Andrew Wright is an author, illustrator, teacher trainer and story teller. He has published with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Pearson. As a teacher trainer and story teller he has worked in 55 countries. E-mail: andrew@ili.hu, www.andrewarticlesandstories.wordpress.com

 

I spent an evening with my old friend Andrea and her husband Guy.  Andrea has been a teacher of English in Hungary, all her professional life. Andrea has agreed to stay on half time in her school, in Budapest, although she is fully in retirement age.

Andrea shared with us her some of her main concerns in this last bit of time of working as an English teacher.  I feel, her story should be shared with colleagues everywhere.  Whether anything can be ‘done about it’, I have no idea.

The ideas below are a mixture of Andrea’s experiences and a few of my thoughts as someone steeped in teaching/learning matters but almost no experience of sustaining teaching, day in, day out, year in, year out. 

So there is the background.

What came home to me was the dilemma which Andrea has suffered and perhaps thousands of other colleagues worldwide suffer from. 

(The words below are not Andrea’s exact words but I have shown her my reconstruction below and she assures me it is, essentially, what she said and what she and her colleagues feel.)

‘I know, I understand, that we mustn’t create negative attitudes within our students by correcting them all the time.  I know that we must try to interest them in the topic of the language we are introducing and practising.  But it is so difficult to interest  15 to 20 young people at the same time and young people, in general, these days.  They have so many top professional entertainment things to follow in their out of school day.  We can’t compete.  We can’t get anywhere near it.  I learned about the game Kahoot  from one class and adapted it into my teaching and it worked well for a  while and then new classes stopped being interested in it, scornfully dismissing it as something completely out of the trend.  How can my poor old brain cope?  Well, it can’t.  My brain can’t adapt to matching the rapidity of change of teenage choice. 

In any case I am exhausted, not only with old age but because my working day is so long.  (It is much easier now I am semi-retired but I am even older than I was!)

On a full teaching day, I must get up at 5.15 am, slowly wake my brain up for the next half an hour, catch the tram  at 6.50 to be at school at about 7.25 and start my first lesson at 7.45. A full time teacher has to do 22 to 26 lessons a week, and everything else comes on top of that, e.g. standing in for colleagues who are ill. A regular school day for most teachers (and students) goes on until 2.35 pm and often, even later as A-level classes could only be set after regular ones – this might mean another 90 minutes of work for both parties.

Of course when you arrive home, you start on preparing lessons for the following days, setting tests and essay homework and marking them, looking for practice material or trying to find something authentic and ‘interesting’ for them to work on. Each group of students is different; in ability, general work ethics and interests, consequently material that I have put together once, may not be appropriate to use with another group.

Also, with English, there is a tendency for publishers to come out with 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th editions of different course books, which is great in the sense that the topics and materials used are updated and modernised – in the hope of raising teenage interest – but it also means a lot of work for me. You need to have a thorough look at a new course book you are working with, unit by unit.

In the mornings, many of my students seem to be as tired as me and slump on their desks or use their creative drive to ferment unrest amongst their slumping fellows.

Some younger teachers can cope with this constant demand, ‘Be engaging!’ At least, they seem to have the energy and perhaps some of them achieve it.

They use ‘apps’, games and videos and in any case, one set of course books used in my school seem to be based on the idea that there is no need to practice anything in depth, as any structure or piece of vocabulary is going to come up again and again later. This might be a concession to the students’ attitude and need for being provided with something ‘new’ every minute. (To me, this feels as if I was trying to build a high-rise block without any foundation or groundwork…)

I agreed to stay on half time partly because the school can’t find enough teachers of English.  In some subjects like Maths and Physics there simply are not enough teachers in the country.’

Doesn’t Andrea speak for the situation in school language classes in many other countries, not only those in Hungary!

Andrea describes the situation fully but please allow me to add a few thoughts.

I think..

I think that the ‘old’ perception of, ‘teaching English’ was this:

Children at school who show natural talent in learning a foreign language are given good marks at school and while growing up find their identity in studying English.  Many of them may well feel, ‘I am the one who is good at English.’  Don’t we all want to feel our identity by saying, ‘I’m the one who is good at….’ or ‘I’m the one who is not good at ….’?

Some of these young people naturally want to follow up on their talent and go to university. 

The university’s aim may well be to help students to achieve skills in using English accurately and being knowledgeable about the rules governing the use of English.

For many years it was the assumption that a foreign language teacher’s job is to present and practice and help students to remember language points and vocabulary.

And, even now, I believe many teachers will look on that summary (or something like it) as being the right thing to do.

But…

Over the last decades, in many aspects of society, the individual has been given more emphasis.  Was the hippie movement a sign of such a development?

In language teaching was Moskowitz’s, ‘Caring and Sharing in the Language Classroom’, published in 1972, not a sign of such a development in the language teaching world?

OK, fine!  Why not, if they learn the language, thoroughly?

But…

The number of lessons in a teacher’s day maybe reasonable for the teacher who is only expected to ‘pass on’ what he or she knows to students AND to students who have the brains and disposition to acquire what is taught.

As Andrea knows so well at the end of her career, if the teacher only has to present and practice language points which they, as teachers, have already mastered, then less preparation may be required but if teachers are expected to create events which engage the students as ‘whole individuals’ who can experience the language not merely study and remember it, more time is needed AND the skill of engaging people which is a topic equally as demanding as learning language forms and rules need to be developed by the teacher.

Electric cars are a huge improvement but they need a major change in the supply of electricity.  New developments need new provisions.

Engaging people as ‘whole individuals’ so that they experience the language they are using, is great (in societies in which this value IS fundamental) but it needs a major change in the time given to teachers to achieve engagement and in their ability to do so.  ‘Engaging’ is not the same as ‘interesting’.  ‘Interesting’ is a part of ‘engaging’.

It follows that I cannot jot down a one line description of my understanding of ‘engaging’!  But it would contain ideas such as involvement of the learner’s mind and spirit and sense of fellowship with others.  It would involve, ‘curiosity’ rather than mild and passing interest.  It would involve, sorting out meanings from complexity and speculating, and researching, and listening to others and differentiating, and evaluating and sharing and discussing and caring…

Such a list is overwhelming and an ‘engaging activity’ might not be quite so overwhelming!  But it would certainly require time, commitment and skill from the teacher.

New developments need new provisions!

A compromise might be to include a few really ‘engaging activities’ within a teaching programme in which the learners can have that vibrant experience of the language which is so special.

Back to the reality of teachers having to work within assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning which in practice were conceived a very long time ago.

In Hungary where Andrea lives and has worked all her life, the cost of living is rising by crazy amounts like 20 or 30% but the government, in Hungary, is holding teacher salary rises to 10% and teacher’s salaries were already abysmally low.

Perhaps that is something else which teachers share around the world!

I thank Andrea so much for bringing this understanding home for me.