First Conditional...an English teacher blogs.

Spanish verb of the day - Bufar

2004-06-29T13:59:00.000+02:00

Verb of the day

Bufar - To snort

Noun of the day

Atlavoz - Speaker (stereo)

What to do with my blog?

2004-06-28T10:26:00.000+02:00

Seeing as I'm longer going to be teaching English, this blog is sort of redundant now.

I'm thinking that I might use it to teach you all some Spanish. Maybe I'll do a 'verb and noun of the day' kind of a thing. You can check back daily to see what the words are, and by simply reading them you'll learn some Spanish. If you're going on a Spanish holiday you'll need to get yourself a phrase book, the verbs and nouns I'll give won't be that much use to you at a basic level.

So, starting tomorrow we'll kick off the new content of this blog.

It's all over

2004-06-20T16:46:00.000+02:00

So that's that.

My life as a teacher is, hopefully, over. I finished my final classes the week before last and said rather my goodbyes to the colleagues I felt like saying goodbye to.

Since then I've been scratching around trying to find something else to do, with not much success to be honest. I do have an idea for another venture but I need to sit down and think about that seriously. Make a plan. Talk to banks and accountants and all that other terrible stuff.

I am enjoying the time off though, and despite the fact that the weather here has been a bit strange (lots of rain, clouds and storms - although lots of heat) I've been down at the beach and swimming in the sea.

I'll check back in if anything happens.

Template madness

2004-05-23T16:57:00.000+02:00

Well, I took a look at my blog this morning and all I got was a pile of strange ASCII characters. Granted they made more sense than I usually do, but I was afraid I'd been hacked it might contain some kind of code used by terrorists or Americans or something. So I changed the template to one of the new blogger ones. I seem to have lost all the comments along the way, so I do apologise for that, but the new blogger comment system should work ok for you.

Only two weeks of teaching left now. The courses are coming to an end and the classes are getting more and more difficult. The kids all know the course is coming to an end, they're distracted, the weather is hot and they'd rather be out playing than in English class.

Tell you the truth, I'd rather be out playing than in English class.

No luck as yet with a job for the summer. I've been scouring the papers and the internet but nothing suitable has cropped up, so it seems likely something unsuitable like bar and restaurant work will be in order until the new school year.

Male escort, you say? Well, stranger things have happen. Firstconditional de Jour. Hmmmmmm.

Time to quit

2004-05-10T15:52:00.000+02:00

I think when my current teaching position finishes at the end of this month, I will definitely call it a day when it comes to teaching English.

It's not what I want to do. It's never been a job that excites me or motivates me in any way. Instead, I find myself bored, weighed down with tedium, unwell at the thoughts of having to do another week's work. I could think of a million places I'd rather be than in a classroom full of children.

I fell into this line of work because I couldn't find anything better over here. I have colleagues who genuinely like what they do, and I'm jealous of them. Not for liking teaching, but because they have a job that doesn't give them butterflies in their stomach before each class (even after years of doing it) and because they're doing something they want to do.

I should have a job like that. It's time for me to decide exactly what it is I want to do and then actually do it. Another year of teaching would be the end of me, I think. Not that I'd kill myself or anything, but what's left of my ambition and drive would be battered out of me.

So there's only about 3 weeks of English teaching left. I can't tell you how happy that makes me feel.

Summertime, and the living is ...erm....

2004-05-05T14:56:00.000+02:00

Well, there's only about four weeks of work left before the school I'm working in closes it's doors for the summer. Well, that's not entirely true, they run summer intensives like most other schools, but there's really only enough work for a couple of teachers, and as there's well over 10 English teachers that leaves most of us with a big problem.

Quite honestly I don't know what I'm going to do for the summer. There are the usual options of working in a bar or restaurant, but I've got a family and I don't particularly have the energy to work nights all summer long. Plus I hate having to work in the evenings as it is. Waiting all day to go to work, it's a pain in the arse to be honest.

One of the other options over here is labouring. There's so much building going on all over Spain that I'm sure I could find a job as a brickie or something like that. It'd certainly do wonders for my tan, anyway.

To anyone thinking of coming to Spain to teach English, think carefully about whether you want to go through this every summer. You scratch a living as it is. The summer is even worse.

More first conditional fun

2004-04-23T21:33:00.000+02:00

Sorry it's been so long since the last update. Life just whizzes by at times, doesn't it?

