On the silent period.

You have a bit of a love/ hate relationship with a man named Stephen Krashen.
Not that he knows you exist, mind. He’s a luminary in the field of research into language acquisition*, although his entire body of work seems to consist of him stating the bleeding obvious and then giving it a seriously researched kind [...]

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On a Really Goode Job.

You are supposed to be job hunting at the moment but you are putting it off. Or rather Putting It Off, the capitals being entirely justified by the lengths to which you will go to avoid it.
This is partly because the wonderful world of state school teaching seems oddly uninterested in you. Surely they are [...]

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On Baby Bliss.

The other particularly helpful baby book Best Friend gave you was supposed to be an antidote to Gina Ford’s regimentation being the key to happiness. Harvey “I’m a doctor donchaknow” Karp’s Baby Bliss.

Unlike Ms Ford’s stick to the schedule first and think later approach, Dr Karp has a Theory about the first three months of [...]

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On the fear of fur coats.

How long did it take you to start seeing the Star as something of a research project?
Four and a half months.
Which is how long it was before he jerked you from the edge of sleep into fully awake one morning by lying in his cot and burbling ‘Dada’. And ‘Dadee’.
Oh perfidious Star.
Although it wasn’t the actual [...]

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On character assassination.

One of the side effects of being a teacher is that you often find yourself musing on what makes your students tick.
Well, perhaps ’side effect’ is the wrong phrase. ‘Secret guilty pleasure’ bordering on ’the main reason why you do it’ is probably closer to the mark.
Generally this focuses on what they are like as learners so [...]

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On how to endear yourself to your tutor.

You’ve just finished writing an essay all about the qualities of a good teacher and the kind of teacher you’d like to be so you thought you’d round it all off by listing some of the greatest moments you’ve endured while attempting to teacher others how to teach English as a foreign language.
You probably ought [...]

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On korrect speling.

When you were about nine years old you were extracted from the classes that everyone else was attending in order to do extra nature study.
It was one of those half arsed efforts schools make sometimes towards catering for ‘gifted’ children, the quotation marks there being entirely justified as the lesson you were lifted out of on the grounds [...]

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On the joy of Tuesdays.

Another post about work. This isn’t supposed to be a blog about work. On the other hand:
You are actually teaching for the first time in over a year now. But only in the mornings. Which in fact means more work as you start earlier and have to squeeze lesson planning (and marking) into approximately half [...]

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On how not to endear yourself to your tutor nos. 3 through 371.

You’ve been working in the teaching English as a foreign language business now for over ten years.
A lot of things about it you love. Rootling around in the mechanics of grammar and such is very satisfying. You get to meet a lot of foreigners too, which is always a source of excitement to someone who started [...]

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On Rochester.

On your return from Margate you stopped off in Rochester. Which turned out to be a very literary visit.
Ever since you had sailed through it on your way to the seaside, the name had been rolling around in your head and bugging you. You couldn’t remember why the place was so familiar when the sight of [...]

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