A rolling thread where we are teachers

Oh -- I'm an adjunct professor of English.

Ok so I'm finally home now. In my final piece of inspiration to my speech class, did I implore my (adult) students to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and continue if they fall down during their speeches?

You know I did. It's a corny teacher moment, but they seemed to like it. I don't have any native speakers in this class, so that makes it a little more fun. Ah well.

aw, I bet your students aren't even going to remember this accident a month from now.

from the advice of a colleague, created a separate facebook account for interacting w/ students with. think it might be a useful way to convey information about due dates, requirements, etc. & maybe an interesting alternative to e-mail.

oh, i meant to tell you -- the merriam webster's learner's dictionary website is fantastic. they have a blog with posts that should be interesting to students of your level, word of the day, pronunciation exercises, a place to create your own dictionary, all kinds of neat stuff. i think they recently made it a lot different/better. also recommended: visual thesaurus (dot com). great for vocabulary, words with two different definitions that are 2+ parts of speech, demonstrating language shit in an interesting way, etc.

wow, thanks for the tip! going to check it out right now

:) my pleasure

my coordinator just came by and dropped off the materials, still crappy, still plagiarized. \(O_o)/

oh yeah while I was showing him my iPad he made a joke about "don't show me all the porn I know you've got on there!"

...

way to project, loser

(him, not you)

hah - also word on the street is he's dating a 25 year old who used to be a student (not sure if she was his student specifically or not) at his last university. on facebook they are 'engaged.' he is 45.

he is giving all of us a bad name

i'm taking tesol classes at the moment. teaching english has always appealed to me so i decided to give it a try. i like reading you people's posts about it.

oh! wonderful -- you will salvage our collective reputation if anyone can.
if you have any questions, i'd be glad to answer them :)

LL, that was a Good Save! I think the only way to recover from those kinds of events is to be self-deprecating and corny.

amanda is the bestest tesol teacher btw

awww <3
certainly the clumsiest

i'm feeling really unusually motivated this semester. it feels good!

aw thanks, ll, i'm sure i will have questions as i go along.

first two classes went okay on Monday, another one today...

the course packet for the above mentioned plagiarized course is pretty lol.. I can pretty much take a sentence from any page in the packet, google it, and find the original source...

that is super lame
would not pass for student work, don't see why it would pass for administration?

today in my class we were talking about how new words are born, and it was really fun
i love my job

yeah. I dunno, my school uses TFQ (teaching feedback questionnaires) as its primary way to evaluate teachers, and it kind of sucks - you just need to entertain the students & get them to like you in order to keep your job (which is what this guy does). stanley fish wrote some good oped pieces earlier this summer about the drawbacks of using TFQs as primary evaluation devices.

it all depends on how they're written, imo. sometimes they can elicit better information, sometimes not.

yeah, I def agree they can be valuable, but I don't like the idea of basing hiring decisions on them (sorry should have mentioned that in my post - my school basically decides whether to hire or fire you based on how good your TFQ is)

also, grammar question for all the ESL/EFL teachers itt: I'm working on teaching comparisons and comparative structures right now. the grammar book mentions that with adverbs that end in -ly, you need to use the 'more X-ly' construction. i.e. more slowly, more brusquely, more sharply (examples from the book). however what's the difference in meaning between:

John works more slowly than Peter does
John works slower than Peter does

to my ear, both of those sentences sound the same? whereas with the following two

Bill dresses more sharply than Adam does
Eric dresses sharper than Rick

the second example definitely does sound a bit off.

has anybody here used Blackboard? My school just switched from WebCT to Blackboard and I'm wondering if I want to get hot n heavy with this software and use it for setting up email groups so students can read each other's weekly response papers to the reading. Thoughts?

our school uses Blackboard, and my university used blackboard too. you can set up discussion forums on blackboard. for one of my classes we did something similar to what you're suggesting - everybody posted their weekly response on blackboard. but I don't know how many of the students actually read the other students' responses.

it seems really powerful and flexible, I just don't want to "bet the farm" on having students submit lots of content to it if they're not likely to look at it / use it. But I can see the advantages in terms of messaging people about course related stuff.

teachers at my school don't really seem to know how to use it, they just use it as a storage place for all their course files.

anyways, I've answered my own question upthread - the book was just describing tendencies for choosing between the -er and the 'more' form, there is a great degree of flexibility in choosing. ugh english is so hard to teach

has anybody here used Blackboard? My school just switched from WebCT to Blackboard and I'm wondering if I want to get hot n heavy with this software and use it for setting up email groups so students can read each other's weekly response papers to the reading. Thoughts?