Last night I was doing the first conditional with a juniors class, and I was regaling them fantastic examples, such as:

"If you don't study, you'll fail the exam."

"If he fails the exam, he'll have to repeat the course."

"If Carlos doesn't stop talking, I'll beat him to death."

Once I'd gone through the construction of the first conditional, making sure they know the 'if' part is always present simple, I asked them to write a couple of examples of their own. Most of them were fairly mundane and to the point.

I then turned to Jesús (student, not Christ Almighty), and asked him to read his. He flattened out his piece of paper, turned to the student beside him and said:

"If you touch my balls again, I'll break your hand."

I didn't ask.

Holiday...Celebrate.

2004-04-08T21:33:00.000+02:00

As you'll have gathered by the silence and lack of bitching, there's no teaching going on this week. That's right, Easter Holidays. Hurrah.

Not quite the same over here, I won't be scoffing chocolate eggs on Sunday, but the lack of having to do classes of any kind makes up for that. Lots of people have gone away for the week, but being an English teacher means I can't afford to do anything but stay at home with the family. One of the best things about Spain is the cheap booze, so you can get 12 cans of beer for €2.50 in the supermarket, sit on the terrace, listen to music, quaff ale and read books.

I did see one of my little students the other day down near the beach. He was cycling along, concentrating very hard and as he was going past me I said "Hello Edu!".

It didn't register with him for a second, but when he did he looked back, saw it was me, said "Hello teacher" and cycled straight into a tree. He didn't hurt himself luckily and I helped him up and sent him on his way again. He did go a very deep shade of red though, poor lad.

So, I'm off to drink some more beer and finish my third book of the week. Talk to you later.

I should keep my mouth shut

2004-03-30T13:12:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the lack up updates, but I haven't had anything interesting to tell you.

Well, that's not entirely true. A number of amusing things have happened in the last week during my classes, but I've made the fatal mistake of coming back into the staff room and talking to the other teachers about them. That means that I can't tell you about them because if any of my colleagues were to read this blog then they could very easily put two and two together and end with me. And I'd rather that didn't happen.

Still, there are 3 teaching days left until the Easter holidays. I promise you that if anything funny, interesting or remotely scandalous happens I won't tell me teacher chums. You'll be the first to know.

Strange noise in the classroom

2004-03-25T23:58:00.000+01:00

The bulk of my classes are in the evening, starting from around 5.30 and running till around 10pm, more or less. Given the fact I usually have my lunch around 1 o'clock, by around 8 I'm starving, and by 9.30 I'd eat a scabby leg if you put it in front of me.

I don't know about you but when I'm hungry my stomach tends to make some funny noises. Strange gurgling sounds are par for the course, but usually there's enough going on in class to cover it up. So, tonight my pre-intermediates were doing a grammar exercise (prepositions - don't expect any funny stories, there's nothing remotely amusing about prepositions) and my stomach started grumbling. 'No bother' I thought, 'it'll go away in minute.'

So there's dead silence in the classroom. The students are mulling over 'John is interested at - of - about - for - by ...erm...in science' when all of a sudden something in my stomach exploded. It sounded like a terrible, terrible fart. The sort of fart you get when you've drunk too many beers the night before and you rush to the toilet with a dose of the splats.

To their credit not one of them looked up. I was mortified of course and left the classroom on the pretence of making some photocopies as my face was quite red indeed.

They don't prepare you for stuff like that when you do your CELTA course. Moral of the story, have lunch later, or bring some kind of snack. Now my students think I'm some kind of farting bastard after I've worked all year to build up a good rapport with them. They'll just look at me now and think 'That bloke farted in class'.

It reminds me of the time when I was starting a new job and I was going to be the manager of a group of people in a call centre. We went through these days of training together, team building exercises, group work, the whole lot. It was a tough few days but at the end I had to get up and say a few words of thanks to my new team, along with the trainers and my immediate boss. I went to the top of the training room, cleared my throat, then blew an enormous snot rocket out of my nose which hung there in mid-air until I could wipe it away with my sleeve. I showed my class that day, let me tell you.

Feel free to share embarassing stories in the comments, make me feel better.

Javier's fondness for his balls

2004-03-23T14:31:00.001+01:00

I've told you before about

Javier

and his propensity for fondling his testicles in class.

