjectives.  Thus, if I’m teaching a bit of grammar or lexis, I don’t have to think I’m doing something wrong. Come on, as well you have to give your dear students language facts and grammar and the like, because those students do need those facts… to be able to precisely communicate in the target language. And above all if they are adults or even teens.  They do need the l...

As I’ve already told you, both teachers and parents wish our students would learn. Well, and most of students as well.  And these students need abundant time for studying. Just them. They should have some place and abundant time for studying, researching and writing their activities. Just themselves, as I just said.  I can recall with joy and gratitude when I was a student at high school and we the students did have a study hall or a library to study on our own. And we carried out and accomplished high school and after that, college.  Perhaps sometimes there might be a teacher or a monitor in charge of taking care of that study hall and he used to work on his own stuff, but also as I said, it is convenient students on their own would learn how to work, study and write their activities.  It is so because it’s them who have to realize they have to study on their own, just because they wish so, it’s them who have to learn how to work on their own.  When there were ...

We teachers wish all our students would learn and be happy in the classroom and at remote teaching. Yes, we do.  Sometimes I have written that they have to learn how to learn. However, they will learn how to learn if they learn before.  I mean, they need to learn and set up a lot of knowledge and ideas and concepts in order to have something in mind upon which they can think about.  They can think about learning if they have previously learned a lot of things.  They can have abstract ideas when they are some, say, eleven years or so, maybe ten. Well, it is up to each kid to establish when they are capable to think abstractly.  As well I have said that good students know they are good students, and they can use different learning strategies and think about them, so they can keep the ones that work, and discard the ones that don’t work; yet this demands some maturity and having learned a lot of things before, when they’re children and thus before puberty and adole...

I have some nice remembrances and memories about when I was a kid and carried out my high school period. I can recall the so many hours I used to spend at the study hall of the youth center I attended.  It had a nice library. And that center monitors aroused and waked up my thirst for knowledge. Also its teachers did.  Also I have some nice memories about my school teachers. Most of them, maybe all, were good teachers, both male teachers and female ones. They gave us knowledge and contents, and as well aroused our thirst for learning.  That’s the teachers’ mission: both give contents and wake up the students’ hunger for learning. Thank you my dear teachers. Most of them may be retired or they have departed.  And libraries are in no way obsolete.  Okay, we have Internet browsers, yet libraries are necessary still, and hopefully they will keep being so.  Think of the good that libraries can make to students, more if the books are in accordance to human dignit...

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...

On last post I told you that communication in English (the target language) is one of the main goals in my classes. Communication among intelligent people.  Also I told you we teachers should know our students to make them talk at the discussions about the points they know from their experiences. I teach adults at present.  Okay, then, I can tell you that also those discussions help me learn about my students, as may happen with your classes as well.  The point is to have our students talk about what they know about. Or about what they’ve been working on – think of the flipped-classroom model, on which you can see further by clicking on its label from the right column of my blog. You decide if you could implement it or not: it might work with you, maybe yes, maybe no...  We as teachers may in the classroom show a serious and affectionate attention to what they may be talking about.  In teens’ classrooms we should take into account that n...

We teachers cannot treat our students in the classroom as a mass, as a mass of people, but we have to treat them as individuals. As persons. As persons with intelligence. Persons who think, who receive the messages we give them.  And they’re free, free and responsible.  As well we will trust them. Otherwise if we treat them as people we don’t trust, and from whom we only receive nuisance, from whom we only expect they’re against us teachers, we’ll get little from them.  In some way we’ll treat them as adults, or as persons who have, as I said, intelligence, plus feelings and will. They like this way of treating: we respect them as persons.  We will trust them I said. For example we will give them some message in the classroom or individually at the school halls, and we should trust and have confidence that they will accomplish what said in that message.  More likely than not, in that way, they will follow those instructions or whatever w...

However we start a lesson in the classroom is so important! A lot depends on that.  I remember a teacher at high school that used to smile and look at us in an elegant way, at the beginning of the lesson and as a lesson warmer.  He was prone to serve and help us in all ways he had at hand. And all that with nothing extraordinary or eccentric or extravagant.  With some other teacher my classmates – well some of them – used to make some ridicule of – I say that with pain because they did something horrible: I so much hate that attitude. I hate the attitude but not my classmates.  Okay, all that said, I can carry on. As I was saying, that teacher of ours used to have a nice and kind attitude with us his students. And his classes were quite good, yes they were. And interesting.  Also he used to realize about our teen problems and stuff. And we the students used to correspond to that kind attitude with effort and struggling to learn and study...

