Category Archives: Humour

175. The Phrasal Verb Chronicles #1

This is both a phrasal verb review, and a random made-up story. 50 phrasal verbs reviewed within the context of a completely improvised comedy story. Click here for The Phrasal Verb Chronicles #2.

Download Episode

I decided to do this episode as a way to remind you of the first 50 phrasal verbs I’ve taught you in my Phrasal Verb a Day series of mini-episodes. When I’ve reached 100 phrasal verb episodes, I’ll do another episode of The Phrasal Verb Chronicles, to help you remember #51-100.

Here are the phrasal verbs I use in this episode. Can you notice how I use them in my weird story? You could also attempt to make up your own story using these phrasal verbs. You don’t have to do all 50. Try just using 5, then 10, then 20 and so on. Eventually you should be able to make meaningful sentences using all the phrases.

I wonder what you think of the idea of “Story Time Club with Luke from Luke’s English Podcast”? Let me know ;)

Extracts with Vocabulary from this Episode (thanks to Jack from the comment section)

I’ve been meaning for a while to go through these phrasal verbs…..
Check them out.
Chronicles
To make up a story off the top of my head.
Try and jog your memories regarding these phrases.
A make up story / situation.
Try and spot the phrasal verbs.
Think also about the grammatical context I’m using them in.
But the aim is for me to try and use these phrasal verbs in this weird long drawn out situation.
I’m gonna try and ask her out.
Sorry you sound a little bit sarcastic.
I’m not up for it any more.
How am I gonna bail out of this?
I walked back over to the other side of the pub with my mates and I felt devasted!
I really thought that we were going to get on with each other.
We might start going out with each other.
But she was annoyingly sarcastic and I don’t know if I can take it.
You usually bounch back from this kind of situation.
If I get flung into a corner I just bounce back
So bring it on
Don’t get carried away
It’s all cool and groovy brother.
Come on catch up!
Can I just chip in?
Bizarre
Look! Never mind that!
It’s twenty quid. Come on cough up
I overheard a guy in the pub.
I listened in and he was going……
I think the police need to crack down on crime.
Do you mind if I just chip in?
I get the impression that nothing is occurring at this moment because you can’t work out what kind of crime it is that police should be cracking down on.
You are actually buying time so that you can think of a funny crime so that then you can use the expression to crack up.

You are very intuitive.
Get on with it!
Schizophrenic
May be I’m cracking up – I’m losing it.
Curl up on the sofa
I’ve got to dash off
I’ve got to doze off
I got on the bus.
I started to drop off to sleep.
I turned on the TV. The commercials were on.
It’s the dumbing down of modern culture.
I’ve got to get out now.
I’ll treat myself to a meal in a nice restaurant.
I’m going to eat out in a lovely restaurant.
I have just a very meagre salary which I have to eek out over the whole year.
Hold your horses Luke! Don’t get carried away.
What I probably should do is work out how to move this story forward.
To hell with my savings!
I started building myself up.
I was really egging myself on.
I went out – I had a really nice time.
I could help noticing that she was eyeing me up.
I’ve had enough of faffing about.
I’m going to take her out for dinner.
You are just kind of ironic.
I’m gonna fess up at this point.
I was devastated.
I had my pint glass, I was just fiddling with a glass in my hand.
Do you want to feel me up or something?
I’m just flagging this up! You shouldn’t say that kind of thing.
I wonder if my listeners are managing to keep up with all these phrasal verbs……
I grabbed the newspaper.
I sat there flicking through the newspaper.
A story which has no drama……
Just biding my time……
I started gearing myself up to kind of announce to the pub that it was story time.
How I’m going to get through this idea.
Get this message across
Gather around in a group and really get on with each other.
No one will be getting at each other.
You wonder if I’ll get away with this because they might not go along with it.
It’s a crazy idea but I might just get away with it.
I’d probably better just check with him if it’s OK.
You want to set up a story club?
I’ll get back to you.
Nothing, nada, zero, zip, zilch.
Summon them up like Spanish
What have you got back to me with?
Nought (nothing)
Don’t get down about it.
They’ll be caught up in the spirit of things.
They’ll be forced to drink in order to down their sorrows.
In which case, you put on the music and every one gets down.
Yes! Get in! I would love to start tonight.
I wanna get in on this!
Because that story time club is where it’s at.
Everyone will have to take their shirts off.
I think we should just get on with this.
I’m gonna go for it.
Old traditional folk tales.
Put your mobile phones away.
Bloke
My dreams were dashed onto the floor of a traditional club.
I mean there was a vague notion of a story line.

173. The Curse of The Lambton Worm (Short Story)

8 Replies

Listen to a disturbing story from English folklore about a horrendous and mysterious worm.

Download Episode

Introduction
The Lambton Worm is a legend from the north east of England in the UK. The story takes place around the River Wear, in the town of Lambton and at Penshaw Hill which is between Durham and Sunderland in the north east of England. It is one of the area’s most famous pieces of folklore, having been adapted from written and oral tradition into pantomime and song formats, which are still performed to this day. I’m going to keep up that tradition here on Luke’s English Podcast by telling you my version of the story.

The tale is about a man called John Lambton, who was the heir to the Lambton Estate in County Durham, and his battle with a giant worm (dragon) that had been terrorising the local villages. As with most myths, details of the story change with each telling. I’m not from that part of England, but I love this story because I remember reading about it in a book of monsters that my brother used to have when we were kids. Remember before I told you about a ghost book that I used to own when I was a kid? Well, my brother had a similar book, from the same series, and it was all about monsters. I was fascinated by these books (Click this link to read some pages of those books!) So was my brother. I remember there was a picture of John Lambton fighting the worm, and a brief account of the story. It was fascinating, horrific and exciting for me as a kid, and the memory of the story has stayed with me. There’s just something about an old scary story that really excites me. I think this one must be a good one because it has endured for hundreds of years. It dates back to the time of the crusades, so about 1,000 years ago – medieval times. If a story survives that long, being told over and over again and being handed down through the generations, it must mean there must be something in it which interests people.

This is a local legend from country Durham and I expect it’s a strong part of their local culture. There’s an old folk song which tells the story, and it is still sung in old pubs by beer-drinking men with beards and acoustic guitars. I love those old folk songs. It’s proper traditional culture, as performed and told by real local people. I’m not from that part of the country, I’m from the midlands, and the south, but the story means something to me because of the connection I have with it from childhood. Also, I just think that you might like to hear it.

I’m going to tell you the story in my own way. It’s normal for folk tales like this to be changed by the storyteller, and there is no official version of the story – just a general outline. The details get adapted and improvised by each storyteller. So, I’m going to give you my version, which means that I will stick to the main elements of the story, but yes, as usual I will be improvising a lot of other details too. The challenge for me is to try and make it engaging, and entertaining and understandable for you. As well as practising your English, we can also consider what makes a good story. I think it’s about the passion of the storyteller, and the attention to certain details. Your challenge is to follow the story, and perhaps learn it well enough to be able to tell your friends, if you fancy that. Just remember to mention that the roots of this story are in the folklore of the county Durham area, in the North of England. It’s important to remember that this is a bit of local culture. If you’re from that area, and you’re listening to this – I hope you don’t mind my version of the story, and realise that, really, I love this story too and I’m just adapting it a little bit for the purpose of letting people practise their English listening.

Illustration by John Dickson Batten from More English Fairy Tales.