Yesterday I was trying to teach the passive to my teenage boys:

My friend's dog bit John on the arse - active

John was bitten on the arse by my friend's dog - passive

- and Javier was going at it with gusto. He was fondling, pulling, rubbing, thwacking and caressing his groin right throughout the class. I don't know why none of the other kids in the class says anything to him. When I was a lad in school if you even scratched anywhere near that area you were branded a wanker for weeks. You'd rather put up with a power itch (you know, one of those ones that's so itchy it makes you jump) on the top of your chopper than scratch it in public for fear that someone might see you.

So, faced with this horrific sight in every class I decided it was time to do something about it.

"Javier, why are you playing with your balls?" I asked, hoping that would shame him into stopping.

"Because nobody else will," he replied.

Javier 1-0 The Teacher.

Vocab

2004-03-19T14:18:00.000+01:00

With my pre-intermediate class I try to elicit as much vocabulary as possible from them in every class. Yesterday we were doing a little something about the past continuous and in the book there were little pictures showing people performing various actions.

e.g She's in the park. She's walking her dog. Or He's at a restaurant. He's eating his dinner.

So for each one of these places I asked them to give me vocab. There are four in the class, so they had to give me three words.

When it came to the park the first three students gave me their three words each. We had all the usual park stuff like tree, grass, lake, bench etc. It came to Carlos and he was a bit stumped.

"Erm......tree." he said.

Good." I replied. "Any more?"

"Erm....children!" he said.

"Good. Now one more."

He was struggling at this stage. So I decided to give him a bit of help.

"You find them in trees," I said.

Silence.

"They have wings"

More silence

"They fly and they sing"

A look of understanding crossed Carlos' face, and he proudly gave me the answer.

"Monkeys!"

It's never dull when you have Carlos in your class.

I appear to have been edited

2004-03-17T09:51:00.000+01:00

The last few posts have just disappeared, not sure why. I will go digging around to see if I can find them and re-post. If not, they're lost in space forever. Oh well.

It's now the middle of March, we don't get paid until the last week of the month, probably the 30th this month, and I'm stoney. A piece of advice for those of you who think about packing it in, coming to Spain and teaching English - you need two jobs. Even with 20+ hours a week in a school you'll find it difficult to get by, especially if you've got a family. Obviously your better half would be bringing in some cash too, but all the same, nobody is ever going to get rich teaching English. Apart from the people that own the academies, of course.

Then you've got 3.5 months in the summer when there's no teaching work at all. What do you do then? The school wants a definite 'yes' or 'no' as to whether you're coming back in October, but how can you say for sure? There's only about 10 weeks or so left of the school year now, then it's out on the streets looking for something to pay the bills with in the summer. I have to say that when I came to Spain I had no intention of becoming an English teacher, it was probably the last thing I wanted to do, but needs must and when it became clear than I wasn't going to find anything else, I went and did my CELTA course.

And here I am. Poor, up to my eyes with bills and day to day living expenses (the cost of living has increased dramitically in Spain with no similar rise in the level of earnings), and facing a summer working as a waiter in a cocktail bar. Great.

Madrid - 11.03.04

2004-03-11T13:53:00.000+01:00

I've been sitting here trying to think of something to write, but the more I think about it, the more trivial and unimportant my words seem.

To the victims, and their families, my thoughts are with you.

Schools need to embrace technology

2004-03-10T10:23:00.000+01:00

Classrooms are boring places. Let's be honest about it. A white board, some desks (maybe you have those stylish chairs with a little desky bit on them which are as useful as a €7 note - if you have a class of 10 or 2 people, you can be guaranteed that a pen or a book or a pencil case will crash to the floor off one of these things every two or three minutes), a teacher with some coloured markers and of course, the most boring of all, the students.

Visual aids, I hear you cry. Pictures. Drawings. Music, even. Pah. Not good enough. They can get all these things at home. To make learning English more fun, the school needs to provide resources that they can only use in the school. Things that make them want to come to class.

I'm not talking about virtual reality helmets or anything like that, but using computers in the classroom must surely be a good way of getting the students, particularly the younger ones, interested in English learning, rather than it just being something their parents are making them do.

