Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002

Nightmares, University and Teaching

Dear Mario,

Yesterday I was talking to some of my friends about university and student life, and most of us thought that it was an experience we didn't want to go through again. All the pressure on exams and results was too hard to make us want to repeat it; someone said that after finishing her studies she still had dreams about having to pass a test again and not being able to do it.

Another person said it was like being in the military service, months after having finished he still dreamt about it, still thinking of the strict rules he had to follow, and I remembered that I sometimes dream about not being able to teach a lesson because the students aren't paying attention, or I dream of not arriving on time at a lesson, moving along corridors like mad, loaded with books and always finding myself being interrupted or wanting to be interrupted so that the time passes by and the lesson ends before I get to my class.

I suppose that conversation came to my mind because whenever I look at a white sheet of paper, knowing that what I'm writing might be read by someone I don't know, makes me feel frightened and insecure.

Begonia Iglesias

What motivates me

( reprinted with thanks from Laurels News, No 23, Brazil )

Dear Editor,

I would like to share with you a light-hearted view of some things which motivate me about teaching.

Don't you just love it when…

-you get everyone's homework
-all students participate in the class
-students appear to enjoy your class
-students use the expressions you taught 2 weeks back
-a weak student gets a good grade
-a quiet student says 10 words together
-students play a game and participate in English
-every part of your lesson plan falls exactly into place
-a colleague observes your class and tells you they enjoyed it
-it only takes a short while to plan a lesson
-a colleague shares a good idea
-students successfully complete a listening task
-students ask a good question that you have to go and check the answer to
-you can create interesting materials for your lesson
-you watch a video and realise it would work perfectly for your next class
-on the first day, all the students turn up with course books
-you meet a student you taught as a beginner, speaking fluently
-all your students pass their CCSE exams
-an ex-student of yours becomes a teacher
-you try a new approach and it works
-you realise that other teachers make the same mistakes as you
-workshops give you lots more good ideas
-your director invites you to give a workshop on an idea of yours

But most of all…
…don't you just love the end of the semester????

Helen Guimaraes

ELC, Recife, Brazil.

A teacher I hated

Dear Editor.

I was only seven when I met my primary school teacher. She was an old spinster, always bitter and nervous who, strangely enough, had the renown of a very good teacher.

She used to shout at all of us, slap us and even beat us. When I think of her I remember her as one of those mythological characters: a Gorgon or an erinia.

I was completely terrified every time I came to school; sometimes I would cry during the breaks (always before the Math class) but I never told anything to my parents for fear she might beat me harder the next day.

To me her behaviour seemed strange and cruel, the more so as my answers were always right. She had this special talent of discouraging us all, of making us think we knew nothing and we were stupid pupils. I always got the first prize, throughout this "four-year ordeal" but I was always sad. My parents even reproached me this.

Maybe my schoolteacher's behaviour did not have such a strong impact on other pupils; some of them were beat up by their own parents, and therefore behaved normally during the breaks: they ran, they shouted, they used to fight with one another. I used to look at them and analyze them. I was probably too different from them. My parents had always been nice to me: they never had to take harsh measures. My mother teaches Psychology (in a college) but I wonder why she had failed to notice the change within me. I was always a bit of an introverted person but my teacher's behaviour made me become secluded from almost everybody, asking myself whether my ideas were worth expressing or not.

Whenever she met my parents she would only speak highly of me, smile and seem the sweetest teacher in the world. This is what made me think that maybe the next day she would turn into a better person, and maybe that was why I was postponing telling my parents the truth. On the other hand, my parents kept telling me she was the best teacher and the best school I could ever go to. They only found out accidentally about my teacher's behaviour towards me, when I was a teenager.

They were shocked and appalled, but there was nothing they could do. My school-teacher was already a retired "respectable" old woman.

Irina Malihen

Reaction to Maley's article in HLT, Nov 2001,
Teaching English in difficult Circumstances:
Who needs a health farm when they're starving?

Dear Editor,

( I am not sure where to post irate letters, so I am sending this to you, though indeed you and Humanising Language Teaching are innocent bystanders. I refer to Alan Maley's article about ELT in poor countries in the last issue of HLT. His is an old trick and a not very sanitary one :

You academics, comfortably esconced in the first World, let me tell you what life is really like in the real world. Now, when I was working in Ghana…….

It's cheap and dirty, but it really works wonders with charitable foundations and guilty white liberals, and can penetrate to the depths of their consciences and their checkbooks.

I admit, if I am unimpressed it is partly because I have my own tales to tell: twelve and a half years in China where I sometimes had to come to class two hours early to get the coal stove started. I taught students who sold ice cream to their own students to support their families and wrote on dirty chalkboards with wet fingers because there was no chalk. So I'm afraid I am not taken with this kind of demagogy, and anyway I haven't got much of a checkbook.

Come to think of it, we used to use (pirate) copies of Maley's Learning to Listen, ( His unit on Sleeping Habits was wonderful to wake up to while sweet potatoes baked in the coal stove).

Now, one of the reasons why we used the pirate edition was that China was the subject of an international book boycott. It was illegal to sell books to China for the simple reason that it could not and would not pay for them. ( This was to China's credit, although very much against China's credit rating.)

Yes this was imperialism. The royalties demanded ( or at any rate commanded) by people like Maley and the Hadfields and all the other brave white missionaries Maley is so proud of , deprived my teachers and my learners of books. And the high cost of higher education imposed by Western publishers, Western lecturers and, of course, the World Trade Organisation, eventually did succeed in driving out all but those who can pay for themselves from Chinese education. Today Chinese education has a system remarkably like that of the West, where those who have the weakest interest in arming themselves with knowledge are precisely those who have access to it, and, as a result, I am writing from Korea which still has the good sense to protect its higher education system.

Yes, imperialism exists, not just the linguistic sort, but the fuel-air bomb sort currently bouncing the rubble of the few schools built by the Communist Government in Afghanistan. Yes, it IS an important issue. In fact, Mr Maley, the issues of linguicide, preferential hiring of expatriates and preferential buying of First World books are major issues. Local teachers don't need you and me to tell them how to make papier mache out of newspaper and cassava paste. On the other hand , a royalty waiver might be nice.

David Kellogg, Seoul National University of Education, South Korea.

( Editorial note: the themes raised by this letter are major ones which is why HLT has published the letter despite not finding David's logic everywhere easy to follow. What are your thoughts on these issues, dear Reader?)