The Main Elements of the Story
Note that I use past tenses to tell my story (past simple, past perfect & past continuous) but below the story is presented using present tenses.
John Lambton is the heir to the Lambton Estate – so he’s a young member of the gentry. A landowner from a fairly rich and well known family in the area.
He’s a rebellious character.
He skips church and he skips school.
He doesn’t care. He just loves fishing. He disrespects his parents.
He skips church one Sunday, and goes fishing.
He meets an old man – an old hermit, who tells him that no good will come of skipping church. He ignores the old man, and yet it puts him in a bit of a bad mood.
He catches nothing all morning.
Then, as the church bells are ringing for the end of service, he gets a bite on his line.
It’s a powerful bite and he has to wrestle hard to bring in the catch. The water crashes around and gets deeply churned up. He fights hard and brings in his catch.
It’s a truly disgusting and horrifying catch.
It’s a slimy and wriggly black worm. It’s dripping slime, it’s writhing and snapping, and it stinks.
He brings it to rest on the soil. It sits there breathing, completely malevolent. It has 9 holes down the side of its mouth, and John can’t really make sense of its other features. It’s really weird, and makes him feel sick.
He pukes, quite hard. What the hell is this thing?
He takes another look at it, and it opens its eye. It’s yellow and red, and it seems to look right into his soul.
This is a life-changing moment, although he doesn’t realise it.
At that moment, the old man reappears, and says with some certainty that he senses the work of the devil, and that Lambton is now responsible for this worm.
Lambton can’t throw it back, so he quickly puts it in his basket, to carry it home.
On the way back, the basket is so heavy and the worm keeps thrashing around inside it, and hissing. Even when it’s still, the basket seems impossible to carry. It’s so heavy, but also, he feels miserable. The good mood he was in at the beginning of the day has been replaced by a very grim feeling of depression. It’s like he’s suddenly aware of all the time he has wasted, and how everything seems quite hopeless, including his family life.
He can’t take it any more, and feeling desperate, he chucks the worm into a nearby well. The worm struggles quite a lot, but down it goes. Lambton waits to hear the worm hit the bottom, and it does, after a pause, with a splash.
He quickly goes home.
Feeling guilty, and more aware of his responsibilities, he decides to join the army in order to fight in the crusades, as much out of guilt as duty to his family and the church.
He goes to Palestine to fight in the crusades. He’s away for 7 hard years in which he sees many things, makes many friends and sees many friends die in battle. He becomes a man.
Meanwhile, back at home, the worm is still alive in the well. The well becomes infected, and causes anyone who drinks from it to become violently ill, and die, with horrible symptoms.
The worm grows inside the well, and after it has reached a massive size, one moonlit night, it slides out from the well, and it’s massive. It wraps itself around the local Penshaw Hill – several times, and lies there waiting, warming itself in the morning sun. It’s a hideous and vicious creature. It has small legs, with claws on the end, which it uses to scrape and scratch the earth. It is incredibly long, and it slithers like a snake. It’s covered in smooth yet tough scales. Around its head it has a mane of rubbery spikes. The 9 holes that run along the side of its face, under its jaw, ooze a nasty black slime which burns the grass and sends an evil black smoke into the air. It coughs up the bones and remains of the bodies it has eaten, leaving this foul waste on the ground wherever it rests. Its eyes are yellow and deep, and malevolent. It has rows of razor sharp teeth like a shark’s except that they’re black and yellow, and his eyes, like that of a shark, roll back into its head when he takes a bite, leaving him looking white-eyed and blind during its moments of feeding frenzy.
It attacks a local farmer, squeezing him to death after he tries to fight it with his pitchfork. It then eats all his cattle, and his dead body, before returning to the hill.
It then terrorises the area, eating cattle and sheep, and wild animals.
The countryside becomes deathly silent, as it is all scared or killed by the worm. It’s a foul and sickening presence which seems to poison the earth wherever it goes.
Its confidence grows and it enters town.
The town mayor, as an attempt to distract it, empties all the milk supplies from the market into a trough in front of the town hall. The worm eats it all, and returns to the hill, where it sleeps.
The best men of the town get together a fighting force and arm themselves with the best weaponry they can find, and go to attack the worm, but it’s in vain as the worm is very strong and ruthless. Whenever anyone manages to slice the worm, the pieces, shuddering, just grow back together again. The worm seems indestructible.
For the next 7 years, the town gives the worm almost all of its supplies of milk in order to satisfy it. The worm grows bigger, and the town gets more and more exploited, until people are starving to death, and all life is sucked out of the place. When no milk is provided, the worm angrily attacks the residents, killing and eating men, women and children.
John Lambton returns from the crusades a scarred man, but a man nonetheless. He has learned how to fight, and he carries a sword and a suit of armour.
He sees the state of the town, and learns about the worm from his father.
He realises it is the same worm that he discarded all those years ago, and immediately realises that he is responsible for the curse and must fight the worm himself.
He visits a local wise woman for advice. She tells him that the worm has cursed him, his family and the town, and that only he can kill it.
She tells him to visit the blacksmith, and to have spikes and blades fitted to his armour, and that he must lure the worm into the river Wear before doing battle.
She also tells him that to lift the curse, after killing the worm, he must kill the next living thing that he sees.
Lambton gets his special suit of armour made, and arranges with his father that when he has killed the worm, he will blow a note on his hunting horn as a signal that he has won and that the father must release Lambton’s favourite hunting hound. The hound will run straight to him and Lambton will kill it, lifting the curse.
He heads towards the hill and finds the worm.
The worm recognises him and uncoils itself from the hill, hissing, puking black bile and generally being hideous.
Lambton realises how difficult this will be because this worm is really big and strong looking. The worm approaches and he backs away.
He walks backwards towards the river, the worm steadily moving nearer and nearer, flanking him. Lambton gets very tired just walking in the armour – which is extra-heavy because of the fittings.
Eventually, he enters the water, which is cold.
The worm slides down the bank and raises itself up to strike.
They fight and whenever the worm attempts to coil itself around Lambton, it gets sliced up on the blades and spikes.
Lambton is so tired that all he can do is just try not to be washed away by the current. He hacks at the worm and struggles to breath. The fumes from the worm are poisonous. Each time parts of the worm are hacked off, they are washed away, and eventually, just a section of the worm is left and Lambton hacks off its head. The pieces can’t join back together and the worm is no more.
Lambton blows a note on his horn, but his father is so happy to hear it that he forgets to release the hound and instead he runs to see John. Lambton sees him , and is dismayed. he can’t bring himself to kill his father, and so the go back to the house and he kills his hound.
The wise woman appears and tells him that despite killing the worm, he failed to lift the curse and that for 9 generations, the Lambtons will not die in their beds.
injured and sick, Lambton collapses.
That’s the end of the story.

What does this all mean? You tell me.

This curse seems to have held true for at least three generations, possibly helping to contribute to the popularity of the story.
1st generation: Robert Lambton, drowned at Newrig.
2nd: Sir William Lambton, a Colonel of Foot, killed at Marston Moor.
3rd: William Lambton, died in battle at Wakefield.
9th: Henry Lambton, died in his carriage crossing Lambton Bridge on 26 June 1761.
(General Lambton, Henry Lambton’s brother, is said to have kept a horse whip by his bedside to ward off violent assaults. He died in his bed at an old age.)

The Old Folk Song
Here is Tony Wilson singing the folk song in the local dialect
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsO7SeCvgMw&w=500&h=375]
Song Lyrics
Here are the lyrics with some meanings added too. Remember, this is sung in an old dialect. Not many people actually speak in this dialect any more, although there is a distinct accent from that region.

One Sunda morn young Lambton went
A-fishing in the Wear;
An’ catched a fish upon he’s heuk	(=caught) (=his hook)
He thowt leuk’t vary queer.	(=thought looked very strange)
But whatt’n a kind ov fish it was	(=what kind of)
Young Lambton cudden’t tell-
He waddn’t fash te carry’d hyem,	(=could not be bothered to carry it home)
So he hoyed it doon a well	(=threw it down)

Chorus
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,	(=Be quiet, boys, shut your mouths)
An’ aa’ll tell ye aall an aaful story,	(=I’ll tell you all an awful)
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An’ Aa’ll tel ye ‘boot the worm.	(=about)

Noo Lambton felt inclined te gan	(=go)
An’ fight i’ foreign wars.
He joined a troop ov Knights that cared
For nowther woonds nor scars,	(=neither wounds)
An’ off he went te Palestine
Where queer things him befel,
An varry seun forgat aboot	(=very soon forgot about)
The queer worm i’ tha well.

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,
An’ grewed an aaful size;
He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,
An greet big goggly eyes.
An’ when at neets he craaled aboot	(=nights) (=crawled around)
Te pick up bits o’ news,
If he felt dry upon the road,
He’d milk a dozen coos.	(=cows)

This feorful worm would often feed	(=fearful)
On caalves an’ lambs an’ sheep,
An’ swally little bairns alive	(=swallow) (=children)
When they laid doon te sleep.
An when he’d eaten aall he cud	(=all he could)
An’ he had had he’s fill,
He craaled away an’ lapped he’s tail	(=wrapped)
Ten times roond Pensha Hill.

The news ov this myest aaful worm	(=most)
An’ his queer gannins on	(=goings-on)
Seun crossed the seas, gat te the ears	(=soon) (=got to)
Ov brave an’ bowld Sor John.
So hyem he cam an’ catched the beast,	(=home he came and caught)
An’ cut ‘im in twe haalves,	(=cut him in two-halves)
An’ that seun stopped hes eatin’ bairns
An’ sheep an’ lambs an’ caalves.

So noo ye knaa hoo aall the foaks	(=now you know how all the folk)
On byeth sides ov the Wear	(=both)
Lost lots o’ sheep an’ lots o’ sleep
An leeved i’ mortal feor.	(=And lived in mortal fear)
So let’s hev one te brave Sor John	(=let’s drink to brave Sir John)
That kept the bairns frae harm,	(=from)
Saved coos an’ calves by myekin’ haalves	(=making halves)
O’ the famis Lambton Worm.	(=famous)

168. Please Vote! (and “stuff” like that)

20 Replies

Please vote for me in the Macmillan Dictionary Awards. Voting closes at midnight GMT on 14 February – so you only have a couple of days! Click here to vote for me. Thanks! If you’ve already voted – thanks a lot! In this episode I shut up about the competition after 9 minutes, and then just improvise, while using the words ‘stuff’ and ‘thing’ as much as possible.

Download Episode
I also talk about a few other things in this episode, including quite a lot of stuff about working for the secret service, drinking coffee and setting the world to rights over a few drinks. So, do listen to all of the stuff and things I say in this episode ;)

Here’s George Carlin talking about stuff (transcript below)

“Stuff” by George Carlin

I would’ve been out here a little bit sooner but they gave me the wrong dressing room and I couldn’t find any place to put my stuff. And I don’t know how you are but I need a place to put my stuff. So, that’s what I’ve been doing back there. Just trying to find a place for my stuff. You know how important it is. That’s the whole… that’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it? Try and find a place for your stuff. That’s all your house is. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much goddamned stuff you wouldn’t need a house. You’d just walk around all the time. That’s all what your house is, that’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You see that when you’re taking off in an aeroplane. You look down and you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff. Everybody’s got their own pile of stuff and if you leave it you’ve got to lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They don’t bother with the crap you’re saving and nobody’s interested in your fourth grade arithmetic papers. They’re looking for the good stuff. That’s all your house is, it’s a place you keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Now, sometimes, sometimes you’ve got to move. You’ve got to get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff! You’ve got to move all your stuff and maybe put some your stuff in storage. I mentioned that. There’s a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff.

Enough about your stuff. Let’s talk about other people’s stuff. Did you ever notice that when you go to somebody else’s house you never quite feel 100% at home? You know why? No room for your stuff! Somebody else’s stuff is all over the place! And what awful stuff it is. Where did they get this stuff? And if you have to stay overnight at someone’s house, you know, unexpectedly, and they’ll give you a little room to sleep in that they didn’t use that often. Someone died in it eleven years ago and they haven’t moved any of his stuff! Or wherever they give you the sleep usually near the bed there’s a dresser and there’s never any room on a dresser for your stuff. Someone else’s shit is on a dresser. Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?! Get that out of there!