It's a bit late for me this term, but next year (if I'm still teaching, but that's another story) I'm going to set up a blog for each of my juniors classes. I think the school will probably have some kind of objection to it, the Director is not exactly PC friendly (that's computers and his constant referral to the natives as 'spics'), but I think it would be a good idea. I could have a 'Blog off', pitting one juniors class against the other for the best blog. Quite what I'd have them do with it is another thing, but I'll have plenty of time to think about it during the 3.5 months I'm unemployed (yet another story for another time) in the summer.

If anyone has any experiences or tales of using blogs in teaching, especially with juniors classes, I'd love to hear them.

Boggle

2004-03-09T13:36:00.000+01:00

Did you ever play a game of Boggle with really low level students and write the letters on the board like this, just for a laugh?

c o c k
f a r t
a r s e
p i s s

A day of rest

2004-03-07T15:35:00.000+01:00

Sunday is a day of rest for English teachers. Unless that is you're out having a cup of coffee trying to read the newspaper and one of your eager pre-intermediate students spots you and comes over for a chat.

I'd normally be ok with this as it's a chance for me to practice my Spanish, but this student is having none of it.

"I eeeenseeeest speak Eeeeenglish", he says.

All well and good if he could actually speak English. All well and good if the conversation is 2 or 3 minutes long, but when he pulls up the seat beside you and attempts to talk about the US Presidential elections it's just a bit much.

"Sorry Antonio," I say. "I have to go before I soil myself from boredom."

"What?" he replies.

"I. Have. To. Go. Home. Now."

So I did. And here I am.

Shut your fat mouth Minge-face

2004-03-05T10:00:00.000+01:00

I was talking in the staffroom with a couple of the teachers about my juniors classes from the other night, and sharing stories with them about their troublesome students. Brothers and sisters in arms. Anyway, I was feeling a little better about the whole thing because they have the same problems as me. Then up pipes one of my other colleagues, who I will call Minge-face, because he's got a digusting triangular goatee which unfortunately only covers a small percentage of his acne scarred face.

"You know what your problem is, THE TEACHER, don't you?"

"No, Minge-face, I don't. But I'm sure you're dying to tell me."

"You act all superior in the classroom. Everyone knows it and people have been talking about."

At this stage I should point out that he's never seen me teach. None of the teachers in the school have seen me teach, so he's just trying to stir things up because he's that kind of snide, talk behind your back person that I just can't stand.

"I see," I replied. "You know what your problem is Mingey?" I ask in return.

"No. I don't," he says.

I pause for a moment before saying, "You have the fashion sense of a blind hippy, you smell funny, your hair looks like it's been cut for your Holy Communion, your teeth are disgusting - do you ever brush them? - your clothes are dirty and you have all the personality of a dead skunk."

He went off in a huff. A while later the secretary told me that on Tuesday I've got a meeting with the director of the school about this, so not only is Minge-face the most annoying person in the school, he's a cry-baby and a tell-tale.

I'm soooo gonna get him after school.

Every cloud has a silver lining

2004-03-04T13:27:00.000+01:00

Last night my kids and juniors classes were doing my head in. Not all them, just one or two students in each class, but that's enough. I've yet to meet a teacher who enjoys teaching juniors - kids are a bit different because they're not as moody, hormonal and typically adolescent. They might be a bit more excitable, but they're easier to control.

You know you're in for a difficult class when you walk in and say: "Hello, how are you?", and the only response you get is a grunted "meh", and that's from the best student in the class. When they're not in the mood they're almost impossible. There's very little you can do, especially as beating them seems to be frowned upon for some reason.

Anyway, I'm sure this is a topic that I'll come back to time and again. The point is that last night I was extremely narky and fed up to the back teeth of teaching.

Thursday mornings I teach business English to a single student. It's a nice class really, mostly conversational as his level is pretty good, and we skim through the book just to clarify the grammar points if need be. This morning we were talking about people fiddling their expense accounts, getting work to pay for things they really shouldn't and stuff that's just within the limits of what's right and proper.

The student said to me, "In Spanish if someone is like this we say they have a 'cara duro' (a hard face)."

I said, "In English, if someone is like this we say they have a neck like a jockey's bollocks"

Once I explained 'bollocks' he found it uproariously amusing and this is now his favourite English phrase. I wrote it out for him to he could study it and everything.

Things like that make the pain of teaching juniors worthwhile.

