Archive for the ‘Humanistic language teaching’ Category

“Our profession is notorious for exploiting its most valuable asset – language teachers – for financial gain. I remember a teacher recalling taking a summer job where he and his fellow teachers struggled to teach competently in a school with sub-standard facilities and scant resources. He had a vivid memory of the owner arriving in a Rolls Royce and announcing that further cost-cutting measures were necessary. I think that says it all.”

Sounds like TEFLtrade is back on the case… (more…)

I’ve been ruminating on for several years of how Continuing Professional Development like observations, workshops and being given responsibility for a supplementary file or two often start off seeming like an opportunity and then gradually come to seem like just unpaid work that benefits the school more than you. While I’ve been thinking, someone else has been writing- and has summarized the situation in a simple and very direct letter in this month’s Humanizing Language Teaching Letters Page:

“Dear Ms Kryszewska

I wrote to you sometime ago - after I had been enthused by Mario Rinvolucri - and told you I’d be submitting to HLT. You very kindly sent me back the guidelines. I apologise for not getting back to you sooner.

I’ve since received your hand-out: “13 Reasons Why You Might Want To Write For HLT” which you circulated via e-mail to all the readers of HLT.

Unfortunately, as always in this exploitative industry of ours, there is no question of payment for this extra work. This is not your fault. I’m sure, as always, there is no budget for this in my school.

However, I have already produced many worksheets for my school and taken several teacher-training sessions without payment, and, to be frank, am sick and tired of not being remunerated for my time and effort. I can’t feed my family by “raising my profile in the company”.

As it happens, I already share creative ideas and infect my colleagues with enthusiasm on a day-to-day basis out of an feeling of basic human solidarity, which the people with their hands on the purse strings in our industry would do well to emulate. Perhaps I am harking back to a golden age of the 1970’s when teachers originally set up schools as co-operatives which have since been taken over by mercenary, corporate EFL barons who place cost effectiveness over pedagogy every time.

I object to a premiership elite of pop star EFL methodologists being handsomely rewarded, while the rest of have to slum it in the lower leagues on casual contracts and insulting rates of pay, wondering whether we’ll be timetabled out next week or not. With the greatest of respect to Mario Rinvolucri, whose work I admire immensely, I think it shows insensitivity and disrespect to expect others to produce for gratis what he does for love and money.

Instead of a school asking teachers to contribute for free, one sure way of avoiding the kind of de-motivation and stuck-in-a-rut-ness, would be to stop undervaluing our contribution every day of the working week by paying us a decent wage in the first place.

Yours ”

(End of quote. Name not published, but I would put money on this person working for International House, as this almost exactly echoes what people who worked for them in Madrid who did my DELTA with me used to say)

My twoyenworth on this matter,  slightly changed since I’ve been in Japan, is:

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Following my own advice for automated teachers, I’ve been trying to use my search for something to write about Japan and or teaching English on my blog as a way of expanding my horizons rather than shrinking them. Recent semi-successful attempts include:

I’ve been dipping back into Eastern Standard Time, which was my bible to accessible Japanese culture when I first arrived in Japan (more serious guides to ikebana and what have you might have put me off for life) . Eastern Standard Time is a guide to Asian influence on American culture that has taught me just as much about America as it has about Japan and the rest of Asia, but anyway is highly recommended and is a great way of making sure that the things you learn about Japan are things you can actually talk about and interest people with when you go back home- a difficult task, believe me…

I’ve also just started Culture Matters, a debunking of Guns, Germs and Steel that is considerably more difficult to read but a bit more relevant to those living abroad and wanting to understand and talk about what they see around them and compare to other places. More about this soon now that I’ve remember that I’m reading it.

In exactly the same way, I can’t remember how Orientalism by Edward W.Said made it back from my bedside into my bookshelves, but will have to start reading again soon and let you know if it’s worth struggling through or not.

So, finally to a book I have actually finished recently- “Summerhill School- A New View of Childhood” by A.S.Neill.  A.S.Neill was one of the most famous proponents of free schools- at Summerhill students don’t have to come to lessons and can decide on most of the school rules in school meetings three times a week, where every student has an equal vote with every member of staff. Despite the fact that he supported the child raising theories of Dr (not Mr) Spock (something that Dr Spock himself later said he didn’t if I remember correctly) and had some very odd friends, from his book Neill (as all the staff and students called him) seems to be a genuinely undogmatic and questioning guy who was just trying to do the best for the kids he taught on a day to day basis, and who came up with what seemed to be radical ways of teaching at the time just because he had seen everything else he had tried fail- a genuinely humble approach that is as rare in education as it is in every other field.

The fact that he developed his theories in very particular circumstances means that you have to be very careful when trying to generalise that as principles for education at all, let alone taking it into entirely different fields and using Summerhill as support for changing EFL- but here are some thoughts of how A.S.Neill might have done the TEFL thing anyway:

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A few posts ago I promised to dish the dirt on the world of the reviews of English teaching materials, a part of the biz that I have been involved in in various ways for 8 years or so now. Apart from the difficulty of knowing how much that person’s opinion should matter to you in your teaching situation (something reviewers can try to deal with by stating at the end of the review who the materials might be suitable for, but that of course is just an opinion too), if you don’t know much about the person writing the review and/ or the publication it is in it isn’t as easy to choose the suitable pinch of salt as it is when reading the Guardian (take all their views, move 15 degrees to the right and there you have the truth) or right wing radio shows (mirror image of same). Here are some of my own experiences that might give you some idea of how that kind of research might be worth your while before trusting the reviewer and buying a new textbook:

In the worst example I have been personally involved in, a well known TEFL magazine contacted me to ask me if (more…)

There is a rumour going round that the ever-increasing practice of EFL publishers based outside English-speaking countries (especially Greece and Spain) pretending to be more English than the Queen’s tea has reached silly new heights.　

One Greece-based English language publisher (although you wouldn’t know it from the address on the back of their books, which is the address of someone’s Granny’s shed in Buckinghamshire), long infamous for using fake names for its (Greek) writers has lost a potentially ground-breaking deal with Mario Rinvolucri (King of Humanistic Language Teaching) after asking him to write his next book as ‘Mark Richards’ because they ‘don’t want it looking like some Italian wrote it’.