When you say listening is boring

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Do you really mean you don’t understand?

PreAL α’s Learner Diaries (which I wasn’t really expecting at all) this week made several references to the listening practice which I’ve been giving students every Friday in recent weeks. The comments are either that it’s boring or they fell asleep. New flash! Listening is practical not entertaining, you idiots.

I give the PreAL classes listening on a Friday partly because that’s my worst day of the week and I prefer to let someone else take the strain, and partly because they need the practice. I’m not giving them listening because I’m being capricious or lazy, but they do seem to be confused about the purpose of the classes. PreAL α seem particularly confused, but they also strike me as being a particularly arrogant group of little emperors and empresses.

I’ll be returning both classes’ exams tomorrow, but with injunctions about seeing me in the office next week if they have further questions about the answers, which I know will come from one or two mark hunters. They can let me know at the end of class if I’ve botched the maths.

I am, I confess, fed up with both classes. PreAL α has mistaken achievement at a mediocre level for genius. They will be insufferable in a couple of years from now. PreAL β is a haven of dimwitted low-achievers who will blight my life next year once all the vaguely decent pupils have gone off to the HL class. [30.08.14. Actually, someone else (who deserved them) got all the SL students. I got the HL students from Ass α, whose general proficiency in English is at SL level.]

Normally at this point in time, the academic differences between the two classes have been slight to non-existent. This is the first year when the percentage gap is perilously close to double figures. Nor is this dichotomy peculiar to English. I don’t know whether we’re going to try and make the vegetables switch to the Core exam (which we ought to do), but Terence, Hank, Nero, Vincent, Elaine, and the other original vegetables are suddenly going to look like geniuses in retrospect.

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