Now, sometimes you go on vacation you’ve got to bring some your stuff with you. You can’t bring all your stuff, just the stuff you really like. The stuff that fits you well that month. Let’s say you want to go to Honolulu. You want to go all the way to Honolulu and you’ve got to get two big bags with stuff plus your carry-on stuff plus the stuff in your pockets. You go all the way to Honolulu, you get to the hotel room and you start to put away your stuff. That’s the first thing you do in a hotel room is to put away your stuff. I’ll put some stuff in here. I’ll put some stuff down here. Here’s another place for stuff for you. I’ll put some stuff on here. You put your stuff over there and I’ll put my stuff over here. Here’s another place for the stuff. Hey, we’ve got more places than we’ve got stuff! We’re going to have to buy more stuff! And you put all your stuff away and you know that you’re thousand of miles from home and you don’t quite feel at ease but you know that you must be okay because you do have some your stuff with you. And you relax in Honolulu on that basis. That’s when your friend from Maui calls and says – Hey, why don’t you come over to Maui for the weekend, spend a couple of nights over here? – Aww, shit, no! Now, what stuff do you bring? Right, you’ve got to bring an even smaller version of your stuff. Just enough stuff for a weekend on Maui. And you get over… And you’re really spread out and now you’ve got your shit all over the world! You’ve got stuff at home, stuff in storage, stuff in Honolulu, stuff in Maui, stuff in your pockets so, supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain. When you get over to your friend’s house in Maui and they give you a little place to sleep. There’s a little window ledge, some kind of small shelf and there’s not much room up there but it’s okay because you don’t have much stuff now. And you put what stuff you do have up there. You put your important French toenail clippers, your own readers with that 45-day guarantee, your cinnamon flavoured dental floss and your Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray. And you know you ‘re a long way from home. You know that you must be OK because you do have your Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray. And you relax in Maui on that basis. That’s when your friend says – Hey, I think tonight we’ll go over to another side of the island to stay at my friend’s house overnight – Oh, shit, no! NOW, what do you bring?! Now, you just bring the things you know you’re going to need. Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pen, cigarettes, contraceptives, vaseline, whips, chains, whistles, dildos and a book.

166. The Prawn Story

12 Replies

An undersea tale of identity loss, and shrimp; this is one of those rather ridiculous improvised stories which is loosely based on an old joke. This kind of episode is for listeners who just enjoy listening to some silly fun. Normal educational podcasting will be resumed in due course. Have a good day!

Download Episode

To get the joke you have to know this expression: “I’ve found God, and I’m a born again Christian”. That’s not an indication of the plot of this story, it’s just a phrase you should know in order to get the (frankly terrible) punchline at the end of the story. It’s not tale of religious belief, although you can interpret it that way if you want (I’m not sure how!). But anyway, just hold that sentence in the back of your mind while listening to this story. The story is based on an old joke, and should be 2 minutes long but I’m going to make it last about half an hour.

Some of you might not understand this – and that’s okay. You don’t have to get it. I’m not really teaching you anything. I’m just telling you a colourful and silly story, which I’m just making up off the top of my head. I do these episodes from time to time, and they prove very popular with some of my listeners. It’s a challenge for me, because I’ve got no idea how I’m going to make it last an hour, while making sure it makes some sense. Normal podcasting will be resumed very soon, including planned episodes about memory, slang, and more.

If you fancy transcribing this episode, click here to access the google doc.

153. The Talking Dog Story

3 Replies

Another funny improvised story to entertain you while you do more English listening practice.

Right-click here to download this episode.

In this episode I decided to improvise another story for you. A lot of listeners really liked episode 125. The Pink Gorilla Story (full transcript available), which I improvised into a microphone earlier this year. I received some very nicely written messages from people saying they’d like more of that kind of story on Luke’s English Podcast, so here is another one in a similar style. You’re a fan of Lukes English Podcast which means you must be a bright minded person, so I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of The Talking Dog Story!

The story is based on an old joke about a talking dog. The joke is usually just a minute long, but I decided to extend the joke into a longer story. Most of the details in this episode are just improvised while I talk. I’m just making it up off the top of my head. As a learner of English, your challenge is to keep up with me. Can you follow what is going on? Do you get the self-referential elements and the surreal or ironic humour? Can you identify the punch-line to the joke? I’m sure you can if you listen! As you are a fan of Luke’s English Podcast you are probably the kind of person who understands and appreciates this kind of humourous story telling. So, get stuck in!

Keep listening to the end, because you’ll hear the short version of the story told by someone else. If you fancy it, why not have a go at transcribing some of this. It’s a really good way to develop your English in an intensive way.

Enjoy the story. You can listen to it by clicking “play” on the embedded player at the top of this page. You can download it by right clicking on the ‘download’ text, also at the top of this page.

All the best, and have a great day.

Luke

151. Google Questions

1 Reply

Luke answers some common auto-completed questions from Google.

Right-click here to download this episode.

Hi listeners. Do you know what “Google auto-complete” is?
You know when you start to google something, like maybe ‘why is Luke’s English Podcast so awesome?’ and when you type ‘why is’, Google completes your question with lots of options? Those options are ‘auto-completes’. It’s when Google predicts your search based on frequently asked searches. Try typing “why is” into Google. It will give you some options, like “why is the sky blue?”

Some auto-completes are quite fascinating, because they make you think “why are people asking these crazy questions?” or “that’s a good question – what’s the answer?” Some Google auto-completes are really deep, if you take the time to consider them.

Have a look at this graphic, which was produced by xkcd http://xkcd.com/1256/ It is a montage of auto-completed questions from Google. I also posted the image on Facebook recently, here.
Here’s a link to the Adweek.com article about women’s rights I mentioned too.

In this episode I decided to try giving my answers to these Google auto-complete questions.

You can listen to my answers in this episode, but I’m also interested in your opinions and your findings from google searches.

Your task while listening to this is to Google the questions and check the results. Are my answers correct? Leave a comment below to give me your opnions.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

Cheers,
Luke

146. Nightmare Teaching Experiences (Part 2)

6 Replies

The continuation of this two part episode about being an English language teacher, and some of the difficult experiences that involves.

Right-click here to download this episode.

A transcript/notes are available for this episode below.

3. The Whiteboard
-The smelly Victorian women’s hospital
-Great views
-Felt like the place was falling apart
-Old stained carpets, mould on the walls
-It stinks! – he was right
-It was never bright. I worked there for one year, including two sweaty summers and one long cold winter. Sometimes the lights would flicker and just die, leaving us in murky darkness. It’s never a good start when the students in the class can’t really see the teacher, each other or the board.
-Some of the students lived in the building and they hated it. Lots of things seemed to go wrong for me in that place. I remember once telling my students some ghost stories about London, and about that building in particular. I thought it was just a bit of light relief, a nice break from doing IELTS practice tests. The next day I saw one of the girls from that class in the corridor, in tears. Her friends told me that she was so freaked out by my ghost stories that she couldn’t live in the building any more. On Friday I saw her hurrying away from the place with a large suitcase. My fault.
-One day I was teaching and the whiteboard fell off the wall. I was teaching something at the board, writing, and the whole thing just dropped off the wall and the corner hit the floor very loudly and made a dent in the floor.
-It made a very loud noise and the students jumped, except for one sleepy Japanese guy who wouldn’t have jumped if I’d stuck 20,000volts through him, and sometimes I was tempted but the others kind of jumped a lot. I just propped the board on the wall, and carried on. I couldn’t really complain a lot about it, although I was understandably pretty angry and surprised. I couldn’t complain about it though because complaining about it would have been unprofessional, so I just propped it up against the wall and we kept going. The next day, we came back to class and the whiteboard was just gone, leaving an empty space on the wall, where the wall paint was all fresh and still glossy from when it had been applied all those years ago.

I’d planned some white board work, and I had my pens, so I just wrote on the wall where the board had been. I was pretty pissed off that I had no whiteboard so I just thought “what the hell” and wrote directly onto the wall. The students found it pretty funny, and it gave a kind of ridiculous edge to proceedings, which I find often helps somehow. The thing is, the wall was much better as a whiteboard than the old scratched whiteboard had been. The old one wasn’t even a whiteboard any more. It was so dirty and scratched. It was a grey board. So for about 3 days I happily wrote on the wall. The writing rubbed off nicely because it was a glossy surface. In the end the grey board appeared back again and it was business as usual.

It was a pretty cool class in the end, although I had to compensate for the crappy resources. The CD player always skipped, the lights flickered, the tables and chairs rocked. The students had to sit in these chairs which had little mini tables on the side. The tables were tiny though, and so people’s books and notes would fall on the floor ALL THE TIME. These things don’t help, and they can really screw you up if you’re not prepared for it. These are all standard problems which we should always be ready for!

What I learned:
Use mishaps in your classes to your advantage. They can become funny moments. Ultimately, your aim is to continue teaching, and not stand around complaining about facilities while the students do nothing. Stay professional at all times. That doesn’t mean formal and strict, but keeping in mind that you mustn’t waste any of the students’ precious time. The lesson must go on. Also, never assume that the facilities will be right. Be prepared for facilities not to work or not to be available. Learn to teach without relying on too many other things.

4. Teaching in a cupboard
-The school was full
-I had a smallish class
-My manager said, you’ll have to teach in ‘the computer room’
-This was not as cool as you’d expect
-It was basically a broom cupboard
-To exacerbate things, there was a kind of bar/counter going around the room with computers on it. This greatly reduced the space in the room. All our chairs were right against the bar.
-We’d all sit there with our knees banging together. It was definitely INTENSIVE general English. None of us could move.
-The whiteboard was behind me, leaning against the back of the door. I had to write with my arm all twisted up over my shoulder.
-Whenever anyone wanted to come in they’d open the door and the whiteboard would hit me on the back of the head. This happened a lot because as I said, this was the computer room so people were constantly trying to get in to check their emails (this is before smartphones) even though there was a note on the door – in my experience, in language schools people just completely ignore notes. Notes or notices are invisible in language schools. As are the “engaged” signs on toilets. In every language school I’ve worked, people have ignored the red “engaged” sign on a toilet door. Why is it that learners of English have to check that the toilet is occupied by trying to open the door? Like, if the sign is red, why would you try to open the door? You’re just going to walk into someone with their trousers down. If the sign is red, don’t try to open the door!
-Whenever students were late in that class they had to climb over the other students in order to get a seat. It was very awkward and weird.

What I learned:
To be honest, I’m not sure what I learned from this experience!

