Occasional Tales

What else is there for me? I’ve hit Unit 7 in the book. My reaction when I saw the content was, “Has another year really passed? Am I going to go through this article yet again?” Before term started I was a little uncertain about teaching the pre-AL students for a fourth year, but I haven’t really had the time so far this term to stop and think about it. For some reason the article in the unit got me thinking about teaching the same material yet again. Of course, I’m not teaching the content of the article. The skill is note taking. I suppose I could change the article, but it wouldn’t really invigorate me. The refrain I’ve been hearing around the office is “tired”. If I was only teaching on one programme, I’d be rather annoyed that the other programme, which is somewhat demanding, is likely to encroach on my time. Some of my colleagues have ridiculous amounts of teaching to the point that they’re coming to working, going home, having tea, a shower, and going to bed. Outside

Here it flaps like a hummingbird’s wings. For the past few weeks I’ve been getting messages about updating Adobe Reader. For some reason (though I can only speculate: my current theory is that this has something to do with state-authorised, malicious pdfs), because the school seems not to like Reader, any attempt to update it crashes into some Windows Registry issue which prevents certain values from being written without admin rights. I’m trying to download the new version of Reader. It instantly leaps to 33% and then seems to get stuck on 48% or so, but progresses very, very slowly after that, and eventually everyone gives up. I’m about to give up and probably find myself stuck with Reader 10.x.x forever. Instead, the school wants us to use Foxit, which I’ve tried and found irritatingly unfamiliar. I have Acrobat at home (being a nuisance because of some bug which insists on installing the latest patch even although I have the latest patch). In educational news, my bra

I’m an educator. (Cue mocking laughter.) I spent last weekend in Malaysia on a training course. This meant having excessive amounts of information pumped into my head, little of which my mind managed to retain. What I do remember clearly is InterBac assessment = lots of work . Lots. (Because I was aware of that, I didn’t make my surprised face.) I also remember that the workshop leader only has ten students. I have about 60 of my own. It’s also not hard for students to be adequate in the InterBac programme. Like the IGCSE ESL mark scheme, the InterBac mark scheme is so relaxed that it’s horizontal. Guaranteed to flatter should be the slogan. In fact, when I was making suggestions about things we could do to stretch the best students, it struck me that EFL is for the hard of thinking (in the “hard of hearing sense”). Yes, I know it’s all about testing language rather than intellect. Once upon a time, the rubrics for different IELTS bands used to refer to the effect a pi