Posted in Education, Pregnancy on May 19, 2008 | 9 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Education, English, Language, Work on September 1, 2007 | 10 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in BBC Breakfast, Blogging, Communication, Dr Bernard Lamb, Education, English, Etiquette, Language, Masha Bell, Punctuation, Reading, Spelling, Work, Writing on August 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Work on July 4, 2007 | 6 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Education, Work on May 26, 2007 | 15 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Architecture, Britain, Education, Literature, Sightseeing, Travel on April 5, 2007 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Britain, Education, Health, Patriotism, War on March 12, 2007 | 2 Comments »
So you decided you’d better do something towards researching current conditions for armed forces veterans as a result of the ’support the troops’ project described here.
And there you are doing the absolute minimum by rootling around the Ministry of Defence website, when you discover that there is, in fact, a Veterans’ Day. And there has been [...]
Posted in Britain, Clothes, Culture Shock, Education, Feminism, Footwear, Morality, Religion, The Rest of the World, Work on February 4, 2007 | 11 Comments »
There are a number of things which colour your attitude towards the whole debate about whether or not Muslim women should be allowed to follow their religious duties and impose their dress codes on the rest of the work force, not least of which is that your stubborn puritan streak puts you much more in [...]
Posted in Britain, Culture Shock, Education, Feminism, Footwear, Morality, Patriotism, Religion, TV, The Rest of the World, Work on February 1, 2007 | 3 Comments »
You are no longer convinced about the value of the concept of equality.
This is mainly because there’s a common misconception that in order to be equal, things have to be the same.
You can claim until you are blue in the face and ready to stick a fork in someone’s eye that, say, feminism - to take a concept entirely at [...]
Posted in Britain, Education, Russia, Weather, Work on January 20, 2007 | 3 Comments »
It’s been disconcerting not to have the British weather to talk about over the last few months. ‘Bit grey again’ isn’t much of a conversation starter after the first few thousand times. So the extremely strong winds came as a pleasant surprise really, particularly as they enlivened teaching practice on Thursday by sending the aerials and [...]
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