Straw Worm

God knows why but this afternoon I inserted a straw into the pencil sharpener and started to 'sharpen' it. Then Laura, my student said it could be a 'long thin slimy one'.

So here it is:

Ears and Note Part 3

Twenty little boys sh*tting on a plane

The other day one of my adult students told me her observation about her 10-ish child's English. She thinks her child mispronounces things. The example is a song her son keeps singing at home. The way he sings it is "Twenty little boys sh*tting on a plane ..." As you can guess it is a 'remix' of "Ten green bottles ..." Can you imagine the boy singing HIS version of the song twenty times nearly every day? Shame on me, his mum, my B1 level student didn't know the sh* word, now the whole family knows it, happy ending, cheerful faces.

This mother now thinks that her son's English teacher doesn't know the proper pronunciation of the words, this is why the boy sings all kinds of ...?embarrassing?... things. I wouldn't think so. Maybe the two English classes a week are just too few. Maybe the problem is that the song is WRITTEN in the book. (The pronunciation of the letter 'S' in Hungarian is something like 'SH'.) Funny though, we are capable of documenting our lives daily with the help of electronic gadgets. Documentary has become folk art. Why don't we then document our learning with the possible devices?

Phones and MP3 players, iPods

I bet all the kids in the group have a portable device to record the language taught in the classroom. Heretical idea! Students are not allowed to use these thing at school otherwise they would listen to music, take pictures or make videos and violate each other's rights to privacy. Should the students buy the coursebook CD? What? Hands off the family budget! (Worth of 3 litres of petrol.)

I want to find ways to utilize gadgets in students' pockets so that we can avoid utterances like this in the near future:

"Excuse me Sir. Can sh*t here?"

Ears and Note Part 2

My first encounter with the English language was through pop music, of course. Then I learned it at school, where it was rather grammar translation flavoured with a bit of audio-lingual seasoning, I don't mean language labs, even 'listening to the tape' was skipped sometimes. It was something like learning music from notes only, there was no space for learning by ear. (I don't remember my teachers speaking English as a means of communication.) Acquisition was out of reach as far as I can remember.

On the other hand Anglo-Saxon vocal music was always around. The most motivating factor was the few occasions when I had the chance to communicate with people (which was really scarce in Hungary that time.)

What we were tested on was grammar, vocabulary, dialogs and monologues learned by heart, with the slot-filler principle. Consequently all we knew was that.

It was 20 years ago. Very modern at that time.

Now I am an EFL teacher outside the public sector. A considerable part of my work is remedial tutoring/coaching kids whose parents cannot help them with preparing for the school English classes. The aim of their English lessons with me (once a week or twice) to keep up with the 'material' of the school English lessons (3-5 times a week). This is a very small town (12000) and I am not the only one on the shadow education market.

Following up those school English lessons I find that the way they are taught English is very similar to that of my secondary school years. But they are only 6-10 years old! Songs in their coursebooks are used as sort of condiments, can be omitted. Songs are not thought to be serious. 8-year olds have neat vocabulary notebooks with bilingual lists of words. They know the spelling (more or less), the L1 equivalent of the words, the order of the words while many of them are not capable of matching L2 words with pictures. (Nothing complicated, skirt, trousers etc.) Poor Piaget. The least important factor seems to be pronunciation. The content tested is the list of words. They can read English with quite funny pronunciation. Isn't it like learning sheet music instead of playing music? Isn't speaking the primary form of the language? Isn't writing over-rated?

Ears and Note Part 1

For a time I have been thinking about the idea that here, in my area literacy is overrated when it comes to teaching young children English. This reminds me of the way playing musical instruments is taught.

A childhood memory

When I was a child we used to visit my mom's cousin, Aunt Olga and her family for a couple of days every two months or so. Aunt Olga had a daughter, who had a piano, which I just loved. I enjoyed playing it. After a time I was able to play tunes familiar from TV, children's songs were so easy for me to play, adults around were amazed. No wonder my parents decided to buy me a piano and enroll me in the local music school.

The first year was a preparatory year, it was called solfege. We actually learned folk songs, solfege, we clapped different rhythm patterns, and we learned to read and interpret notes, I mean musical notation, sheet music.

It was in the second year when I started to attend piano lessons. I was able to play music on the piano and I enjoyed making music then.

My very first piano lesson was the total disappointment. I had been practicing hard because I wanted to show my piano teacher what I was already able to play. To my surprise she was not interested.

First thing I was NOT even allowed to open up the fall board of the piano, I was NOT allowed to touch the keys!

After this first shock there came the others. To cut a long story short, in the third year of my piano studies I decided to give it up. I hated to practice, all I got was just the notes on the paper, the five lines. My initial enjoyment of music was gone.

