Why your student reports are BS
“My boom” (as the Japanese like to say, meaning “what I am really into”) at the moment is Scientific American Mind, and more specifically the free podcasts available on the website- with a special mention for the 60 second ones that can fill in the time between changing from the Yamanote line to the Keihin Tohoku line at Shinagawa station almost exactly. As well as being interesting and often connected in some way with language teaching, Scientific American Mind articles and podcasts are another thing that makes me wonder why people who write about Linguistics and (more) Applied Linguistics are not capable of using language in a way to make their subjects interesting for everyone and easy to read.
Anyhow, a recent one that made me think is an article and 60 second podcast that says memories of subjective feelings are much less reliable than memories of facts. As most student satisfaction questionnaires are based on them remembering their feelings about various parts of the course, seems we might have a problem…
Other stories of TEFL interest on the same site include:
- Doctors telling you to quit is one of the things that has the biggest effect on the success of giving up smoking. If doctors have been taught that patients should be making their own decisions and taught autonomy, like in a certain other profession, this should be enough reason to getting them back to cutting through the crap and telling their patients “Look, you have been studying IELTS for 10 hours and I have been teaching it for 10 years, who do you think has more idea on how to study for the test?”