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

Dia do trote

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

CTG

Yesterday evening I didn’t have class in the evening so I went to a so-called academic week of presentations (if you can call them that) at CTG in our city. I usually go every year but not to see the presentations as they are terrible. It is usually to catch up with friends I haven’t seen for a long time who study in UEG, the local public university. I have no idea who the guy was giving last night’s presentation but it was bad. On a scale of 1 to 10 with ten being the worst possible it ranked at about a 20. Don’t take my word for it, most people who were there went to watch a soccer match in the room next door instead of listening to this guy waffling on about who knows what. There was a data show available and a decent sound system too, I have no idea why he didn’t try to use it in the presentation instead of just using it to show translations of stuff that he didn’t really understand himself. I would love to have this kind of stuff in my classroom. One good reason for going to these yearly things is that I am always reminded to make sure that my classes never get as bad or boring as this.

As you can see from the photo above, I bumped into a lot of old friends and ex-students too. In the photo with me are Ariel and Larissa, my old MEC students. They are so cute and funny They study Letras at the same uni as Roberta, but a year ahead. We didn’t see anything of the presentation but spent time catching up with other old friends and students of ours