Now I know that learning music from musical notation is very important. I am absolutely sure the process of learning how to turn sheet music into an order of pushing different keys with my various fingers contributed to the development of my early childhood brain and all, but what I lost was music. Wasn't it music to be learned? I don't know.

About two decades later I met a beautiful young pianist, mother of one of my students. She occasionally took one-to-one English lessons with me and once I asked her about her career as an artist. It turned out that she had the very same piano teacher as I used to have, causing her the same feelings of disappointment. She was an extremely talented little girl, so she was not discouraged at all. She would put the storybooks on the piano and played the pictures of the stories. She did NOT lose music.

Now jump to my rebel teenager years. I fell for heavy metal music, consequently I wanted to play the guitar.

of course I had my electric guitar, later an over-driven amp and no sheet music. All we could rely on was our ears. It WAS music, as much as thrash metal can be labelled music. This was something to enjoy. Later of course I took classical guitar and jazz guitar lessons whereby my skill of interpreting musical notes was an advantage, but the clear aim was to play real music and that was definitely characterised by using ears! Just to make sure I started learning classical guitar at the same time (I was convinced that the traditional way is necessary). My classical guitar teacher didn't even play the piece to be learned, not once did I see him play the guitar! (I admired him anyway, he was a contrabass player as well and he often played some jazzy tunes on the contrabass.)

Surprisingly I haven't become a popstar, not even a jazz guitarist, but an English teacher.

Inspiration

Today I read Lőrincz Tamas's entry My five reasons for leaving the UAE – reason 3 which made me think about inspiration.


I learned the meaning of the word “inspiration” about 3 years ago, when I divorced. In those days one of my students asked me if I was afraid of the change. She asked who I would get the inspiration from now that I was alone.

What? Inspiration? I’d thought inspiration had nothing to do with the presence or absence of a hubby. I thought she’d been a bit on the pathetic side.
Some months later I knew what she meant. After quitting a fruitless marriage I was there with no one to pull me back, no one to criticize and make me just fling my ideas.I understood what inspiration was. When in the presence of certain students of mine I had really good solutions in mind whilst other people just blocked me from thinking.

Inspiration comes from everywhere and everyone around if you don’t cheat yourself and it is you who is in control of the ’everywhere and everyone around’. Now I think anytime when I changed or fled forward I changed my ’everywhere and everyone around’. That’s a good thing. Yeah, if you can’t find the inspiration you need you have got to move on. Or is it just an excuse? But I’ve never felt so fine so the idea must be okay. Or no? Yes? Yes. No? Yes.

As a schoolteacher I used to be a walking failure. I worked just for a short while at the beginning of my teaching career for a year and for some months as a substitute teacher. I was a nice teacher but not tough enough. Being tough was just simply excluded from my teacher toolbox. I don’t think there was anything wrong with my teaching skills. Just that time many of those kids had no respect.

By respect I mean a deposit of trust in a stranger. That I invest my attention in her and trust the teacher will be fun. Nowadays it is very difficult to gain that kind of anticipated respect. (Having been a private teacher for long years now I think the money I charge for the classes replaces this trust.)

So I left institutional education and considered the whole business a failure of my personality as a teacher.
Now I see this was triumph, as since then I have been teaching on the other side, in the “shadow”. I teach people outside school, mostly one-to-one. This requires a range of skills and attitudes different from those demanded in public education. Lessons are less frequent and the trainer must be more flexible. Very flexible. And you cannot motivate through marks, forget about rewarding in the traditional sense. Consequently I have developed a set of principles.

• I have very few lessons to teach my students English (many times it is restricted to one class a week), so I have to make them devote much of their free time on learning, it can be done through engaging them in authentic, relevant and enjoyable activities. I struggle every day to produce individual solutions for everyone out of my pocket; they just have to find their own ways to English.
• I am not good at rewarding “good” behaviour, so I can just rely on their inner motivation.
• As each lesson is different and my students usually come with unexpected demands (they want to learn this and that—out of the blue) I must be flexible and thus the material/content is flexible and negotiable (without the internet I wouldn’t be able to do it). But on the other hand it must be finely tuned, input-wise comprehensible. It requires routine and also offers a great deal of enjoyment through challenge.
• As for my definition of the role of a teacher, I believe a teacher is a window-opener. I help someone open a window, actually it is a joint-venture, WE open it. They look out of this window and see other windows. These new windows are often invisible for my eyes. They are their own windows. My aim is to enable them to go there to those new windows and open them, just as I have already shown them in the case of the first window we opened together.

Funny, sometimes I read thoughts similar to these queer ideas of mine. Therefore I suppose my existence as a teacher is not altogether a failure. Or is it?