Teacher standards

My wife was telling me last night about some students from the uni complaining about their English teacher. To be honest this complaining about teachers at the uni in our city is a common neverending situation caused mainly by the uni administrators hiring teachers that will work for the lowest possible salary which results in some pretty abysmal teachers working there. There doesn’t seem to be any really checking up on the quality of the teachers, the really bad ones usually just give 100 in all tests just to keep the students from complaining. They had a teacher last year that couldn’t give class at all, she would just arrive without saying anything to the students, give them a cheap and nasty ‘verb to be’ photocopy to do and after 20 minutes dismiss them from class to hide around the uni till their next class started with the instructions not to let any coordinator see them so she would get paid. She was so bad that students refused to have class with her any more   This latest complaint is about the teacher who gives class to the languages students who speak no second language (yes, it is possible to enter the uni here in Brazil with no knowledge of English and get a degree in English languages). Apparently she cannot speak properly and keeps telling the students wrongly how to pronounce words and gives wrong definitions for words too. This is on top of the teacher two weeks ago who told her students that she had read a thousand books and that if she didn’t know an English word then it didn’t exist (she was talking about the expression ‘mother tongue). A lot of my students tell me that when they first found out that they had passed in the uni entrance exam they were so happy that all their studying English and Spanish had paid off, but now they were so sad that they had these terrible low quality teachers who knew less than they did. Some of them tell me that they actually feel depressed knowing they have to go there every night, so sad   There was a change of admin this year and I know a lot of people had hoped this would change things around but since the start of the year the students tell me they have had three or four different English teachers in varying degrees of lower and lower levels of English. The sad thing is that some of these Letras students were telling me that they hope to become good teachers in the future but that they see their dream slowly slipping further and further away as UEG fails them semester after semester. Such a sad situation

Professor CCAA

Although I’ve been working for CCAA in Brazil since I arrived here, I have never really found a good site for teachers from this franchise. The main CCAA website is really only for franchisers and not teachers or students.  Recently though I have been really interested in a site created by a teacher called Zailda who created an excellent Google Group for CCAA teachers. It’s ran by CCAA teachers for CCAA teachers and provides a lot of support, information, files and material that other teachers have created specifically for lessons, etc. It’s free to join and helps out a lot. I mainly work with advanced or MEC students but also teach EPG and I like having a look to see what extra materials are on in the group. I like posting my own stuff there too, mainly extra activities or conversation materials. Our Spanish teachers were asking me about it and I gave them the links to go look see as I saw quite a few people posting there about Spanish materials. The site provides links to other sites of interest and hosts discussions to help teachers try to solve and problems or queries they have. I really like this site a lot, I just need to try to find a little more time to post things there

Trying…

I’ve been more or less playing around with stuff online for my students for over three years now. My online exercise website I started over three years ago and it has around 350-400 exercises on it based mainly around the CCAA methodology and student textbooks. I wanted to make sure that I had quite a few for the students to use as review exercises before the two exams they take each semester. I’ve also got quite a few wikis at Wikispaces now, plus one that I’m helping Roberta to make to host mainly links for exercises we created for her TN5 group. My online presence is growing hahaha!! About 18 months ago, during a teachers meeting at the school, I had tried to get some of the teachers I work with interested in making some online activities for their students that could all be hosted in my website. The result of this was that they weren’t really all that interested and nothing really came of it Now, 18 months or so later there is still really very little interest in the internet as a serious tool for teaching language in the school. The Cambridge school has a lot of online resources that exist as part of the Cambridge site and the CCAA one is just mainly for franchise promotion so I thought that the teachers would be quite interested in getting something going that would be interesting not only for the teachers but for the students too. I think that this is mainly because of two things, one is just laziness and the main reason is that here in Brasil the courses at the universities, both public and private, only teach the same old boring stuff that probably existed at the conception of the Brasilian education system. I’ve visited three universities near to our city and in all of them its exactly the same My students seem genuinely interested in all the online stuff I uploaded and I’m sure that if the other teachers tried a little that their’s would be as well. In the teachers meeting though usually they prefer to change the subject quickly to anything that isn’t related to the school :-S I decided that there is no real point to my trying to point out new stuff online to them, even when the website is actually very useful and timesaving. Such sites as Quizlet create many great exercises from a small list of vocabulary, shithot for a language teacher but it would really be a waste of time mentioning it in the teacher’s meeting Roberta says she will try thinking of something but I wouldn’t hold my breath about any ideas she has succeeding.