A rolling thread where we are teachers

is there any way we could move this thread to 77 or deindex it or something? i'm getting a little nervous about it.

lalech, twice in the past two weeks our tesol teacher has almost tripped on a cord, and each time i've immediately thought of you and lolled, which probably makes me look mean and/or inappropriate.

hahaha
i insinuate myself into many unusual situations

i have a funny story but i want to wait to post it til the thread is safeguarded
today was full of conflict and crying

i was not the one crying fyi
it's week 3 -- usually someone cries by this point

as soon as the thread is safe i want to hear this story.

can we move it to 77? is that ok? i don't want to exclude anyone...but i am dying to tell this story

it's a good idea. and anyone who isn't on 77 and wants to be just has to ask and they get added so there are no real issues with exclusion.

mod request requested

i'm mad paranoid and love my job* too much to endanger it.

*really, for real i do actually genuinely ENJOY what i do for money

i can tell!

i asked the mod board and they suggested starting a new thread on 77. i'll wait til the morning to start it, and will let you know if/when i do. i would rather have a high level of privacy if we're talking about something that -- for some people -- is be as controversial as teaching.

i don't want to get burned or drowned or blacklisted for this. it's not that the story is so good, it's just that we're dealing with a sensitive subject here.

is be == can be or is, depending on which way i rewrote that sentence like 5x

I just started one FYI

Could someone here send me a 77 invite? I'm not on there yet.

just ask on this thread and a mod will add you.

Request Access to 77 Borad

so I'm confused about one activity that keeps on coming up in my materials. we're practicing listening and I'm supposed to ask them to do a 'pre-listening' activity where they 'predict' the content of the recording before listening, based on the title of the recording, and then try to see if what they predicted matches up with what is said.

is there a pedagogical base for this? does it sound stupid to anybody else? I can't recall doing anything similar at all to this in my language classes in school.

ability to prejudge ilx threads as clusterfucks

ha, i had an exercise yesterday where ss had to predict what an article called "about engineering" would be "about".

i guess maybe it has smthg to do with developing the ability to glean gen ideas from key words in texts where they won't know many of them (wds). same as we've been practicing "skimming" as a skill. just speculating on the intent though, and no idea really if it's at all effective.

so I'm confused about one activity that keeps on coming up in my materials. we're practicing listening and I'm supposed to ask them to do a 'pre-listening' activity where they 'predict' the content of the recording before listening, based on the title of the recording, and then try to see if what they predicted matches up with what is said.

is there a pedagogical base for this? does it sound stupid to anybody else? I can't recall doing anything similar at all to this in my language classes in school.

― dayo, Monday, September 20, 2010 11:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

some of the stuff i'm reading for my teacher ed program suggests doing this. i guess it's to get them in an active reading/listening posture? it is hard for me to imagine not seeming stilted in the classroom, but what do i know?

yeah maybe it's designed to make them more active listeners? idk. the thing is I can't take it for granted what vocab if any my students know about the subjects at hand, and it's rly hard to guess what passage called 'there is no right or wrong answer' is going to be about?

it's a standard thing in esl teaching to ask students to "predict" what something will be "about" -- what they're really doing is making inferences about limited context clues, something we all do without thinking about it. when you see a thread that says "thread where we are teachers" you use your previous understanding of ilx to know that this is a thread for people who are teachers, not a thread where people teach you how to do things. when you see a thread that says "clusterfuck thread" and it's about different kinds of international soft cheese, you realize that you predicted incorrectly. it's just developing that skill to correctly infer what something will be "about." like critical thinking, it's a skill that must be developed.

okay, that makes sense - thanks LL. I'll try to use it more in my next few classes

I'm doing my own social studies this year for the first time in a while. We covered the Beringia Land Bridge Theory yesterday, lead-in to our Native Canadians unit. For the first and last time in my life I was thinking, "You know, I could really use Sarah Palin as a guest lecturer today."