It is not simple at many schools yet and their teachers do whatever they can: they do their best! I only wish to help my colleagues.  I mean that unfortunately at some - only some maybe - Spanish schools yet a lot of English grammar is presented, but no emphasis is put on gaining some communicative competence.  However, this is changing in Spain. And the problem is not simple.  The thing is that some teachers feel in some way compelled to meet a school-year syllabus they think it is rich in grammar. And teaching teens is not simple. And they have not much time. Yet this is changing, or this has already changed, as I said. I’m referring to teaching English or other languages.  Lately I had to teach a student to pass a September exam of English, and a lot of stress had been set at his school on grammar and nothing on winning a communicative competence. His teacher might have done her best anyway! Nevertheless more and more Spanish schools are t...

I’ve returned from an English-language camp for boys. A summer camp. Also I’ve recently taught private tuition to a kid aged 17.  He had problems with his school subject of English. Okay then, as I was teaching him and giving him examples of sentences that appeal to him and meet his life and interests, that young man was finding more motivation at English.  I believe he’s finding his way to success and passing his school subject of English: he has found that English has to do with his life. He’s a great guy. / Photo from: ireland com

  I’ve seen something sensible in the schools I’ve worked in. The teachers treated the teens as if they were responsible people, and these latter ones tried to be so. Also those teachers tried those kids would behave in a mature way. In some way they were treated like they were adults, or something kind of that. In other words the teachers treated the teens in a serious way, by taking into account what the kids said, by taking as something serious and important what the kids said. Well, they were kids but not silly people, they were young but not silly. As a result those kids responded in also a serious way, because they liked to be treated in that way. So they were treated as adults or at least with respect and deference. For example when those teachers wanted to arrange an appointment with such or such students to talk at a tutoring session you could see they were dealing with a serious matter. They were treated with respect and as if they were persons of high...

  A good friend of mine says he feels very free when he obeys. His option is listening and obeying to what he’s told to do – or suggested to do – by somebody superior. Freedom and obedience are not confronted. That also happens with our students: they may prefer and opt for obeying. Even in anthropological terms the person who decides to obey is the one that may be the freest. And all that is completely related to our students’ initiatives. We have to let our students ultimately be free. It’s the only way we can use to educate them in a thorough way. One school principal made me think once when he told me something like I had to have my students silent and attentive but I should let them be free ultimately. Young people – alike as older ones – develop, better and improve themselves as persons when they’re free, and as well when they’re free to obey. / Photo from: ThoughtCo. Kids and teens may get a superior education through reading adequate books! They can enrich...

  Today I’d like to talk, again, about our students. How should I say? I’d like to talk about those people, those persons that have not been born yet. Yesterday I read a short piece of fiction, where children were being thrown into a ditch from a truck, yes, children! Well, you know, it was a story inside the first chapter of a book on ethics, like an example or anecdote. The solution is not abortion, with all my respect. I know about some women’s tragedies, but that is not the solution, I’d say. Have a nice weekend, you all! I wish you all the best! Those creatures are children, people! By no means do I try to raise any controversy. It’s not my style. In case you've aborted, all has a nice remedy. I believe in that. / Photo from: Entrepeneur. The pic is just a nice illustration.

  As I said on the previous post young people, like our students, are capable of all that is great. They’re at the age when they can contain great ideals and some big generosity. Sometimes we may think they’re rather troublesome but if we adults help them in the right way, they can become great people, great persons. We can take advantage of individual tutoring sessions in order to help them take what they have in their inner being and heart. But we grown-ups must set an example. For instance they have the idea of justice very deep inside, and they don’t tolerate we could be more inclined to some students. Some nice exercise we can do when they’re teens is setting the task of writing about themselves. It’s original. And tell them you’re going to read their essays. You for sure will get amazed at what they’ve written and will see many different things and lives. Even you could learn something useful for your daily teaching and treating them. By the way, they’re natur...

  Pheeew! We’re starting the new school year and we need some help, for example by visiting Angela Watson’s blogs. Today I wanted to write a bit about our youngsters. Although sometimes we might think otherwise, young people are passing through an age prone to high ideals. They’re capable of all that is great. They’re generous enough to face great ideals. We should not forget this point. And when talking with them we should pull from the strokes that show they’re capable of those big things in life. I think I’m writing about this issue later or even tomorrow. But please bear in mind about this point: young people can be determined and prone to great ideals. And you may think of the many volunteers who enroll in big enterprises in favor of refugees, or the poor, or the illiterate, or the elderly… or just they’re great citizens or might be so, who can make our countries great too! / Photo from: Police helicopter ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation