Post by Bonobo on Nov 17, 2017 22:59:45 GMT 1
PS. In my uni times I was taught that an English teacher isn`t the same as a teacher of English. Later I found out that only a few people stick to that old rule. What should I do???
Every day I am exposed to an indirect contact with two dozen teachers of English through my private tutoring. Pupils and students report to me what happened in the English class and they comment on their teachers` actions. Sometimes those comments are not nice and then I can`t help being critical, too because some teachers do (or don`t do) things which are completely unacceptable to me.
The main vice of some teachers of English seems their incompetence. An example: a 5th grade pupil asked me to check his homework. He made a few mistakes in a grammar exercise, including Present Simple tense in a sentence with "today." I corrected it but he told me that their teacher had clearly admonished pupils not to use Present Continuous in such contexts: "Today I am taking a bus to work."
A few times a day I have to correct the pronunciation of my students, e.g., when they try to utter "apple" like "April" or vice versa. Or the common mispronunciation of words like "they" as "day," or "three" as "free" etc etc. Students always say it was the teacher who spoke so in class. One student even told me that his teacher forbade him to use good pronunciation which I was trying to teach him at home.
This inaptitude to provide quality English teaching is characteristic to elementary school teachers. The problem is many of them are not original teachers of English. They finished various studies 20, 15 years ago and became teachers of biology, Polish, geography, etc. Later they realised they would benefit more from teaching a foreign language so they enrolled postgraduate two-year courses and gained a new profession.
Why are they employed at all? Probably there are still not enough teachers of the language so principals suppose it is better to keep a lousy one than have no teacher at all. Once I thought it mostly applied to rural schools but today I see it is a global problem.
I am not a saint myself, I have my limits, too, but for goodness`s sake, I don`t do such silly things in class.

Every day I am exposed to an indirect contact with two dozen teachers of English through my private tutoring. Pupils and students report to me what happened in the English class and they comment on their teachers` actions. Sometimes those comments are not nice and then I can`t help being critical, too because some teachers do (or don`t do) things which are completely unacceptable to me.
The main vice of some teachers of English seems their incompetence. An example: a 5th grade pupil asked me to check his homework. He made a few mistakes in a grammar exercise, including Present Simple tense in a sentence with "today." I corrected it but he told me that their teacher had clearly admonished pupils not to use Present Continuous in such contexts: "Today I am taking a bus to work."
A few times a day I have to correct the pronunciation of my students, e.g., when they try to utter "apple" like "April" or vice versa. Or the common mispronunciation of words like "they" as "day," or "three" as "free" etc etc. Students always say it was the teacher who spoke so in class. One student even told me that his teacher forbade him to use good pronunciation which I was trying to teach him at home.
This inaptitude to provide quality English teaching is characteristic to elementary school teachers. The problem is many of them are not original teachers of English. They finished various studies 20, 15 years ago and became teachers of biology, Polish, geography, etc. Later they realised they would benefit more from teaching a foreign language so they enrolled postgraduate two-year courses and gained a new profession.
Why are they employed at all? Probably there are still not enough teachers of the language so principals suppose it is better to keep a lousy one than have no teacher at all. Once I thought it mostly applied to rural schools but today I see it is a global problem.
I am not a saint myself, I have my limits, too, but for goodness`s sake, I don`t do such silly things in class.