Thursday we were doing the five kingdoms of living things, and I had a girl read "amoeba" off the board as "Obama." I was able to milk that for laughs the rest of the day. "Bacteria" was up there too--if only someone had read that as "Gingrich."

just wanted to share this with all my other ESL teachers, found it through a link from a link that LL originally sent me

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/

they have a youtube too!

http://www.youtube.com/voalearningenglish

also this story is awesome and uplifting

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/education/28school.html

we're doing something similar at my school!

this is key: “Let me help you,” was a response committee members said they often offered to reluctant colleagues who argued that some requests were too difficult.

Ughh I think I just had my least favourite lesson since I got to the basic-class-control stage 3 years ago: there is a HUGE FUCKING DRILL right outside school and the whole building is shaking? Ughhh I like talking about decimals and all but I just want to put a pillow over my head.

sharing another cool website that I use fairly frequently

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/esl/videos.html

http://eslonthehill.wordpress.com/

lots of good stuff for higher level ESL teaching

Hello,

I was hoping that there may be discussion of How To Write A Teaching Philosophy on this thread, but there is none. How does one compose one of these things?

I found a lot of samples and just went from there

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tstpts.php

hoo boy

I teach English to foreign students and I teach people how to teach English to foreign students and sometimes I teach people how to teach people to teach English to foreign students.

Does anyone know anything about getting single subject teaching credentials (e.g. for high school, etc.). I know it varies by state.

yes. you have to pass CBEST (in CA). You have to have a certain number of hours of student teaching. You can apply or look for some programs where you can actually get this credential while teaching at a private school, thereby still getting paid (because otherwise you don't get paid, and it makes it kind of hard to get a credential).

I missed this, thanks kyle!

Anyway, I start teaching film production in 3 weeks. Who wants to get schooled?

back to school tomorrow

just went to my classroom to hook up my laptop / PowerPoint and practice my first lecture to a giant, empty lecture hall

stoked!

So guys, I didn't get hired this year. I'm too expensive ... 2 Masters and 3 years experience put me out of the running in my cash-strapped state, and as of tomorrow morning I am an unemployed elementary school teacher. I've signed up for sub lists, etc., but this is ... very very difficult, and I'm looking at a year with low and irregular cashflow,as well as a more difficult time getting hired next year. In all, I sent out roughly 100 applications, with custom cover letters and glowing references and ... not one of my references got called; I didn't get an interview between May and today. It really sucks, and I'm not really sure what to do with my life right now.

This won't make you feel any better, but once I got about five years into teaching (also elementary), and was high enough on my board's seniority list that I was never in danger of being excessed, my lack of any extra qualifications--no ESL, no special ed, no French--actually became an advantage in making sure I'd always have my own classroom. There's nowhere else to put me.

I spent a few years supplying/substituting before going full time, and then--and now--the sub work in my board is extremely steady. I think our subs draw probably 90% of a full year's salary, some more.

remy, that is so disheartening. ordinarily I wd just say come to Texas but even jobs here are hard to come by now (you are still welcome to come to Texas, tho, if u don't mind 109 deg heat right now.)

Teaching: we enlist for the opportunity to counsel and educate tomorrow's youth, but we stay for the extra-long vacations.

had to sub a sixth grade health class
subject: body odor

apropos.

awesome

how do you teach about body odor? what's the lesson like?

"Okay: everybody gather around Tommy's desk for a second."

i did not have any prep time. So I talked extemporaneously about deodorant as a public service; we discussed the many implications of the phrase "your rights end where my nose begins" took a brief detour into the farts vs. pit odor discusison, and then talked about empathy, and how to pull somebody politely aside rather than publically call them out for stankiness.

Hello ILX.

I teach History, to 11-17 year olds in Northwest London.

Did do 2 years of TEFL in Barcelona.

I have plenty of body odour problems with my students routinely not showering but the worst thing is when students unilaterally decide to unload a bottle of deodorant in the room. But hey at least I don't have the problem of nits that my primary colleagues do.

Am off until Thursday!

can we keep teacher stuff on our 77 thread?
i plan on keeping anything personal on it at least

remy i'm curious what the discussion about noses and rights was like. feel free to bump the other thread though.

it's tuesday!

Tell me about your attendance policies! Especially if you teach at a post-secondary level. This is my first time getting to make up my own and I have some ideas, but I would like to compare them to what other people have done to see if I'm way off base. Thanks!