Occasional Tales

No, no, it’s real enough. Probably. We’ve managed to get our full complement of teachers even though it seemed that we wouldn’t. Our original new English teacher never made it because she’d already signed another contract and seems to have been fishing. Colonel Blimp and I both suspect she would’ve been difficult. In her place, we have an Australian. I don’t wish to cast aspersions, but as their year is completely out of sync with ours (they have their finals in October), I have to wonder what our man’s motivation is. He has almost no EFL experience, and no IB or IGCSE experience. This may not matter too much, but IB is very philosophy driven. To wander off on a tangent, why is there not IB teacher training college where the drones can be trained to think the IB way? At the end of the process, neutered works emerge spouting the IB leaner profile, and approaches to teaching and learning by heart. The problem here is the lack of international mindedness. ¶ It must be great whe...

Out with the old; in with the new. I decided to change the name and address of the blog because < insert your reason here >. The exams have arrived, but so far I’ve been spared anything too long, dreary and onerous. Paper 1 seemed to be fairly benign this year. I note that the true-false justification questions were scattered instead of being concentrated in a single section. The options in Paper 2 also seemed to be better than last year’s choices. We finished the unit planning last week, although I suspect we’re meant to do it per subtopic, which is just reinventing the wheel with the copious quantities of box-filling bollocks this exercise requires. In truth, I don’t think this is at all helpful, and is even less helpful when you have inexperienced people doing it. The basic issue is that I don’t think you can actually construct a workable unit from this so long as there are copious quantities of bullshit getting in the way. It’s also a bit of a waste of time bec...

And less of the usual. I’ve now been told I’m definitely teaching PAL and AS. The former will be more of the same. The latter will be different although I don’t know how different. I don’t know whether I’ll be teaching Standard Level IB only or whether I’ll also be teaching Higher Level. Only a small number of AS students will be doing HL English, which means that they may be integrated into the IB English classes, thus leaving me with the rest; or I might be teaching them anyway. It would possibly be nice to teach a smaller class. Although I have no problems with standing in front of large groups, the bigger they are, the less personal it all becomes. Group work is a nod to reasonable class sizes where reasonable class sizes would be better in the first place. On the other hand, I had groups of six students in Tongzhou and Fuzhou doing IELTS who mostly just sat in class wasting my time. There was the giggling idiot with his ¥8,000 mobile phone; there were the ferrets, a pa...