I think I shall give up my job

In a way, I am a better teacher than I have ever been. I am very comfortable in front of a class (unless they are being riotous) and I know my stuff very well. I am pretty good at planning a lesson. I feel that the students trust me.

But there are aspects of the job that I hate. One of them is to do with retention. The teachers are leaned on very hard to make sure that all the students take their exams before they leave. This is sometimes impossible, for example, in the case of bereavements - usually one or two a year have to suddenly return to Germany (etc.) in tears and never return. But sometimes it is simply a matter of making a students prioritise the exam over their job, and this is where bullying comes in. I am not a bully. I do not spend 15 minutes in the corridor with a student pushing her into telling her boss that she cannot do her job on a certain day because she has an exam. Especially when she is clearly scared of letting someone down and promises to come on another occasion for the exam. I would rather try to find another session for the "mop-ups".

Even though my boss does it with a kind look on his face, he is actually a bully, and what's more, I think he knows that I think so, just as I know he thinks I am far too soft.

I also hate the meaningless target-setting and the ILP's. I don't like the fact that to get the funding, all the students have to do an exam that means nothing outside the UK. OK, it's an exam, but it has no kudos. I look at the reading test and I think that some questions are unfair - impossible to teach to. I have a degree in English Language and Literature and I can't answer correctly some of the Level 1 reading test questions. The answers are mysterious to me. That shouldn't happen, but I am afraid the tests are not set as carefully as they should be, or indeed, as they used to be.

I like teaching but it's the other stuff - the endless box ticking - and covering our backs for the inspections - that bother me. Most weeks I am thinking: I can't really be bothered with this any more, and I find it weird that my colleagues love it, and will spend hours trying to decide whether to award one mark for pronunciation or not.

what makes my job hard

What makes my job hard is that I plan and teach 2 lessons on Monday which are both for mixed level groups, so I plan 2 lessons for each lesson. The first group is one with almost illiterate Bangladeshi ladies together with Upper Intermediates who want to take exams at Levels 1 and 2. So there is a lot of work in teaching them. I drive for 25 minutes breaking the speed limit in order to get to the next venue. The second group is the mums who come for the creche, and get a free 2 hour lesson once a week. They absolutely love it and are great students, but they are a large class and mixed levels (14 students between Pre-intermediate and Upper intermediate/Advanced); they take a lot of organising and the paperwork for them is absolutely irrelevant but has to be done in case we are inspected. And it is all worthwhile because I particularly enjoy that class, especially when even the shy ones open up and talk all about their experiences of childbirth (I have one man too, who takes his day off on Monday especially to come to the class, and he has to hear all about that and in return tells us about horrific accidents at work.) They all want grammar and vocabulary and are particularly keen on homework.

I sometimes feel rather happy after this has gone well, and go to work at college to do the registers, answer emails and think about lessons further on in the week. In the evening I do yoga. On Tuesday I have to be early at the college to get a parking space and I teach in the morning and in the afternoon. My class is made up of unemployed people, who are sent by the Jobcentre, but in spite of this they are usually co-operative students. There is only one who really seems to be wasting our time deliberately, but one is wasting our time accidentally, one has an addiction problem and is unreliable, one has a youth-related problem and seldom attends, and one is a full-time carer with children who is often called away. So they do have all kinds of problems but I teach them as well as I can and try to get some rigour into them. But I have them for 4 hours (used to be 5 hours twice a week) and I make it as interesting as I can. they also need some employability taught every week, which falls to me, and some of them are taking exams, and that's difficult to organise. Also new ones arrive all the time. We had 6 more in the last 2 weeks. But when it all goes well it does give me such a high! The unfortunate thing is that the teaching takes a lot of adrenaline and afterwards I am very tired. After 2 days of adrenaline my eyes are smarting and I am soooo tired, but I also teach from 9 am until 9 pm on Weds. Then I have a day off and then I teach on Friday a.m. - a different place. Then I have to start planning for the next Monday and Tuesday. The planning takes a long time usually because of the mixed levels.

 The unfortunate thing is that when I am observed the assessor always comes to the evening class, which is maddening, I am too tired for it really, but I have got something quite good planned for my next observation. Which was meant to be taking place tomorrow and now it isn't, so I have to plan something else, but I am frankly toooooo tiiiiiiired. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Teaching again

It all went pretty well last week but I am worried about Maybury, where I have a class of only 7, and only 3 of them are level 2, and one of the Level 2's is going to struggle horribly with the reading and writing exams. Bellfields, my supposedly disadvantaged class of mums with children in the creche, was popular and fun, and well-attended, I got a good buzz from that class, and I have them again tomorrow. Routes into Work was a small class - a group really - but we had a funny bunch, with M from Turkey who is young, handsome and cheeky, and S from Iran who is older and has strayed from dementia towers without quite knowing why, and 2 ladies from Iran and from Spain who have no particular problems, but must be wondering what on earth they have got into. Luckily I have a volunteer for that class, who really helps me to manage them. My level 2 class is a huge roomful of 18 young adult students who are all (nearly all) very fluent in English and have plenty to say. They can be great fun (they barrack each other) and the thing is to get to know them as individuals (not easy with 18 of them) and at the same time keep the lesson moving along. No volunteer; and I have never taught that kind of group before (3 hours) so I hope to get a bit of advice from my colleague Sue on Tuesday.

