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Another little surprise today. We’re using In Company intermediate for one of my classes and the company is buying a copy for all the students. As it was sold out at the local English bookshop, the company ordered copies and they came in today, and surprise surprise!, it’s a “new edition”. It’s been changed around enough to make it awkward for me to keep on using the old recording.

I checked at the bookshop and they still haven’t got the updated CD, so this puts me in a bind: my students have new books but I can’t get the listenings for it. They couldn’t tell me how much it costs either, but I imagine it’ll be in the ballpark of 50 euros along with a teacher’s book (which I don’t really need). The course book costs 32 euros, so looks like the damages will be upwards of 80 euros for the whole shebang. Oh well, I guess this is my little stimulus package to help reactivate the economy, though I may have to do some deficit spending. So much for thrift.

To be truthful I’ve never felt any special inclination to have the latest gadgets and gizmos. In fact I think I was the last kid on the block to get a mobile phone. Now usually if you’ve got a class in a company they’ve got a CD player around somewhere you can use, but not this company where I taught today, so I bring along these portable speakers and, get this, a CD player. Gasp! I hope you’re not shocked, this obviously being ancient, caveman technology. It actually belongs to my daughter, who of course now wouldn’t be caught dead with it. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll use it in my class. But I guess it had already expired, reached its planned obsolescence, because today it sort of moaned, closed its LED eyes, and went on to a better life.

Luckily I was saved by the abundant supplementary material I lug around with me everywhere I go, this would be photocopied supplementary material, happily not dependent on transistors and laser beams. I do try to keep things simple.

After this class I had about an hour and a half free before my next class, and being a beautiful sunny day, I was walking around the streets of Madrid and popped into an electronics shop. On all of the screens there was some cartoon movie with, I guess they’re called, synthetic people along the lines of toy story. It was amazing.

So off I go to the academy where I teach, which as it happens has computers with internet access in the classrooms and projectors. So I start thinking that today we’re doing a reading on the use of technology in the cinema, and I realize a film like the one I just saw would be a perfect lead-in. I kick myself for not asking the shop assistant what the film was.

But I think, no problem. I’ll get to class a few minutes early and see what I can find on youtube. So I find something that looks pretty cool. Some woman is running along a planet and gets to what I suppose is her spaceship-like home. But it’s really impressive, very realistic looking, but I only have a chance to watch the first minute of it. So class starts and finally it’s time to show the film. So the woman gets to her home and starts talking to the others, in French! It was a French cartoon!

Well, that was just a little embarrassing, but I guess it served the purpose of reminding the students of the changes brought about by technology in the field of animation, especially the introduction, but the French was embarrassing. In any case, with youtube you can just click on something else, which I did. It didn’t really go that badly, it just must have been obvious to the students I was improvising. In any case, I believe in living dangerously. What I did was much more entertaining than just going straight to the reading if I’d been too chicken to do something more imaginative because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of myself.

I always kick off my classes with revision cards. On slips of paper I write sentences in which I have underlined the target lexical item. Students cover the underlined word with their finger and try to elicit the word from their partner, a bit like taboo. I really like it: you pick several flowers with one cut (a humanistic variation of the more violent two-birds-with-one-stone idiom). Students warm up and revise, and it gives you (the teacher) a chance to settle in. Anyway, today my students had their homework out and immediate starting commenting on it. And I wondered, is this a coincidence or are they trying to tell me something?

This is an hour long class with two proficiency students; I mean they’ve already passed that IQ test, so they’re awesome language learners, lexical superstars, testimony of what hours of effective language teaching can do. Or did they reach these linguistics heights in spite of us? Maybe I should ask them.

Anyway, they always ace the lexis because they’re such responsible, conscientious, hardworking students: homework’s always done, lexis revised, they’re primed and ready to go: for an hour. By the way, don’t get me wrong. I don’t even take hour-long classes unless they’re back-to-back with another class, which is the case here.

