Archive for the ‘Kaplan’ Category

Actually, this very nice article on EF and Kaplan in California  is far more fair than my scandal raking post title (note to The Guardian- real journalism on TEFL is possible!), but thought it might be a good chance to get some juicy anecdotes on host families from commenters

To get you started, the best student story I heard was being so hungry that they tried to sneakily cook a potato (singular) while their host mother was out but on hearing the car pull into the driveway they had to run upstairs with a boiling hotpotato and eat the half cooked evidence. They were paying 40 pounds a week including meals in London zone 4, so my sympathy is tempered somewhat, even for those who lived in Catford

In reverse order by when they appeared on the blog (the first two are new):

“Now Skinner did reign in the land of psychology, and it came to pass that Chomsky smote Skinner and begat Krashen, and Krashen begat Long, and lo, Long begat Merrill Swain…”

A biblical history of SLA by Scott Thornbury, “What good is Second Language Acquisition Theory?”, English Teaching Professional magazine, March 2008

“… we need to be wary of taking SLA theory too seriously. And we should be suspicious of those who argue that knowledge of theory is a professional obligation. Teaching is a highly skilled activity, but it is not, alas, rocket science. In fact, it is probably not a science at all”

Thornbury, “What good is Second Language Acquisition Theory?”, English Teaching Professional magazine, March 2008

“I appear to be regarded as something similar to flat-pack furniture: cheap, does the job and aside from initial construction, can be left to own devices without much attention.”

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/tefl/young-learners/alt-quote-of-the-day/

“…but you would have to remember always that your work was to teach a small boy English. There is a great deal of drudgery in that. Do you think you have the patience for it?”

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tesol/eikaiwa-through-history-quote-of-the-day/

“Kim Min-suk, spokeswoman of JungChul Language School, said that her school does not employ Asian English teachers because she believes the students prefer Caucasians.

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/blue-eyed-english-teachers-quote-of-the-day/

“The Japanese had very primitive ideas concerning the fitness of men to teach… Anyone who could speak English could evidently teach it. The idea of a trained professional foreign teacher was never entertained by them… The “Professors” at first obtained were often ex-bartenders, soldiers, sailors, clerks, etc. When teaching, with pipe in mouth, and punctuating their instructions with oaths, or appearing in the classroom top-heavy, the Japanese concluded that such eccentricities were merely national peculiarities.”

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tesol/gaijin-teachers-quote-of-the-day/

“I will practice my English with you, if you will do me the honor”

“You keep alive just to practice your English?”

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/teaching/teaching-abroad/asia/teaching-in-japan/how-teaching-english-can-save-your-life-quote-of-the-day/

‘to me, “distance learning” means an unusually long classroom’

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/culture/distance-learning-quote-of-the-day/ (more…)

Hopefully it’s okay for me to reprint this editorial in full (and in the classic self-deluding style of a habitual blogging copyright breaker I am going to take the fact that they haven’t disabled the copy function on the online version as some kind of permission), because not only can I think of no way to say what it says better, I can possibly find nothing else to say on the matter ever:

“In this issue of the Gazette we have a number of stories featuring global giants in possible trouble over employment law. We have language schools operating in the UK and owned by an American media giant (page 1). We have a UK-based company owned by a multinational founded in Sweden recruiting for schools from Russia to Indonesia (page 3).
   The English-teaching world is becoming increasingly corporatised, globalised and – to judge by the contents of the anonymous envelopes sent into the Gazette’s offices by desperate teachers – staggeringly ignorant of the basics of employment law. So here are a few handy hints for employers:
RULE ONE: You are the employer. That means it is your job to know employment law.
RULE TWO: You need to know the law in all the countries in which you operate. Here is a pointer for school franchisors. If you are recruiting for a franchisee you may well in effect be operating as an employment agency. So your contracts need to comply not only with the law in the country of employment, but also with the legislation where the office doing the recruitment is located.
RULE THREE: There are certain authorities it is advisable not to disagree with. They include the US Supreme Court, the European Court and, as the British Council have found out (see page 4), the Russian tax police. What the US Supreme Court says is law in every state in the Union. What the European Court says applies country in the European Union – which means, language-school owners please note, that rolling up holiday pay into the hourly, weekly or monthly wage is illegal everywhere from Copenhagen to Capri. If you want to do business in Russia, don’t argue with the Russian tax police, whatever the law actually says.
RULE FOUR: It is not a good idea to ignore the law just because you feel it to be impractical, unworkable or just too expensive to comply with.
RULE FIVE: It is a really bad idea to tell your staff that you know what the law is but that you are not going to comply with it because it is impractical, unworkable or just too expensive. To compound this by telling your staff in writing is completely idiotic.
RULE SIX: With the notable exception of Germany, in most countries the tax authorities don’t like the idea of teachers being freelance. This is because it is easier for a tax inspector to get hold of a school than a teacher. You can tell the teachers they’re responsible for their own tax, but this may not stop the taxman turning up at the school gate.
RULE SEVEN: If you are about to break one of the preceding rules, ask yourself, do I want what I am doing to appear on the front page of the Gazette? If the answer is no, don’t do it.
And finally, a handy hint for teachers: If you think your employer is breaking the law, don’t just send us a whingeing email (and if you do, don’t do it using your work email account). Your horror story may well be true but we need documentary evidence to prove it. If we can prove it, we can print it. ”

And an extract from the article on Kaplan to show you what they are talking about:

‘it is true that the European Court of Justice has ruled this practice to be “unlawful”… However, the practical ramifications of accruing holiday pay for hourly paid workers according to this principle [the court ruling] are complex and unworkable.’

i.e. We don’t agree with the law, so we won’t keep to it. So there.

To add a bit of culture, here is the original Blast, which our mate Mel has done a very good job of making a TEFL version of: Blast Manifesto