5. Teaching kids in Japan
-This was pretty early in my career. I was in Japan, teaching mainly adults but the school wanted me to teach kids too. I thought it might be another string to my bow so I agreed to take the training.
-During the training I was very sleepy and couldn’t concentrate. As a result, I learned nothing.
-I’ve already talked about the tight schedule of teaching. I often had just 10 minutes to finish teaching one class, complete notes and get down two floors to begin the kids class.
-The general scene was that there was a small room with a glass door so the parents could observe everything going on in the class. The parents, who were all housewives basically, would bring the kids and then watch the lesson through the window.
-3-6 year olds in one class
-Difficult to get them into the room
-Either crying or going mental
-They’d crawl all over me
-They covered me in crayon once
-Just my presence seemed to drive them into a frenzy
-They were different with the other teacher
-I had to conclude that I just had a mad energy that they could sense, and which drove them crazy
-They’d be tearing posters off the walls, climbing up onto the counter and throwing things everywhere
-I caught one kid just spitting on the wall
-They would open the cupboard and start chucking stuff out of the window.
-All the time at least one of them would be stuck to me
-One kid, a sweet kid called Dan, just could not hear me. He would be off, in his own world and I would call him back, like “DAN” etc. The other kids would join in and we’d all be going “DAN DAN DAN”. He learned that in English his name was DAN. So, I’d say, “what’s your name?” and he’d say “my name is DAN!”. Apparently, the family went on holiday once and a foreigner (probably an American) said to him, “hello there, what’s your name?” and he said “My name is DAN!” – The parents were over the moon!
-I learned to distract them with cards – it became all about card games, and races and repetition. Sometimes I would be quite impressed and in all the madness I’d catch them engaging in small bits of English. For example, “it’s mine” – which they would often pronounce as “itchi mai”, or just the colours or other words.
-One day we were joined by another kid called Ritomo. I genuinely think he had behavioural issues. He was incredible hyper and aggressive. I’d manage to get them sitting in a circle quite peacefully, but Ritomo was like a time bomb. I could see him building up, until he would explode and start reaching across, grabbing at the faces of other kids, kicking the other kids and eventually just running around the room like the Tasmanian devil. Once, he grabbed all the cards I was using and legged it out of the classroom into the stairwell, and just chucked all the cards down the stairwell.
-After contending with all this I would usually be boiling hot and very uncomfortable, sometimes covered in crayon or even worse – child saliva on my shirt. I’d then have to run upstairs and straight into a lesson with some salarymen, and I’d have to sit there sweating and wiping off the saliva from my shirt while teaching these serious guys.
-Ultimately, it was very touching teaching these kids. I didn’t realise how they’d become attached to me. When they understood that I was leaving Japan, there were tears. One kid, a 4 year old called Ryo came to school but he wouldn’t come into class because he was too upset about me leaving. He really wanted to say goodbye to me, but he couldn’t do it. Instead he just hid under a chair, crying. One of the other kids wouldn’t let me go, and grabbed onto my leg. They were adorable, but only when it was time for me to leave!

6. Hubris
-This is probably the class that I remember being the most difficult. There have been others but this one stuck in my mind. I wonder if anyone listening to this was even in that class. For me it was not nice, but I don’t know how it was for them in the end. Sometimes you just don’t know what your students are thinking. I’ve had classes in which I was convinced everything was awful and it turned out they were all happy, and the other way round. I’ve been rudely awakened by some comment that a student doesn’t like her classmates even though she happily interacts with them all day long. You never know sometimes. But in this class I knew pretty quickly that it was going to be difficult. As a teacher you start to learn to read certain signs about a class. Some things let you know that it’s going to be one of those classes. I mentioned things above. A lot of those things happened in this class.

-Basically, it’s a story of ‘hubris’ – which means when you have an arrogantly enlarged sense of self-confidence which causes you to believe you can’t fail, but then you do. It comes from ancient Greek mythology. I did one difficult course and did it well, and because of that I assumed I would be great in the next course, but I was wrong, and it was a total nightmare. Perhaps it was not all due to me, in fact I’m sure it wasn’t as I’m about to explain, but still, I look back on it as a difficult experience which I now wish I’d done differently, but from which I’ve learned a lot.

So, what happened? I hear you ask.
It was two weeks before Christmas in the middle of a cold, dark London winter. I’d just finished teaching a one week class of executive business people. This was a very important class, and I had been stressed before that, but stressed in a good way because I prepared myself fully for the lessons by checking the backgrounds of the students I had, looking at their needs and preferences for learning English, checking their professions carefully and then selecting a 30 hour course which covered all the things they needed. I spent lots of time preparing and photocopying material and generally psyching myself up. I dressed nicely and all that. One guy in particular on the course was a VIP who worked as a top-level director for a German car manufacturer. He was a really important client, this imposing German guy. So, I worked very hard on the course with very little preparation time, we worked in class for 6 hours a day. I listened, helped, recommended, prepared specialist vocabulary, facilitated, set up role plays, dealt with grammar, pronunciation, feedback, I went the extra mile, I bent over backwards and I delivered a very good course in the end. It helped that the participants were hard-working professionals themselves, who were able to concentrate and see the benefit of what we were doing, but I felt pretty pleased with myself, especially after the stress I’d felt at the start of the week. The group gave me very good feedback, and the VIP even told my boss that he thought I was the best teacher he’d ever had. Wow, I felt great. I’m a fantastic teacher, I thought.

At 5.30PM that Friday my boss told me about the course I’d be teaching starting Monday, after the weekend. It was a group of about 10 young professionals, here to study business English before finishing their degrees, or finding a post-graduate job. They were all in their early 20s with little business experience. I thought “no problem, I’m the best teacher in the world, I’ll just do my thing. I’ll be like some business English guru for them. After the tough week I’ve just had, this will be a walk in the park”. It was hubris. Pride before a fall.

A number of factors led to this being one of my most difficult courses. Some of it was my fault, some of it the fault of my students, and some the fault of factors out of my control. So, what were those reasons?

Let me first tell you what went wrong, and then the reasons why it happened, and then what I learned from the experience.

The class was going to be a combination of students from two already existing classes, and a new person. So, some of them came from a business class, others came from a difficult legal English course, and one girl was new in the school that Monday. The business class was the same course as this one, so for them it was a continuation of their normal class. Same room, same programme, but with a new teacher and other new people coming into their room. The law class were exhausted and fed up from doing so much work. They’d been doing loads of writing, role plays and exam practice, finishing with a very tough legal English exam. They were not in the mood to do any work. It was their last week before going home. These two groups were like buddies really, two groups of buddies, and they didn’t really mix. Also, they had no real reason to mix because they knew in two weeks it would all be over and they’d be going home. It’s kind of like everyone had given up making any effort. Then, there was the new girl who entered in the middle of this bad atmosphere. I don’t know if it was her, or the atmosphere of the situation she joined, but she behaved in a really bad way, being rude from the beginning, lots of attitude, not willing to work, challenging things, answering over me, flirting with me, making me feel uncomfortable and kind of spoiling activities in class. I expected the others to kind of take to her quite badly, as she was basically poisoning the class. However, they all seemed to like her and kind of let her get away with it, as if it justified the fact they didn’t have to do any work. At the same time though, I was sure that they would all be pissed off about the fact that we weren’t achieving anything in our classes. It turns out they saw me as the reason for that, not her or their weird behaviour. This new girl was quite a bullying influence in the room, and I suspect that others didn’t like her but were not willing to step in and stop it.

It was also a class full of women, except for one quiet Korean guy, who left after the first week. So, there was a kind of odd tension and the usual working friendship between the students that develops after a few hours had not developed. In fact, I found it very hard to get the first lesson really underway at all. After an hour or so I realised that we had managed to achieve almost nothing, I hadn’t put the students under pressure enough, we hadn’t really done any challenging grammar work or vocabulary development and they hadn’t been really activated with a task and I could definitely sense trouble. People were not getting involved, some seemed to be frustratingly impatient while others wasted time. I asked them to make short presentations about themselves, involving standing up and talking for 5 minutes each. Normally I write down all the mistakes they make and then give them all individual language feedback and ask them other questions after each presentation. This allows the class to get to know each other, put their English on display, give me a chance to work out their language needs, bond them together by putting them through a little challenge, and to immediately give them some very direct help by correcting their errors. The presentations all fell flat, with the speakers just grinding to a halt after a few minutes, while I attempted to encourage others to ask more questions. They didn’t seem interested in each other, and I was not able to write down any meaningful language feedback. All I could write on the board, was a few obvious and easily corrected errors. No impact at all. Instead I just got the sense that each person was making a terribly bad first impression on the others, with no sense of rapport developing at all. It was like my plan didn’t just fall flat, but sent the class in the opposite direction. At one point, a presentation ended up in a conversation between two of the girls about a very sensitive ethnic and political topic, involving a nation of refugees and a conflict over a land border between two countries. It was a very divisive and controversial topic, and a personal one because one of the girls was from that region of the world. I could feel other members of the class bristling over the direction it took. When I intervened to get the girls back on topic, they seemed personally offended that I stopped them talking about it. Everything seemed to be going wrong.

All the usual signs were there. These are the signs that things are not going well.
You give them a short task to do in pairs, the idea being that they communicate in English while also doing a language or skills class. They ignore their partners completely.
You ask the class to do an exercise. One of them doesn’t do the exercise and instead sits there trying to make eye contact with you because they’re not happy about something. Then when you ask if everything is okay, they don’t mention anything, but moodily start the exercise. While doing feedback on the exercise, someone sighs very loudly at an inappropriate moment, perhaps while someone else is talking.
The exercises I gave them just seemed to just die in the air. Usually, a class will feed on something and build it into something bigger. That didn’t happen. I felt like a fool as nothing I said seemed to have any value to them at all! Things I wrote on the board seemed badly written, uninsightful and unhelpful. It was like teaching underwater. The air was thick. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. The distance between me and the students seemed vast. I’d taught plenty of classes in that room before and I liked it because it had a comfy, warm and almost intimate atmosphere. This time it was like a cold hospital ward. Students would often come in late, or just not come back after lunch. I decided I had to put my foot down. When the difficult girl arrived late, I asked her “why are you late?” and she gave me a bad excuse, like “I slept through my alarm clock”, and then instead of acknowledging that she should be in class on time (because arriving late disturbs the class, she doesn’t know what’s going on, we waste time and lose concentration as everything has to be explained) she just kind of challenged me over it and it became an awkward conflict, which she felt like she had to win. I felt like some of these students had been to business school and had learned that you must negotiate everything, don’t make any concessions and analyse anyone in authority for leadership skills. If I didn’t fit their Jack Welch or Jeff Bezos model for leadership then I wasn’t worth anything.