Don't make too manny mistakkes

2004-03-02T22:45:00.000+01:00

We have one teacher in the school where I work who tends to do all the little puzzles and games that we use in the kids classes. Word searches, quizzes, bingos - all those kind of things. He's a very experienced teacher too, I reckon he's been doing it for around 20 years (God bless him), but in every single one there's a spelling mistake of some kind.

The kids will be searching for different sports, for example, and one of them will come up to me and say: "Ruggby is something?". Or it'll be the exciting 'comparatives bingo' and they'll have their sheets of paper with:

taller
happier
faster
oldder

I don't know if it's deliberate, his way of making us suffer a bit in class when the students inevitably spot the error that the teacher who's just photocopied the original two minutes before class hasn't, or if it's a typo, or if it's just a problem he has with spelling. Anyway, it's no big deal.

It just struck me as a bit odd tonight when the students had to find 10 regular verbs in a word search, could only find 9, and the only thing we could find that even resembled a regular verb was the sequence 'walt', which we just assumed should have been 'walk'.

I'll give him a piece of my mint tomorrow.

We've been Googled

2004-03-01T11:16:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed that some people have come through to the site via searches on Google, in particular

'teaching the first conditional, English'

So to those people I sincerely apologise for the total lack of information about how to teach this part of English grammar. All I can suggest is continue searching, because:

If you search harder, you will find something.

I sentence you to 20 hours a week

2004-02-29T13:55:00.000+01:00

That's about how many teaching hours I have in a normal week. It doesn't sound like much, and I know there are teachers in 'real schools' doing a lot more, but it's plenty for me.

I know you're probably thinking that there are a few more hours to add to that total for all the preparation, lesson planning and other bits and pieces that we need to do, but you'd be wrong. When you do your CELTA course to become an English teacher, they get you doing lesson plans which should show how long you're going to do a particular exercise, what to follow it up with, etc etc.

Of course, the moment you're finished your course you never make another lesson plan again. Well, at least I haven't. I've never spent hours a week planning lessons, writing it down, stop-watching and all that. Normally I arrive at the school about 15 minutes before my first class, take a look at the text book for my juniors classes, realise that it was written by a beardy old Prof trying to be cool and trendy and dismiss using anything in it because it's just so bad (crap textbooks are something I'll talk about in the future), so I'll just photocopy some grammar exercises or something like that. Intro on the board, answer some questions, do the exercises. Wheeeeeee.

There's no motivation, no enthusiasm, no great joy in hearing the students speak better English than they did at the start of the course. It's just a matter of getting through the class as painlessly as possible. Maybe that shouldn't be the case. I'm sure there are, and I know a few, teachers out there who have a real passion for teaching the language. They care about their students, they think about ways of making class more interesting for them, and good luck to them. They're doing a job they really like. I'm jealous, I suppose.

For me it's just the best paid job I could find out here. I've done worse jobs in my time, but at my age (I'm 28-39 for anyone interested) I'm tired of doing jobs I don't like.

And most days I don't like teaching English.

Students are weird

2004-02-27T12:40:00.000+01:00

I suppose it's natural that when you have so many classes you will encounter the odd eccentric along the way. One of my pre-intermediate classes has thrown up the strangest students I have ever encountered. Before I progress I have to say that Carlos is one of the nicest students I have too. A genuinely nice person who just happens to be a bit potty.

Last night we were doing an exercise on the present perfect, and I was explaining how we use it differently to the way they use it in Spanish, even though the form is almost identical. They'll use it to talk about completed actions in the past, we use it to talk about actions in the past that still have a connection to the present.

As an example I gave them these two sentences:

a) He lived in Spain for 10 years

b) He has lived in Spain for 10 years

In sentence 'a' the action is finished. He lived in Spain for 10 years, now he lives somewhere else. In 'b' he's still living in Spain.

Fine. Quite easy to understand, I think. So, just to make sure I ask "Does anybody have any questions before we go on?"

There's silence for a while, it looks like everyone has understood perfectly, then Carlos says "Cheese is 'queso'?"

I reply, "Erm....yes it is, Carlos. But do you understand the present perfect?"

"Sure," he replies, "No problem."

Be careful out there

2004-02-26T00:13:00.000+01:00

My Monday and Wednesday class with 10 teenage boys is not one of my favourites. They're all around 13 or 14 years old, and not one of them wants to be there. Their normal school finishes at 5pm, then they have their English class at 7. When they'd rather be at home playing 'Play dos' or off with their mates smoking joints, they have to sit in a classroom with me trying to teach them English.