Beginning teaching again

I have begun teaching and stopped several times and I'm not scared, but I am nervous and I keep scratching my arm - sign of nerves coming out as eczema.

When I first started teaching the First Certificate Class I had a student who was very noisy and dominant. A dominant student always wants to be a rival to the teacher. The first thing she did that irritated me was her noisy breakfast. She would bring in a can of coke and a pastry from Gregg's for her breakfast and make a great parade of tearing the bag and opening the can, and I asked her to not make such a loud noise with it all. She was not supposed to eat of drink in class at all and eventually I said that she would have to eat her breakfast before she came into the class because it was so disturbing. She acted as though I had infringed her human rights. What a sulk she went into! I ignored it. Then came the day that I criticized her speaking. I told her about mistakes in word order and in omitting articles, and using the wrong prepositions. She just didn't believe me. She was so used to people telling her that she spoke great English, because she was fluent, but there were a lot of mistakes in there and she did not accept that. (She was very proud of the fact that she was engaged to an English man and very excited about her wedding). After that speaking assessment she was even more insulted with me and she decided to talk all the way through all my lessons - I taught that class for three hours a day. She had a pal who was also a big sulker and together they formed a partnership that would not answer any of my questions and behaved as though I wasn't there.

I really couldn't decide what to do. She had paid for the lessons - they all had, and they were preparing for an exam and it was my job to make sure they were ready. For two months I just carried on teaching the ones who were good, marking their homework and so on, and trying to ignore the hostile ones. I used to dread going into work. Then one day I walked in after the break and found that there was a conflict going on. A young Spanish man was telling the noisy girl that she was ruining the class, and after that she left the class and didn't come back until the exam. Phew!

(When she came back for the exam she arrived with the famous fiance. He looked about 15 and was about half her size.)

Anyway I decided I had made the wrong decision with that student, and next time I would nip any such behaviour in the bud as soon as it started. The next class I was assigned was an advanced class and I was rather excited about all the interesting things we could do because of their higher level of English and the fact that they were not an exam class. But on the second or third day a student came in who ignored me completely and talked to the rest of the class as though I wasn't there. She talked throughout the lesson in spite of me asking her direct questions and asking her to listen. So after the class I tackled her and said: why do you come to the lessons if you are just going to talk? She said: "I don't need lessons. I have a job in Boot's! I am only here for the Visa." She was very proud that she had a job in Boot's. (All the students needed to attend classes for 15 hours a week because they were on student Visas.) So I thought about this and how the agony would go on and on if I didn't stop her behaviour. So I went and told the Director of Studies about her. Ida could be lovely but she could put people right down. Ida came and fetched the young woman out of my class the next day. She tore her off a strip and the woman came back in floods of tears. She had clearly been humiliated and she blamed me for this. So Ida put her in another class.

Was the result good? No. The whole class hated me. They sat and stared at me for an hour and half every day and refused to answer any questions. I couldn't make them write, either. After the break they all left except Magda. I ended up just teaching Magda. My life was still horrible, apart from the time the Hungarian came on holiday. He took lessons for 2 weeks as part of his holiday. He loved my lessons and was really enthusiastic. Apart from Magda, that was the only nice part, for three months.

So there you are. What was the better decision? I don't know.

Also, people think that teaching adults is easy. The fact is, they don't always behave like adults.

Employed at last!

I went back to the College of FE I had visited before Christmas. See previous post: I am a teacher. ESOL = English for Speakers of Other Languages.

The guys who were my students for the micro-teach pretty much offered me a job straight away. I was so relieved. I go from apprehension to delight, but generally, I am glad to be employed at a proper College again, and if I am bombarded by work-related emails I am happy with that too! I am looking forward to meeting my colleagues.

Also, we were broke before, and I shall be glad to make a contribution towards the expenses that keep cropping up.

I am a teacher

I went to be interviewed for another job yesterday. It took a vast amount of courage to do it, because it is a long time since I taught, and I am rather out of the habit of thinking of myself as a teacher, and more in the habit of thinking of myself as working through a business process in order to achieve outcomes.

I had to teach the Head of the Department and the Head of Curriculum the grammar point Wish plus past tense. I taught them pretty much as I would have taught a class but I forgot to get them to do a production task (writing their own wishes). But it was a textbook lesson and included some Powerpoint slides to make in interesting and I had also made some exercises which they enjoyed.

I wish I had got the job!

They gave to job to someone who was already working in the department! But I was a very close second and the thing was, I remembered that I enjoyed being a teacher and the sense of responsibility and performance. But afterwards I could not sleep and that's what I don't like about it - the adrenaline comes and goes and the end result is that one feels terribly tired. That's why teaching suits the young. When I was at College I explained to our tutor that I couldn't sleep at all after evening teaching - that I couldn't wind down afterwards whether it had gone well or gone badly. And she said she was exactly the same! Even with all the confidence and calmness she exuded.