The old pioneer

I’m nearly middle-aged, but try to keep up, you lot.

The past two weeks have been non-stop. Part of this stems from moving on to a new new topic, viz. government. I’ve been producing PowerPoints and worksheets for it almost without ceasing in order to stay ahead of the game.

I’ve dealt with the British government and have turned my attention to the American one. Ms Giggles declared her ignorance of the former, which she seemed to think excused her from doing anything, and because she’s fallen behind again, she’s not going to be producing anything about the US government until too late.

I think the next time we have a meeting, I’m going to insist on knowing where things are at. Morrigan is more or less at the same stage I’m at; Dmitry and Ms Giggles are the gods alone know where; Mr Bradford may be on track.

That means that having started on my next labour today, I’m probably going to have to deal with the structure of the US government by myself. I’m already thinking about filling in at least one class with an episode of The West Wing so that the slowcoaches can catch up.

In essence, I’m carrying the entire department, and will until we get through Social Relationships, which is entirely (?) new this year. (I need to look at the Scheme of Work; at least two parts of this are new.)

Meanwhile, Vlad may recognise the value of English, but he doesn’t really understand the teaching of it, and Dmitry is too inexperienced to know any better. There are plans, albeit verbal, about having a three-tier system, which would sort of mean the partial reintroduction of the vague and nebulous English we used to do here. The bottom line is that our pupils need general English (English B only partly satisfies that requirement because it lacks an assessed listening component) rather than classes that are only focused on one or two aspects of the language.

A few thoughts:

• Speaking: plenty available in class, but students seldom avail themselves of the opportunity, especially the thick ones. There’s a range of abilities from chronic mumblers (mainly female) to the clear and fluent, but only some would benefit from a class devoted largely to speaking.
• Listening: the one thing which English B sorely neglects, although they do get some practice at it. It’s something that needs more practice as well because they’ll be facing real English in English speaking countries where no one’s going to compensate for their low level of proficiency.
• Reading: by and large not a problem unless the student is thick and doesn’t have a dictionary. They don’t read widely enough, and a diet of newspaper and magazine articles are insufficient.
• Writing: a favourite of English B with a wide range of text types, which none of the students can write with any competence because they’ve been trained to produce TOEFL essays and nothing else. Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Mind you, quite a number of the text types are completely useless to prospective university students.