Then I heard from another teacher (the one who had been teaching that class before me – a really charismatic older guy with lots of experience) that some of my students weren’t happy and that they missed his class. They said my class was “terrible” and they weren’t happy. Oh no. Bad news for Luke! I decided I would really put my foot down and straighten the class out. After lunch I had a go at them for being late, and for not taking part properly. I hate doing that in class. Absolutely hate it, because I’m not good at it. Well, I’m better now because I’m older but then I was younger and I was never good at being tough. It’s just not in my character. If I get angry or tough, it shows on my face and I don’t seem strong. I just seem upset and weaker. I don’t get confrontational or strict generally, and so it’s weird to do it. I guess they didn’t buy what I was saying because it didn’t make a difference. In fact, I suspect it caused them to lose confidence in me. Again, the absolute reverse of what I had hoped to achieve actually happened. I wanted to put my foot down, and I just ended up putting my foot in my mouth.

The next day, two of them were late for class and I closed the door, leaving a note which said they couldn’t come in. These were two girls from the law course. Young lawyers. I should have known better than to leave a handwritten note for a couple of lawyers, telling them they couldn’t do something. Of course they took it really badly. During the break a teacher told me that two of my students were really angry with me. Wow, this was a nightmare. This never happens to me! Usually the opposite if anything! So I went to see them and they were upset, saying that they had had to do something in town and had rushed back to be on time only to find my rude note. They considered my actions to be very inappropriate. They were not happy. I had to try and keep my head up and stay confident and consistent, so I maintained that it was important that they come in on time, although I didn’t mean to offend them with my note. I was just trying to impose some rules and structure. My explanation mildly improved things, but the damage had been done.

In the last session of that day, while waiting for other students to arrive after break, two of the girls told me they thought the course was going badly, and that the classes were no good. At first I was kind of glad that someone was on my side and I wasn’t alone. Then I realised that they held me responsible, rather than the other members of the class. It was my fault that the class was going badly! They probably thought that this was how things normally were with me. They didn’t know me so they knew no different. They didn’t realise that I was not such a bad teacher. This made me really angry. I was so pissed off at this point and couldn’t help saying “this never happens in my courses” before I had to kind of bitterly explain that yes I agreed that the class was not good enough – but I couldn’t explain how it was the fault of others. I mentioned it, saying things like “it doesn’t help that certain members of this class are incapable of attending on time or even taking part properly when they are here”. They didn’t really like my tone. Instead I had to kind of admit that I would do better – as if the class was going wrong because of a lack of effort on my part. I was explaining to my boss, my teacher or my parents that I wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, I do accept that I should have done certain things better, and that some of it was my fault as I will explain in a moment, but I knew that it wasn’t all me. The fact is it was my job to ensure that the class was as effective as possible. So, in a way, the actions of these people meant that I had to carry the whole circus of this class on my shoulders. The group shifted its collective responsibility over to me. I finished the day completely shattered, with a mind numbing headache, with a massive heavy load on my shoulders.

Two of the students complained to my boss, saying they thought the class was bad, and that they would write a letter to their agents explaining how awful they thought the school was. Seriously, this was quite unprecedented. Thankfully, my boss had faith in me, knowing that it wasn’t really my fault but was just one of those courses that goes wrong. He suggested that I do some ‘tutorials’ with my class, to talk to them all 1 to 1 and try and resolve any problems. I agreed, and did that the next day. Of course, the students didn’t see the value of it, and considered it a massive waste of their time. One of them said to my face that she thought I was leading the class badly and the tutorials were a waste of time. The difficult girl I described earlier decided to lock horns with me over everything before forcing me to admit that I had failed to be a strong leader. She completely ran over me with her forceful character. It was like dealing with a bully. I found it ridiculous. Of course, this was the height of rudeness. There would be no need for my strong leadership if she behaved like a grown up. I think it was a trust issue. I expect where she was from, male teachers should be much more dominant, alpha male types. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not an alpha male. I don’t believe it’s necessary to impose yourself and your ego on everyone in order to be a good teacher. That’s all a bit macho and old-fashioned I think. But, I think that’s what she and maybe the others needed and expected. She probably needed me to be a more old-fashioned strict male teacher, and without that she couldn’t help misbehaving. Ultimately, she was responsible for her behaviour, not me. So I still disagree and believe that she was wrong.

The tutorials were not a complete disaster. I learned that some of the students expected certain types of exercise. They didn’t like role plays and case studies. They were bored with them because of the other courses they had attended. A couple of them admitted that they thought it was the fault of the school for putting two classes together. She didn’t understand why we couldn’t run two smaller groups, which would be more effective. We just didn’t have enough teachers for that, and ultimately the school wasn’t going to pay another teacher to come in and take one half of my class. This lifted the pressure from me and onto the school somewhat, but it didn’t really improve things much. Unfortunately, basic economics is something that regularly has an impact on classes. Schools can’t or don’t want to pay for more teachers. The most profitable way would be to have one teacher per 100 students, but obviously that’s not possible. What happens is something of a balance between quality (with fewer students per teacher) and profits (more students per teacher). One sign of a good school is smaller class sizes. The best schools, like The London School of English where I worked for 6 years, manage to keep their class sizes smaller, give more benefits to teachers, develop specialist courses and make an extra effort to create a special atmosphere inside the building.

Back to the tutorials. I learned that they wanted boring, challenging old-fashioned grammar work. What a surprise for a group of young forward thinking professionals. They just wanted boring gap fills and mind numbing grammar explanations, with work on writing and job interviews.

So, I did exactly that. I removed fun from the lessons. No pair work. No group interaction. Just very controlled language practice followed by quick feedback. It was like an old-school exam course. It was like a punishing series of language exercises, all of which had very clear right and wrong answer. It kind of straightened them out. Ironically, one of them complained that it was too difficult, and this is after she’d complained earlier that it was too easy. I found that putting them through boring and difficult work made them bond together more. During breaks they would be relieved and would chat to each other more, as they were all going through the same difficult experience. I’d come back into class after break and I’d find them hanging out and socialising, but when I’d enter the room they’d all shut up and go back to their desks, like ‘the fun is over, he’s back’. My heart sank a little every time this happened, as it always does when you feel like the students just don’t like you for some reason.

The difficult girl continued to be difficult, but I’d already accepted that she was not going to change, and realised she was just a spoiled daughter of a rich businessman and that no-one had ever said “no” to her in her life. She seemed an incredibly sheltered and naive person, who couldn’t really operate in the real world. Then I remembered that she would probably always be rich and successful, as no doubt her father would have some important contacts to help her get a great job in the future. That made me kind of angry too. She had privilege, but no respect for others. I lost respect for her, and felt like I should teach her a lesson in humility. I didn’t really know how to do this, so I generally didn’t give her any rope. I mean, I wasn’t patient with her, didn’t give her much response or attention. After that, she didn’t bother me so much any more. Once she made a rude comment, and I couldn’t help but laugh. This was a great moment because I wasn’t hurt by her comment, I just found it ridiculous. I felt that the others sensed this, and had become tired of her bullshit too. It was like her value or influence in the class had dropped. After that, she stopped attending. She didn’t attend the last day, but came in at the end to leave a note on my desk. The note said “Thank you for being my English teacher. I’m really glad I met you.”

Now that was surprising because she spent 2 weeks acting like she hated me, caused all kinds of difficulty, didn’t attend a lot of classes, and then leaves me that note. I’m still scratching my head trying to work out what was going on.

In the end, I managed to get a grip on the course, but the first week was a write off. It was horrible. Every day I stayed at school late trying to prepare for the next day. Then I would go home with a strong headache, not wanting to eat any dinner. A couple of times I had to walk home to clear my head. It was a dread filled week and I often remember it, and try to avoid similar experiences.

So what were the causes?
Certainly I was just unlucky with the students. Just a mix of bad personalities perhaps? I’m sure they didn’t think so. In fact, I expect everyone involved believed they were not to blame, but were the innocent victim of the situation.
Ultimately, I don’t think anyone really wanted to be in the room together. I ended up being the victim of that because I was the guy telling them they had to be in the class together. I just became their scapegoat.
Time of year was a factor. It was dark and cold. England must have seemed rubbish to them in those conditions. There is a feeling in the middle of winter in England, when you haven’t seen the sun for a couple of months, and you feel tired and depressed. It’s called seasonal affective disorder. Sometimes it hits the students for six, because they’ re not expecting it.
Everyone was just waiting to go home for the Christmas holidays so they weren’t motivated.
The class were all women – this can be difficult. For some reason women like to have some men in the class to give some balance. Either that or just women with a woman teacher, then they can relax as a group of women. Otherwise it becomes really weird. I can’t explain that, but as I’ve said before, if the women aren’t happy then no-one is happy.

Putting together two groups to make one doesn’t always work, and it can make the school look a bit cheap, like it’s saving money on rooms and teachers. Also, the two groups had already bonded, and didn’t really expect to be thrown into one group together.
I expected the course to be easier because of the previous course. This meant that I had a false sense of security. I probably didn’t try hard enough on day 1 or make it difficult enough for the students. I expected things to just work, but I hadn’t thought about it or planned carefully enough. I probably wasn’t as well prepared, or tightly organised as I had been on the previous course.
I didn’t dress very smartly. Looking back on it now, I wore jeans and a pair of slightly scruffy brown shoes. The girls were very chic and well presented. Compared to them, I looked like the student. I should have worn a suit on day 1.
Maybe there was some sexual tension there? I can’t tell really, but sometimes bad behaviour is a kind of flirtation and girls sometimes are very rude to a guy as a kind of come-on. That might explain the letter that was left for me. I don’t know.
Culture shock. I’ve explained before how culture shock can manifest itself in the sense that the culture you’re in is ridiculous or wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if these students were kind of unimpressed by London in the winter time, and couldn’t help feeling some contempt for us. I was just another annoying English person. Certainly at times I had to listen to them going through the usual complaints about the UK. The food is bad, the weather is bad, it’s noisy in London, my accommodation is cold, I don’t know why you have two taps in the bathroom, why do you do everything differently here, why do you have to drive on the left, English women are ugly (this was perhaps the most offensive) and English people are stupid because they go jogging on the pavement in the city, etc etc. That kind of thing. Maybe they were expressing culture shock.