Anyway, maybe these two super students don’t really need my lexis cards. Besides, in an hour class you have to move right along if you want to give them language work, a listening, and some fluency work. When it comes to the ABCs of language teaching, I think the A could be “adapt”. I’ll try to think of something for B and C.

Today I taught a mixed-ability class in a company, but not the same one I wrote about before: this is as common as sunshine in the desert! Anyway, their levels range from pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate, and attendance is pretty irregular, in fact sometimes just one comes, which was the case today. At a solid upper-intermediate level, today’s student’s probably the strongest.

Luckily when I teach these classes I bring about five different class plans, or more accurately, material for five different classes, often from Instant Ideas. If something goes well in a class, I’ll keep a photocopy of it in my folder, and in an emergency or an unexpected situation, out it comes, just like from Mary Poppins’ bag.

I mainly use the book when several people come: it’s an intermediate business English book so it’s an average of their levels. But if you just get one, it’s nice to give them somewhat of a tailor-made class. This invariably includes a nice chat with ongoing friendly feedback (correction), which is a real luxury for them, not easy to come by, so they’re appreciative. And as they say, the bottom line is always happy students.

Response

Thanks for your insights about freelance teaching! One question, with these kinds of mixed-level classes, don’t you find that it is very hard to keep a sort of continuity within the class? The students have different levels to start with, and then half of them never come or each one comes very irregularly. How do you deal with this when looking at your class as a whole (rather than looking at each day individually)?

My response

You’re absolutely right: continuity is hard to come by, though in the end there are two that actually come fairly regularly to this particur class, which I still have by the way, so logically the class is aimed at them. By the way, they have different levels, one being intermediate while the other actually is probably post First Certificate, that is, advanced.

But luckily business books today tend to have a broad scope, which makes them ideal for mixed abitility classes. In this case I’m using In Company intermediate, which I’m happy with. The students are presented with a broad range of language and each student “notices” what he or she is ready to notice. My more advanced student is reinforcing her knowledge and picking up business collocations, while the other is focussing on more general lexis.

Again, this sort of broad focus, that is, exposing students to lexically rich texts, means that everyone gets something out of the class, though the poor attenders will have much less contact with the language and so progress less. Actually for them it’s not about progressing but not losing what they already have.

I hope I’ve answered your question.

Beep, beep, danger, danger: one of my classes today was a drudgery. I’ve violated one of the cardinal rules of English language teaching: thy classes shalt be lively and dynamic, at least a good bit of it.

Lets start from the beginning. This is a new class I got in a good company, which basically offered English classes to its employees, so I suppose they asked them, “Who wants English classes?” Five of them signed up, they found me on Madrid Teacher, the pay is pretty reasonable, definitely better than through an academy, it’s not too far from my home, so viola, I’m on it, I meet them, they seem like nice people, and now I’m their “profe”.

They said their level was basically intermediate, and that in fact is a pretty good average, because their skills range from pre-intermediate to upper intermediate. Therein lies the main difficulty. The weaker students have a bit of a complex, in fact one of them spends most of the time furiously taking notes and is reluctant to surface to answer questions and participate. The stronger ones end up dominating so I have to “nominate” the weaker ones to force them to participate. I also find myself slowing down for them, so things take longer than I anticipate. In fact in today’s class the main problem was I didn’t get to the fluency activity at the end.

This is actually a pretty good group in the sense that when they told me what they wanted they said mainly vocabulary, listening comprehension and speaking. That sounds pretty good to me, but again the problem is getting bogged down in the language input phase of things; that’s the part that ends up a drudgery. But at least they understand the importance of that phase. Yet here in Spain opportunities to put your English into practice are not abundant, so the fluency stages are important.

The way I see it, the upshot here is that I’m not really going to be able to use the book “properly”; that is, the group goes too slowly to get to the fluency activity in the book, so I’ll have to bring in my own, which may not necessarily always tie in with the book thematically, grammatically or lexically. But supplementing is as old as the hills, or as old as English teaching.