Blackboard is terrible software for stupid technophobes.

Personally, I'm phobic about wasting my student's time and energy, and my own time and energy. I make no claims to be a code-writing fiend, but that hardly makes me a technophobe. Kind of busy with the content of the course (an upper division seminar for undergrads on Edmund Spenser which asks them to read all of "The Faerie Queene"). Just trying to talk to other teachers about whether they've enjoyed using this software. Oh, and are all technophobes stupid? Or are there some people who happen to be both technophobes and stupid? And in either case, are you actually accusing me of being a stupid technophobe, or just claiming that anyone who is skeptical/curious about a new piece of software's utility in the classroom is a stupid technophobe?

John works more slowly than Peter does
John works slower than Peter does

to my ear, both of those sentences sound the same? whereas with the following two

Bill dresses more sharply than Adam does
Eric dresses sharper than Rick

the second example definitely does sound a bit off.

as i read it: prescriptively, the second sentence in each pair is technically inaccurate. one of them sounds more inaccurate to your native-speaking ear because descriptively, people do say that. less so the second example. but in terms of language teaching, which is usually done somewhat prescriptively so as to avoid serious confusion, i would say go with the more + adverb formula. it's safe, and students are not going to benefit as much from what flies descriptively. imo, of course.

i would be thrilled to use blackboard, as most of my students are technophobes. instead, we have moodle.

thanks LL, that sounds about right.

I'll probably use Blackboard next term, at least as a place to house documents and links. We used it when I was in law school and I hated it, but it's all we got.

Also, a lot of my students don't have easy access to computers and I don't want to make their grades dependent on their being able to get to a computer lab at school. Just getting them to type their assignments in legal writing was like pulling teeth.

I've been in the last couple of days setting up the classroom. Well, yesterday I actually just sat at the computer--I need a day to get re-acclimatized to the simple fact of being there. I've been working my way through The World Is Flat over the summer. Made me extra glad I'm a teacher and don't have to worry about "high-value added skills" and all that stuff.

just putting this out there:

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/current

is pretty good and I've got an institutional subscription. if any of the articles look interesting to you guys let me know and I could, uhm, share.

thanks!

As a continuing ed instructor, I get paid by the student and I just found out yesterday that I have 23 in my class this term. That's a lot! And, bonus, this is not a writing class so unlike last term when I had to read 24 legal writing assignments every week (omg), I just have to grade 23 midterms and 23 finals.

I had my first class this past Saturday and I have a lot of really interesting students. In a good way! That's one thing I love about continuing ed - my students are v. interesting individuals that I enjoy getting to know.

my teacher ed program started this week. officially freaked out

oh please, you're a natural
stop the freakouts before they start imo

aw <3 means a lot coming from you, Amanda
i think i will maybe just take a nap and calm down

yeah just remember that in order 2 b a good teacher, u have to not freakout, ever

doing responsive classroom stuff today. it is good and all, but kind of... obvious?

sorry but need to vent - hate it when that dude I'm working with from upthread e-mails me about his sessions and says something like "many of the students are not very strong..." (happens all the time)

have you ever thought that you are just not teaching them effectively

also, just turned down a request to write a rec letter. that felt bad. but I honestly think lukewarm rec letters hurt more than help. need to have a range of stock responses stored for next time.

Not much, just fractions to a niece, and it was frigging harder than I ever imagined it would be. Sister-in-law got a laff watching.

I won't write rec letters for everybody either. Some of my students, as much as I might like them personally, are just not very recommendable.

dayo, how did you tell the student that you would not write the letter?

Does anyone happen to know of any EFL schools in London looking for teachers? I've been doing agency work all summer, and it's abruptly dried up.

I sort of hemmed and hawed and told her that she did pretty good work (B to B+ student I would say) but I said that she was very quiet in class, I didn't really notice her contributing during group work, etc - also explained that I could only write her a fair letter, and that would probably hurt her application more than help. not sure if she fully understood. I tried to soften it by saying I would help her look over her application, give her advice on her essays etc. xp