And any of you who know, or have experience of, groups of teenage boys will know that if they're not interested in something, it can be quite difficult.

The worst of them is the one who sits right in front of me. We'll call him Javier. He just can't stop playing with his balls. I don't honestly think he realises what he's doing, but for 75% of the class he sits there playing with them. Rubbing them, squeezing his lad, sometimes flicking at it like you used to flick bits of paper off your desk when you were in school. How he hasn't ruptured something I just don't know. The others don't seem to notice, but I think that's because they're too busy staring morosely at the pieces of paper they spend their time doodling on.

When I first started teaching this lack of attention would bother me, as if it was a reflection on my ability as a teacher. It's not. There's not much you can do with a class full of teenage boys who would rather be anywhere else in the whole wide world. I just get on with it. If they want to listen, fine. If not, it's not as if I can beat them like my teachers did when I was in school.

They do say some funny things though, although the best of them I can't tell you because I've already told the story in the staff room and if anyone from that school heard it they'd know it was me doing this site straight away. But as soon as something else good crops up you'll be the first to know. Sod my colleagues.

A word of warning for any teachers looking for work in Korea or the far east this coming summer. I was sent this by a teacher friend. It's almost too surreal to be true, but god love the poor bloke involved:

"It was at this point that he was told that he would have to work as a go-go dancer and escort in a foreigner-only gay bar.

Refusing to comply, Wyer was imprisoned and beaten on a daily basis before succumbing. 'It was a nightmare,' he whispered. 'I am not gay but I was forced to dance for men and entertain them. I just switched off, it was like I wasn't there, I was a total zombie.'"

More here

I think it's a bit safer here in Spain. A bit.

Skool Daze

2004-02-25T10:10:00.000+01:00

The new blackboard style reminds me of that game 'Skool Daze' with which I passed many an hour as a kid on my trusty rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum with 48k of computing power.

The best bit was that you could write on the blackboard. Very nifty back in 1982, let me tell you.

Anyone remember that one?

Please ground, open up and swallow me.

2004-02-24T10:47:00.000+01:00

I have a private student outside of the school where I work who I met via a neighbour. She told him she was looking to do some English classes, as she was having a long distance relationship with a Scottish bloke, and he asked me to do it.

Fine. 90 minutes a week. A whole €25 for me. In general the class is fine, mostly conversational, although there are times when I feel like the class must surely be over and there are still 45 minutes to go. I really hate that. Anyway, in the meantime the neighbour has broken up with his lady friend and she's gone off with the two kids to live with her new lover.

The other day I noticed a removals van outside his house, so I just mentioned that in the class as something to talk about (and of course to get the latest gossip).

She started to talk about it, then got extremely upset and started crying so much she could hardly speak. Naturally I felt like shit for bringing it up, and started with the old platitudes:

"Well, life is never easy...blah blah blah..."
"It's always very difficult in these situations....blah blah blah..." etc

I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me, especially when she'd try to talk and because she was crying so much she'd make a kind of snorting noise, which just made her cry harder.

It's a crap job sometimes.

No talking at the back

2004-02-24T01:38:00.000+01:00

I've added a comments section for each post so you talk back to the teacher.

Which may or may not be a good thing. I suppose there has to be somebody reading first though.

False Friends

2004-02-23T10:40:00.000+01:00

In Spanish and English there are many words which are similar in both languages. They look the same, and the meaning is the same.

As an example, most of the words that end in 'tion' in English are the same in Spanish except they end in 'ción'.

e.g Celebration - Celebración.

However, there are words which look similar and sound similar, but which have very different meanings, some of which can make you look a little foolish if you try and use them in the hope that it's ok.

e.g - 'Constipated' in English means that you can't go for a number 2. 'Constipado' is the Spanish word for a cold.

'Embarassed' in English is when your pants fall down in public and you're not wearing any underwear. 'Embarazada' in Spanish means 'pregnant'.

These words are known as false friends. Here are some links to lists of false friends and their meanings. You can make quite a fun class out of it, especially with younger learners who seem to find the whole 'preservative/jam' - 'preservativo/condom' thing especially funny.

False Friends 1
False Friends 2
False Friends 3

Yeash, I shpeek perfect the Eeeengleeesh.