Perhaps there was some culture shock between them too. There was quite a mix of nationalities.

Them coming late prevented me from starting classes properly. Instead I must have looked unprepared and vague.

It’s funny to me how I could go from one week of being the greatest teacher in the world, to hitting rock bottom in just a matter of days, with students saying it was one of the worst courses they’d experienced. I mean, how does that happen?

Now, I’ve just shared ONE bad course I taught, but in my defence I must say that I have an otherwise very good track record in my classes, with students regularly being very happy with me, often giving me top marks in feedback. So, this course must have been a one-off. I try to think that it was just a combination of bad elements that somehow came together at the same time, causing a bad outcome in my class. I may have been responsible for certain things, like not being strict and dynamic enough at the beginning, or showing strong leadership, but some of the students too were definitely responsible for taking part in a very poor manner.

Ultimately, I was just very glad to have finished the class. It was like going through a painful series of challenges. Each day gave me a new headache. My colleagues were worried about me. I couldn’t enjoy myself all week because of worrying what to do with these students. At the end, the students did thank me. One of them in particular came up to me in the pub that Friday night, and privately said thank you very much for you effort during the week. I think ultimately they saw that it wasn’t all my fault, and that I was working very hard. I still have the note that the difficult girl gave to me. Sometimes I see it and it reminds me of the difficult week.

What did I learn?
Never get too happy or pleased with yourself. If you think you’re doing a great job, there is probably something you’re forgetting about, that you’re doing wrong.
Pride comes before a fall.
When things go badly, don’t feel too bad because it’s not all your fault.
Equally, when things go well don’t be too proud of yourself because it’s not always because of you.
Be well presented. Make a good first impression. Impose rules on younger learners early. Treat younger learners more like adults, or they will act like children.
Remember that time is money.
Make lessons challenging at all times.

It’s hard to say what else I learned from this other than the ability to be a bit tougher. It just toughened me up a little more. I just approached lessons in the future with more experience behind me, and students could just sense that I was more experience and then felt safer in my class. Now I’m less nervous before lessons. I feel like I’ve experienced enough difficult moments not to be too shocked. Also, doing stand-up comedy helps with confidence, but really it’s been teaching that has prepared me the most.

Despite these stories, I have definitely had more good experiences than bad. Some of my classes have genuinely been amazing and I’ve met so many interesting and lovely people. If you are one of those lovely people I have met then “hello”. To everyone I have ever met through this job I would like to say “hello” and thank your for contributing to my learning process as a teacher.

To all my fellow teachers out there – I know how you feel! Keep your chin up.
To all the learners of English – keep your chins up too! I know how you feel as well now because of my experiences of learning French.

I hope you have enjoyed listening to this episode.

Remember you can read a full transcript of this on teacherluke.podomatic.com or teacherluke.wordpress.com where you can also find links to iTunes, Facebook and YouTube and you can also make those very special and important donations – as little as one pound if you like, or more, it’s up to you.

Also, you may have noticed some idioms in this episode. I’ve made a list of the idioms I used, and I will be explaining them in the next episode. Also, I use loads of other nice pieces of vocabulary, common expressions, descriptive words and collocations throughout this episode. I suggest that you listen a couple of times, or listen again while reading the transcript and pick out any expressions that you like and that you could use yourselves.

Don’t forget to leave your comments on this episode either here at wordpress.com or at http://teacherluke.podomatic.com.

Thanks again for listening, good luck with your English and take care. BYE BYE BYE!

Luke

145. Nightmare Teaching Experiences (Part 1)

19 Replies

This episode is all about English teaching and some stories of bad classroom experiences. Transcript available below.

Right-click here to download.

Hello listeners, how are you doing? It’s a beautifully clear and sunny September day here. This time of year always reminds me of going back to school after the summer holidays. So, because of that, I’m going to talk about some teaching experiences in various schools I have worked in over the years.

In this episode I’m going to talk to you about my experiences of being an English Language Teacher. I’ll tell you what it’s like from the teacher’s point of view, share with you a few really bad experiences I’ve had as a teacher and then explain what I learned from them.

If you would like to read and study every word of what I am saying then you can because there is a full transcript for this episode, which is available at http://teacherluke.wordpress.com. Just find or search for this episode on that page. 145. Nightmare Teaching Experiences

There you can read every single word I’m saying, you can copy+paste words into google to check them, or you can transcribe some of what I’m saying and then compare it to the correct version provided on my website. There’s lots of ways to use the transcript as a tool in your English learning. If you need more ideas, just leave a comment below asking for suggestions.

You should also look out for some idiomatic expressions I use in this episode. I have scattered a number of idioms throughout the episode. I think they’re useful, common and expressive ones. Can you notice them? I will deal with them in the next episode.

So, let’s get started. Listen to my stories, leave our thoughts in the comments section and watch out for some idioms too.

I’ve been teaching for 12 years. I’ve taught in a few countries around the world, including the UK, Japan, France and Norway.
It’s a really great job.
I get to meet people from all walks of life and all different countries.
I’ve met some truly fascinating and amazing individuals.
For example, over the years I have met high-ranking politicians, expert scientists, movie stars, executives from successful car manufacturers, IT systems engineers, computer games makers, World Cup winning football players, F1 drivers, musicians, even a porn star and plenty of other interesting people.
In the classroom I’m pretty much my own boss.
I can be creative
I can have an idea in the evening and realise it during the next day
I can think up my own tasks and have the students do them (e.g. bank robbery, planning a TV show, presenting their own political manifesto, role plays, comedy improvisation games, business meetings etc)
Sometimes I can just make things up on the spur of the moment and then make them happen there and then.
I can see students learning and improving
I get to know my students and have a chance to learn about life all around the world.
I sometimes have the opportunity to make the whole room laugh, or to laugh myself at very funny people in my classes.
I have opportunities to travel and see the world, and I think that is extremely important as a way of developing a sense of perspective about life in general. So, I am very happy to be an English Language Teacher. I think of it as a proper career which involves hard work, and unique rewards.

There are some downsides to the job though, which we shouldn’t really complain about. I will at least mention some of the things which are a common frustration for career TEFL teachers.
Usually it’s that the job is undervalued by others. It seems a lot of people consider a career in TEFL to be trivial and easy. For example, I’m sure most of my friends think that basically, all I do in my job is sit in a lovely quiet room surrounded by 4 cute Japanese children, showing them big flashcards – blue, red, green and yellow! GOOD! and then have loads of holiday. It’s not like that at all. People always say things like, “so how are the kids?” or “SO I guess you’re on holiday at the moment!” and I’m like “I don’t teach kids!!! I teach finance directors!!!” and “I don’t know the meaning of the word holiday!!!” Also, lots of people consider TEFL to be a holiday job. Like, “oh TEFL, yeah I did that on my year off during university”. Some people consider it to be the job you can do if everything else in your life fails – like it’s a kind of step down to a more relaxed, less challenging lifestyle. A friend of mine told me once “sometimes I feel like just giving up, dropping out and becoming a TEFL teacher”.

The fact is, the job can be whatever you want it to be. If you consider it to be something to do while you travel, or something to do while you focus on writing your first novel then fine. It can be just a means to an end. If you consider it to be a genuine career move, you find the human interaction, the pedagogy and the linguistics to be fascinating and you’re prepared to work very hard at it, it can be a great career. There are some millionare English teachers out there. For example, Raymond Murphy, the guy who wrote English Grammar In Use. That’s now one of the biggest selling books of all time, all around the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a copy of that book yourself.

I’m thinking of writing my own book actually. It would be full of grammar and vocabulary exercises as well as lots of other things to read. It would be full of my humour, but it would also be really useful and a great companion to these episodes of the podcast. Would you be interested in that? Does that sound like your cup of tea? Let me know.

Anyway, regarding TEFL, it’s more challenging, professional, multi-skilled and demanding than people realise. It can be incredibly energy sapping, emotional and painful at times, if things don’t go well. Of course it can also be very enjoyable and rewarding. Sometimes it is easy, but sometimes it’s very stressful. It’s swings and roundabouts really, but generally I have found it to be a great career.

I think there’s a misconception going around that if you can speak English, you can teach English. Not the case at all. It takes years of experience and a couple of academic qualifications under your belt. It might even be possible to prevent people from learning if you do it wrong! I also hate that kind of charisma man – the guy who just loves the attention he gets from a class of learners of English and turns it into his own special one man show. He doesn’t realise that they give him that attention because they’re there to learn from him. Sometimes my worst fear is that I’m just another charisma man teacher. But of course, that’s ridiculous…

Learning a language is not like learning another subject, like maths or history. You’re not just learning information, but learning how to do something – and not something like cooking or playing tennis, but how to express yourself and interact with other people. There’s something deeply personal about learning a language, and often the best students are the ones who throw themselves and their personalities into the learning process.

