I can’t believe how long its been since I last got the time to post here
Very sad, I must try to get a bit more time organized. A new semester and the school has a new director too, things have been busy. Last week was promotional week for the school which meant the teachers visiting the local schools to drum up a few more students. The other day we visited the local public uni here n the city to talk with the letras classes. I think this visit to UEG was a bit of a waste of time though because most students in letras don’t speak a word of English and don’t want to either. For them the degree is just a way to get a public job and knowing that they can teach terrible classes and receive a government salary with all the trappings. They have changed the rules for English teachers since I’ve been in Brazil, such as, having the interview entirely in English which weeds out 99% of the bad ones. But not all public teaching jobs require this and nepotism gets a lot of cousins, brothers, etc jobs in public schools. UEG suffers from this quite a bit. One English teacher last year was given her job by some relative that already works there and her classes were so bad that the students used to email me to ask me things and to get me to help explain things to them because their teacher didn’t have enough knowledge to do it in class. Luckily for the students this teacher only lasted one semester thanks to a change of coordinators but since then the students told me they have had two more that were just as bad. It’s quite sad really that the students are so excited when they find out the have passed the public exam to study for free in the Public uni only to be so sad and depressed a year later at how bad the classes are
I tried to teach there last semester buy didn’t get back to me about this because of some documents they said they needed but some of the students there told me that this wasn’t the case. Some of the students from my wife’s class come to our house so we can help them out with their projects, etc. so at leas they get some decent support from somewhere.
As the title of my post says, this week is Dia de trote. Well, actually its from today till Sat this week. The new director came up with the idea of having the students do something funny or unusual once a month, just for fun. This week is the first time we have tried this at the school and it was decided to do something simple for the first one like wearing Havaianas to class. Most if not all people in Brazil wear some kind of flip flop so this one was easy for the students to do. I’ll take a few photos of my groups completing this task to post in Facebook and Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see what other ideas they come up with for this day
We moved house recently and in the promotion we have been advertizing conversation classes. I have been digging throught all of the boxes for the material we have for this and I came across some books that were packed and had been hidden away for quite some time. I was really pleased I found them because they have many interesting conversation activities I can do with my MEC students that require very little setting up. I’ll have a good look through them over the next few days to see what I can find to use this coming semester with my students. they are mainly teenagers and love doing different things