TEFL Why oh why Part Three
…Why does no one ever listen to me??
Rather than a complaint about how your friends back home ask about your experiences abroad for 10 seconds and then get back to gossiping about Britney, I’m talking here about students who meet your top-spec up-to-date grammar explanations (gathered through nightly use of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English for alternate reading and weights practice) with skeptical looks, “my other teacher said…”, “Yeah, riiiight!”, “No, that’s wrong” and/ or spitting out of chewing tobacco. Reasons include:
- You remind them of their pathetic pussy-whipped salaryman father, so nothing you say counts until they also hear it from their mother
- It’s due to sexual tension that will flare up in increasingly intense fights until you end up snogging and have an ultimately doomed opposites-attract relationship like Bruce Willis and Cybil Sheppard in Moonlighting.
- You corrected yourself 17 times before you finally got the correct explanation up on the board
- Your perfectly correct grammatical explanation up on the board has 12 spelling mistakes in it
- Another teacher has started a whispering campaign against you
- They were brainwashed by their primary school teachers that the grammar explanations of native speakers is a kind of cultural imperialism
- Your body language and sweaty patch on the back of your shirt shout lack of confidence in what you are saying
- They’ve just found out how cheap and short a TEFL course is
- They dated the last teacher, and are taking out the break up on you
- Their last teacher used to teach them fake grammar points just for a laugh
- They are trying to make a supportive face rather than a skeptical one, but it all comes out wrong since their stroke
- They picked up their intonation from a late-1990s American teenager, so even they don’t know when they are being ironic
- They have learnt how much time you spent on your blog this morning when you should have been planning your lesson (or is that just me…)
And if that ain’t enough for yer, when I was in a more serious mood I actually wrote some sensible reasons and ideas on how to tackle the problems of doubting students, available on Usingenglish.com here.