So, teaching English means working closely with people, and this can be wonderful. It can also be very challenging, ridiculous, embarrassing and difficult. I’ve worked directly with people before, in shops, restaurants and bars and you learn after a while that a certain percentage of the people you meet will be either weird, a twat or an arsehole. It’s just the way it is. It’s human nature. There’s always one person who makes life difficult. There’s always someone who will throw a spanner in the works. Some people call it the 1/30 rule. That at least 1 person in 30 is a dickhead. It’s true in English teaching too. The majority of the students you have in your class are great, but then sometimes there is one of those ‘1/30’ students, who will kind of screw up your class, spoil what you try to do, upset other students or convince them to turn against you. Sometimes you have a few classes that are perfect, and everyone is great. You enjoy it, but in the back of your mind you’re thinking – I’m going to get 2 or 3 “30s” in my next class, I know it! The reasons for why some people have to act like total dicks is a kind of mystery. Let me give you an example of what I mean…
-Huffing and puffing a lot when you ask them to do normal exercises
-Constantly interrupting whatever you are doing with completely unrelated questions
-Being cruel to other students in the class to the point that none of them want to open their mouths
-Disagreeing with what you say even though they’re wrong – why? Nobody knows.
-Acting like whatever you are doing is really easy and boring even though they’re consistently getting it wrong
-Turning up late and getting very shirty with you if you bring up the subject
-Convincing other members of the group that whatever you’re doing is wrong and that some kind of mutiny would clearly help everyone learn English
-Preventing anyone else from speaking and practising their English, and assuming that when they speak they speak for everyone.
-Generally disrupting the class and destroying the nice atmosphere which is essential to creating the right conditions for learning – and for what reason? Usually because of ego, or because of insecurity or being an especially spoiled brat who can’t handle it if the universe is not spinning around them every second of every minute of the day…

I realise that talking about experiences like this is especially negative, and I hope you don’t get the wrong impression about my classes. The vast majority have been really great, with some super cool people and a really positive atmosphere which allows language to develop properly. It’s just that every now and then you have a bad experience which sticks in your memory, but the crucial thing is to learn from these bad experiences, which is not just true in teaching – it’s also true in life. We regret the things we don’t do, and we learn from the mistakes we make and the bad experiences we have. Which is a pretty damn good reason for going out there, being courageous and doing things for the first time.

So, back to these 1/30 people who can torpedo your class. If you’ve been a language learner in a classroom, you may have met one of these people. Usually, they have no idea they are doing doing something wrong, which is kind of frightening because it means at any time we could be acting like a total dick without realising it. Sometimes it is because they have a sense of entitlement – being spoiled by their parents means that they are not comfortable unless everything is based around them, and they have to be the centre of attention, whether that is good for everyone or not. This means they just can’t handle being in a group situation, where they have to put others first or consider themselves to be one among many who have to work together to make the experience more fruitful for everyone. Sometimes I expect these people don’t even realise they are being rude, but think that they are doing something good.

It’s not just the odd student who can derail a lesson though. There are many other reasons. The teacher probably holds the most responsibility (I’d say it’s something like about 60/40 between teacher and students) but also plenty of other things, including the time of day, the weather outside, the day of the week, the season, the nationality of all the students in the class, the facilities – the room, the atmosphere, the light, the quality of the equipment, the seating arrangement, the noise levels, the number of students in the class, the material being used (published or not, self-made or not, the condition of photocopies) and so on and so on. The list goes on.

Many of you have probably experienced things from the point of view of the student. You probably have a different side of the story for what makes a good lesson. That’s another episode of the podcast! I’d like to read your comments about experiences of being a student in a language class. Maybe you met some terrible teachers, or shared classes with terrible students. Send me your comments please! This episode really is a chance for me to share some nightmare teaching experiences with you, and then to reflect on what I learned from them as a teacher. Why have I chosen the nightmare experiences? Because they’re the more interesting stories and there are things I learned from those experiences. I think we learn more from our bad experiences than from our good ones. I’d like to share some of those things with you, and just tell you some stories that you might like to hear.

I know I have a lot of teachers listening to this too, so feel free to add your comments and stories below. Teaching is a great, important and undervalued job, and it comes with a unique set of challenges. I think part of the uniqueness of teaching is the fact that as a teacher you are kind of outnumbered by the students. There’s more of them than there is of you. As a teacher you can feel an enormous pressure to deliver the right kind of training, and if your students are not happy, that is a real nightmare for you because it means that somehow you are personally responsible. That may not be the case, because as we have seen above, there are many factors for a good lesson, but teachers often feel they are on the front line. We can suffer a lot if a lesson goes badly, whether it’s our fault or not. Sometimes weeks of your life can be full of drama and bad vibes just because your class is going badly. Of course the students suffer too – in fact that’s the main point of all this. We’re trying to help the students learn English, but sometimes it just doesn’t work that way and it can feel like either you’re fighting some kind of pointless battle, or that the gods are acting against you somehow. It’s important to learn from bad experiences in class, to learn how to prevent them or just how to react to them correctly.

As learners of English in class you also have a responsibility to make a class work well. It’s great when students know this and work together with a teacher to allow a class to be a success. One of the roles of a teacher is to be a facilitator. That means to help to create the right conditions in which the students can learn for themselves. Being a teacher should not mean just standing there doing most of the speaking, lecturing to the class like they used to in the old days. The teacher shouldn’t really be the centre of attention. The students should be at the centre of what happens in class, but that gives a lot of responsibility to those students. They have to work together, allow the right conditions for learning to develop, be unselfish, help others, attend regularly etc. With the wrong attitude, the students can totally torpedo the lesson. With the right attitude (seeing everything as an opportunity to get involved in an active learning process) they can take a lesson to new heights. All it takes is for them to accept some responsibility for the success of a class, then enthusiastically take whatever the teacher gives them, and run with it.

It’s also the responsibility of the school manager to create the right conditions for learning. Creating an air of respect or positivity in the school helps. Making sure classrooms are in good condition certainly helps. Giving the teacher the tools to do his/her job effectively definitely helps. Managing the numbers of students in class helps a lot. If you have too many students in class, it can be very hard to teach them effectively. If students are dropping in and out of classes, it’s hard to build a team spirit. If the students can move up or down a level whenever they want it can spoil any sense of unity, morale, solidarity or rapport which is essential to creating the right conditions for learning. Also, the manager should put in place some method of ensuring that the students are divided properly by level. An entry exam + interview is pretty important. Also, a good balance of nationalities and genders in class is important.

Seating the students is crucial too. If they’re all seated separately, with lots of space between them, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to engage comfortably in speaking tasks. Teachers should try to arrange the tables and chairs before a lesson to bring the students close together in comfort, so they can see each other, interact with everyone, see the teacher and the board clearly. Putting students all around one table makes them feel they are connected and working as a team. Putting them on separate tables makes it feel more like an individual test. Having them stand up and walk around can replicate real life speaking tasks and allow body language to come into play. Moving the students can help the blood and oxygen flow better and prevent people falling asleep.

Intelligence types are a consideration too. People learn in different ways. Some prefer analysing language, some prefer to see visual representations of grammar or vocabulary (e.g. time lines, mind maps or just images) and others learn best when involved in some physical movement. So a variety of activity types is important. Get the students moving around and interacting in different ways, rather than just sitting at their desks for the whole lesson.

We should also remember that you can’t please all the people all the time, and so there will always be someone who’s not really into a particular activity. On those rare occassions that everyone is into it, everyone can reap the benefits.

Preparation by the teacher makes a massive difference. The more you know about the students in advance the better. You can then try to directly meet their language learning needs. Hopefully they all have similar needs – that’s the management’s job. PLacing students in classes based on their needs (business English, exams, academic English etc). Writing a careful plan, with learning objectives and a good balance of language and skills work, with all the correct types of support exercises, communicative techniques and so on, is vital in assessed lessons, but a very good idea in other lessons as a way of ensuring quality. But then again, it’s important to know when to throw the plan away and just improvise a lesson there and then. You should teach the students not the plan.There’s no point doggedly sticking to a plan if the students don’t really need that particular language point. Sometimes it’s necessary to leave the plan, and follow something that comes up in class and which is clearly what the students need or are interested in. It’s ok to go off on a tangent as long as it is relevant and the whole class goes with you.

TTT is something we should cut down on in the language learning classroom. People often assume that as a teacher I talk all the time, and you could be forgiven for thinking that if you listen to this podcast. But I believe that a really good teacher must be a good listener. We’ve got two ears and one mouth for a reason. You must listen very carefully to your students. Listen to their English to see what they need, or what they’re doing wrong. Listen to their reactions to different things you do in class – that helps you to choose the right kinds of activities, and generally you must listen in order to encourage them to speak. People are naturally more willing to talk extensively if they feel that someone is really listening. Have you ever talked to a friend, but felt like they weren’t listening? It makes you feel “oh, what’s the point, I’ll just keep my mouth shut”. It’s the same in class. If you feel no-one cares, you’re not going to talk. So the teacher should listen, show you’re listening and encourage others to listen too.

Marketing can also have an effect on your class. If the students have been led to believe they’re going to get something from a course, that is going to affect how they react to what you’re doing. If your school has an amazing website that makes lots of grand promises they probably will come into the class with a lot of expectations, especially if it is an expensive school with a good reputation. You have to beware of those expectations and try to meet them immediately! An expensive school, with a powerful marketing drive can set the bar very high for its teachers – putting all the pressure on them to deliver the end product. That can be very stressful for a teacher, but it is also a good process to go through for training you into a good teacher, because you are forced to raise your game.

As you can see, there are loads of factors to take into account as a teacher. There are plenty of other things I could mention, but really I would like to start telling you some stories of real teaching situations I’ve encountered.

So, here are some experiences:

1. My first teaching experience
-Where to put my hands?
-Awkwardly leaned/sat on a desk
-Students were really rude to each other and completely lacked any sense of cultural awareness or sensitivity (one guy was from Iraq, and another guy immediately mimed firing a gun at him – facepalm)
-I had no idea about the language point I was teaching. I could only explain it by using the tense itself.
-I was teaching present continuous. The best I could do is print off a load of clip art with people doing things like dancing, playing basketball, and the students just had to explain what was happening in the pictures. Not bad, but that was it.
-I had no voice – I couldn’t string a really coherent and confident question together. I had no engaging classroom presence. I was not able to frame activities effectively. I came across as mild and weak.
-I was really put off by the reactions of the students. Often, students in TEFL classes will look at you with a kind of pained expression on their face. This is because they’re listening carefully and possibly struggling to understand. Whenever I saw this pained expression it went straight to my heart.
-I was crippled by nerves. I couldn’t function.
-Every day after my teaching practice I would go home and watch Bill Hicks videos to cheer myself up, wishing that I could have his confidence in front of other people.
-There was doubt over my ability to do the job at all and in the middle of the course my tutor warned me that I might fail.
-One woman said to me, “seriously Luke, why don’t you just concentrate on music? Why do you want to become a teacher?”
-It was actually quite a difficult time because I couldn’t imagine having a career in music. It was too unreliable. I wanted steady employment. But for the first 5-6 years, before doing the DELTA I was in a shaky position as a language teacher, frequently wanting to get out of it but not really knowing how to do it, and not having the courage to just do something else. In the end, perhaps I’ve decided to make a go of it. I don’t know if that matters to you or not, but perhaps you can relate to my situation then, by thinking of your situation – what was it that led you to follow the career you’re doing? Did you always want to do that? I’ve never known what I want to do with my life, or quite where it is going. I just know I want to do what I do well, and I want some level of success. TEFL might not be the high-reward job, but ultimately it is all about the individual – what can you do to make your dreams come true? With the right attitude and a desire to work, you can do anything you want to. Just be positive and work hard, don’t give up, be dedicated, don’t let failures stop you but see failures as an opportunity to learn. Look for possibilities beyond the work you’re doing now. Think outside the box. These are all standard bits of wisdom for success. I wish I followed that wisdom all the time, every day. But you’ve got to try.