2004-02-22T18:08:00.000+01:00

Teaching low level/pre-intermediate English can be boring at the best of times. There are only so many times you can teach something without it becoming desperately dull. Also, students often feel inhibited in a classroom and struggle to speak even the most basic phrases.

Me: "Hello. How was your weekend?"

Student: "Fine."

Me: "Did you do anything special or exciting?"

Student: "No. Normal."

Me to all the students: "Did anyone do anything exciting?"

All the students: "No. Normal."

And so ends another attempt to get them speaking. So I have developed a theory. I speak reasonably good Spanish, but I still get thrown a bit by accents, and I can struggle for full comprehension at times. However, I have noticed that my proficiency in Spanish increases in direct proportion to the number of beers I consume.

Once I'm four or five beers in I'm perfectly fluent. I can understand everything people say, I can conjugate reflexive verbs in the past tense with no difficulty, my use of pronouns is impeccable, and although I've never tried, I'm quite sure that my written Spanish would also be flawless, with perfect grammar, spelling and accents.

So, what we need to do to bring the teaching profession out of the dark ages of photocopied exercises, white board markers (red, green and blue) and hackneyed text books, is to install a bar in each classroom. Ply the students with beer, get them talking about Madrid v Barcelona, ETA, Melanie Griffith or some other pressing social issue and bam, you've got yourself an enjoyable English class.

And if the students don't drink, you can always knock back a couple yourself to make the class go quicker.

"I'll be right back, class. Just got to go drain the lizard."

Must suggest it to the boss on Monday.

Me fail English? That's unpossible.

2004-02-21T10:38:00.000+01:00

It's amazing how little native English speakers know about their own language. Here, we teach the students all about grammar, punctuation, the different tenses etc. Obviously this is hugely different from the schools in the UK where grammar is given a perfunctory mention at best.

If you asked your average 16 year old in England to tell you the difference between the present continuous and the present perfect, they'd probably just look at you blankly before offering to sell you some heroin, or try to steal your mobile phone.

I can't remember doing any grammar in school really, but over here they're taught Spanish grammar in schools, and in a way it makes it easier for them to learn a new language. So many new English speaking arrivals over here struggle to learn Spanish because they have no idea how their own language is formed. I'll admit that I was as ignorant as they come about it until I did my teacher training and started doing classes. The learning curve is very steep for the first few months. If you're doing a class about conditionals, or past perfect and when to use it, you have to study it yourself.

It's not that the point of grammar is completely new. As a native English speaker you've been using it your whole life, more than likely correctly, but without any idea why you're using it.

Learning more about English though helps you learn more about Spanish. Why do we use this tense in these circumstances? How is the past formed? When do we use present perfect instead of past simple? I know it all sounds very boring, but when you're in a new country trying to learn a new language it really does make a big difference if you know a little bit about your own language first.

Can you say 'I don't know'?

2004-02-20T13:55:00.000+01:00

Montse (not her real name, pronunciation Mont-say) is far from the perfect student. I find it difficult to elicit even the most basic English from her, and she's a pre-intermediate student. Not elementary or beginner, so she should know something.

As an example, we'll be doing a very simple reading exercise. After they've finished reading and I've gone through whatever vocabulary they don't understand, I'll ask some questions about the text.

The other students will muddle through, attempt some sort of a response in English, but this woman just will not even try.

"Montse" I say, "can you tell me blah blah blah...?" (where blah blah blah is a simple question relevant to the text she's just read).

She'll look studiously at the book for a while before saying "No sé" ("I don't know" in Spanish).

I try and correct her. "No, say 'I don't know', Montse"

"Si." A pause. "No sé."

Me: "I. don't. know."

Her: "Si, eso."

Me in my head: "FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. JUST SAY 'I DON'T KNOW'. I REFUSE TO ACCEPT YOU'RE THIS STUPID"

Me out loud:"Ok, try this for me now. Repeat after me, 'I don't know'"

Her:"Urmf?" She shrugs.

I ask Miguel something and vow to never speak to Montse again.

PRESENT SIMPLE

2004-02-20T09:19:00.000+01:00

So this is a blog about teaching English in Spain. Stories from the classroom, stories from the teacher's room, stuff like that. Obviously I'm going to have to remain anonymous if I'm going to tell tales on my erstwhile colleagues, but that's fine.

I don't know if this is going to be any good or not. Time will tell.