"Always look on the bright side of life."

I thought that my last posts have been a little on the dark side so I thought I'd write something more positive. So here are some things I've learnt over the last week;

1 I don't know as much as I thought about computers.

2 How to use Word for something other than very simple texts.

3 What it feels like to be a student again.

4 What it feels like to put in a full day's work and then study on top of that.

5 How to learn through a foreign language rather just the language itself.

6 What it feels like when your teacher just races through the materials without checking whether you've understood it.

7 That I need to slow down as a teacher sometimes and that we have to finish the page/chapter/unit/book is no excuse.

8 A whole new area of vocabuary in Greek since the lessons are in Greek and we all use the Greek language version of Windows XP.

9 Your fellow student can be the best teaching resource at your disposal.

10 Teachers are the most critical students LOL.

taught to death

Or at least that is how it feels. Today in the lessons we had a new instructor who seems hell bent on boring us to death with jargon. The machine gun style of delivery combined with a voice so harsh it could qualify as a weapon makes the three hours we have here seem like ten.

You know the kind of thing; the teacher who prides themselves on covering the requisite amount of material whether the students have learnt it or not.

"Who cares if they don't understand the important thing is that we covered three chapters."

If nothing else this person is a wonderful inspiration to me. Now I know why I teach the way I do and not like this. It reaffirmed the faith I have in not blindly following any kind of curriculum, irrespective of whether students can absorb it or not. This may sound obvious but far too often teachers come under pressure from the administration, parents and students themselves to "finish the book" As if reaching the final page was any guarantee of increased awareness.

This is especially true of language learning where skills are evaluated not simply a body of knowledge.

Another interesting article on Teaching and EFL

How learning has escaped from the box

Technology is getting easier and its rapid development is changing language education, making it possible to link the classroom to the real world beyond

Gary Motteram
Friday February 17, 2006
Guardian Weekly

Have you noticed how technologies that were once hidden away in intimidating computer rooms, guarded over by zealous technologists, have recently moved back into the classroom? And these are not the grey boxes of old; in fact they are being carried into class by learners and their teachers in pockets and handbags.

See here for the rest of the article.

Some photos from the computer class

Despite all the crap they gave us yesterday at the computer lessons I thought I'd post a few photos just to show a more postive side of things

spitting blood

Scratch my last post as I'm now officially p****ed off with this course. Five minutes before the lesson was due to finish the secretary waltzes in and blithely announces to 25 people that the course times have been changed and that instead of doing two three-hour lessons a week we'll be doing three three-hour lessons a week, starting tomorrow.

So everyone has to rearrange their programmes, planned weeks in advanced to accomodate a bunch of disorganised knuckleheads who have 50 odd computers at their disposal and the organisational skills of a first grader.

What annoys me most (apart from the monumental lack of repect shown the people taking part) is the fact that no explanations was given as to why, suddenly at the last moment, this change was necessary. When everyone started complaining the secreatary just shrugged her shoulders and said,

"Τι να κανουμε;"
(What can we do ?)

What you are telling us is that this say an act of nature like a hurricane or flood, completely beyond your control?

You can check out these jokers for yourself here

learning more

I’m writing this while in my computer lesson; we’re learning how to put hyperlinks in Word documents, which is something I didn’t know about. So it’s pretty useful so far. I’ll write more when I have time.

500th visitor!!!

According to Clustrmap I've had 500 plus visitors since the 19th January. May not sound much to people who get thousands of people everyday, but it's far more than I expected when I started this blog. I feel as proud as punch.

I've tried viewing this site with Internet Explorer but for some reason the sidebar drops down to the bottom of the page. So try using Firefox instead. I've had far fewer internet hassles (viruses, spyware etc) since I switched.