What I learned: Confidence is vital. Even if you feel a bit depressed or not in a good mood, it’s important to put a smile on your face when you walk into the room. Put on a brave face because somehow your mood has a massive influence on the mood of a lesson. Also, knowing your stuff is very important. You have to study the rules of English grammar a lot so that you can answer any question that people ask you. At the beginning it feels almost like you’re making it up because you’re unsure of yourself. This confidence comes with time and experience.

2. Sweat and Stress Rashes
This is when I taught my first multi-national groups after teaching in Japan. For some reason it was terrifying. Generally the Japanese are quiet, sweet, non-confrontational. I went back to London where the standard of teaching seemed to be much higher. There were lots of people who’d been doing it for a long time. Lots of well qualified career TEFL teachers who worked for Cambridge sometimes, things like that. Lessons were observed more, and generally there was the feeling that the students had travelled hundreds of miles to come to London to study English, paying lots of money for an intensive English course, and so they want to improve fast and effectively. This was stressful for me as I was used to dealing with small groups, using the same old material time and time again, not really dealing with much grammar, but working on creating a safe environment for people to feel comfortable speaking English.
So, when I joined my new group of 16 students from around the world, it was quite a culture shock when I realised they were all from many different places I’d never been to, or met anyone from. I had students from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Japan, France, Turkey, Czech Republic and Brazil. That is quite a broad range, which is very interesting. But certainly a lot of those countries are more direct than the English and the Japanese. In fact I was quite surprised by the directness of people in the way they interacted, showed their emotions clearly (like disagreement) and spoke quite loudly with some interruption. They were all keen to learn and to be challenged. They’d been studying with another teacher who they really liked. She was quite strict and did a lot of grammar with them. They enjoyed that. So, they asked me lots of things that she had taught them, kind of checking their knowledge but also testing me too. I felt a sense of challenge, distrust and tension. They were already a group who knew each other. I was entering their circle, as the kind of leader or alpha male, and I was still relatively young and I looked young for my age too. I was probably dressed too casually too, because I hadn’t worked out that the way you look is very important. If you go in wearing a suit, people will immediately think you are professional, serious and experienced. If you wear jeans and a t-shirt, they might not feel they are getting what they paid for. I was wearing jeans, and a shirt untucked. Not bad, but these days I always make an effort to control the first impression by dressing smarter so they know they’re getting a professional. Small details can be important. Also, it’s good to be strict and not too friendly at the start, and then ease that off slowly until you become more relaxed and friendly in the middle, and then motivational and trustworthy. Humour can help a lot, but you have to use it sparingly and dryly as well. If you go for big laughs and make lots of effort, you’ll come across as a dick who is desperate for attention. If you make subtle jokes which are understated, with a straight face, there’s less chance that you’ll come out of it badly, and it will improve the atmosphere rather than make it awkward. You shouldn’t tell jokes, although I do, and pay the price for it. I mean, pre-written or well known jokes. Usually jokes are received badly because no-one understands them. Sometimes a joke comes up that people love because they learn from it, but usually they just make the students feel bad because humour excludes them. The best thing is to allow the students to be funny and make each other laugh. This is immensely rewarding for them. You can help by allowing people to laugh, laughing yourself or engaging the students in conversation with a view to them saying something funny. You may even be able to feed the students some funny lines, which allow them to say something funny in response, which lets them take the credit for any laughter which occurs.

So, I didn’t know any of that, or know how to do it then. Instead, there I was standing in front of them, not making a good first impression, very nervously attempting to keep control of myself and run an effective class. It was not a strong first few lessons. I would often get stuck on a grammar question, lose the answers in the teachers book, get the CD on the wrong track, make mistakes on the whiteboard and so on. It was really tough and embarrassing. I felt like my reputation was hanging by a thread. I went to class every day really early to get ready and I dreaded the arrival of the students. I would use copious amounts of energy running around the classroom in a stressed out state, my face bright red, sweat patches under my arms, my sweat dripping on students books as I lean over to help them. I developed a rash because of the stress. I had little red spots on my wrists and arms. Amazingly I managed to work out grammar points and answer questions about them at the same time. There’s a lot of pressure in dealing with grammar that you don’t even know yourself and trying to explain something you don’t understand, while everyone is looking at you. They say people’s biggest fear is speaking in front of people, like in a presentation or speech. It was like that for me every day. That’s pretty awful, but also ridiculous. It brought out the ridiculousness in me. I couldn’t help seeing the whole thing as some kind of bizarre joke. Here’s me in front of all these people from around the world, and I don’t even know how it happened or if what I’m doing is useful at all. I developed a slightly eccentric teaching style, with quite a lot of bizarre humour which really came from my feeling very weird to be teaching. Eventually it worked and I began to make the students laugh all the time, and laugh quite hard sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. The key thing was that I was using laughter to aid the teaching, not just to create laughter. Students began to tell me how much they enjoyed the classes because the atmosphere was good, and that they really learned things.

In the end, that class went very well. We all got to know each other, and in some cases became friends who I am still in touch with now, nearly 10 years later.
What I learned:
You should stick to what you know – play to your strengths, but don’t be afraid to take some risks because that’s how you learn. Be yourself and add some personality to lessons. Not too much though – you shouldn’t dominate or anything, but students tend to respond well when you give something of yourself to your lessons. It seems that students are quite preoccupied by teachers expressing their own personality in classes. Don’t be afraid to be a little bit vulnerable in class, but at the same time you have to be completely sure and confident about the language. It’s a difficult combination of being human and super-human at the same time. Study the grammar, prepare well in advance, have fun and treat the students with RESPECT at all times. Never get angry, never tell anyone to shut up. Go for a drink with the students or take them out of the classroom every couple of weeks. Don’t get too close to them though, because ultimately you are their teacher, not their friend.

I looked young, and students would never realise I was the teacher. Sometimes I’d have to convince them. New students would often come into class with a form from reception. They had to give the form to the teacher. They’d come in the room and look around, then give the form to the most ‘teacherly’ looking person in there, usually the oldest. I would always have to put my hand up and say ‘I’m over here! I’m the teacher, hello, my name is Luke, like Luke Skywalker… Luke, I am my father…. etc”
I guess you should look like a teacher, or be aware that people have ideas of what a teacher should look like or behave like. You can use that to your advantage – by being ‘original’ but it can also work against you if you seem unprofessional or inappropriate.

These stories continue in part 2 of this episode – 146. Nightmare Teaching Experiences (Part 2)

142. The Annual General Meeting (Part 2)

4 Replies

Here is the second part of the AGM. For more information, see episode 141.

Right-click here to download this episode.

Thanks for attending the AGM. Here is the agenda:

Part 2 – Agenda
13. Set List Show (see video below)
14. Meeting listeners
15. Music mixes
16. Holidays and weather
17. New job
18. New episodes
19. Wearing trainers without socks – The Dangers
20. Flip flops in Paris – The Dangers
21. The sound of your own voice
22. Zdeněk Lukáš
23. Length of episodes
24. Pacific Rim
25. Statistics
26. Emails
27. The new Star Wars movies
28. AOB

Thanks for attending the meeting. If you have any other business, just leave a comment below. Happy holidays. Luke

Your donations make this podcast possible.

Set list show
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6ZrNS_HwOQ&w=500&h=281]

141. The Annual General Meeting (Part 1)

2 Replies

You are formally invited to attend The LEP AGM (Luke’s English Podcast Annual General Meeting) which will take place during the recording of this episode.

Right-click here to download this episode.
The AGM is a chance for me to just summarise some news and give some information before we all go away for our summer holidays.

Here is the agenda for the meeting (which is split into two parts).

Luke’s English Podcast
Annual General Meeting
August 2013
Location: Baddesley Clinton House (not haunted)
AGENDA:
1. New listeners
2. Thank you
3. Sweat
4. Bassline
5. Best voice for the podcast
6. Toilet seats
7. Playstation 3 – system update required
8. Time
9. Happy music
10. Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino
11. Pedagogical Approach
12. Whiskey in meetings
13. Background music

…This episode continues in the next episode of Luke’s English Podcast

Part 2 – Agenda
14. Set List Show
15. Meeting listeners
16. Music mixes
17. Holidays and weather
18. New job
19. New episodes
20. Wearing trainers without socks – The Dangers
21. Flip flops in Paris – The Dangers
22. The sound of your own voice
23. Zdeněk Lukáš
24. Length of episodes
25. Pacific Rim
26. Statistics
27. Emails
28. The new Star Wars movies
29. AOB

Thanks for attending the meeting. If you have any other business, just leave a comment below. Happy holidays. Luke

Your donations make this podcast possible

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Luke’s ENGLISH Podcast

Learn British English with Luke Thompson

Category Archives: Humour

175. The Phrasal Verb Chronicles #1

Extracts with Vocabulary from this Episode (thanks to Jack from the comment section)

173. The Curse of The Lambton Worm (Short Story)

168. Please Vote! (and “stuff” like that)

166. The Prawn Story

153. The Talking Dog Story

151. Google Questions

146. Nightmare Teaching Experiences (Part 2)

145. Nightmare Teaching Experiences (Part 1)

142. The Annual General Meeting (Part 2)

141. The Annual General Meeting (Part 1)

Extracts with Vocabulary from this Episode (thanks to Jack from the comment section)

Cookies on teacherluke.co.uk