Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

“Can you invigilate an exam in Pamplona?”

I said yes, thinking of San Fermín and bulls and historic cities and Navarran wine and that kind of thing.

The reality, as ever, was a little different. Everardo and I left Oviedo on the Friday evening after our last classes (so once we’d got the car sorted and such that meant 8pm). There are two choices to get to Pamplona according to google maps, South via León and Burgos, or along the coast to Bilbao and then inland. We plumped for the coast road. The sun sank lower and turned everything golden as we figured out the limiter on the car (don’t want to go over 110km per hour, thanks to the new speed limits and the police being all vigilant and all).

An unfinished part of the motorway

Eve said there might be some traffic but there was nothing, well, nothing compared to the M62. We drove until the car asked for fuel, and pulled off at the first garage… lights on, no one about. So on to the next, hoping it was within 25km which, thankfully, it was.

At the side of the garage there was a Meson, which is basically a restaurant, but one which doesn’t have any pretensions. I was a paper tablecloth kind of place. We didn’t really have time to hang around so we ordered a plate of chorizo, egg and chips each. It was bloomin’ lovely. Sugary coffee and a coke to keep alert and off we went again.

From Bilbao south, the roads get a little trickier to navigate, signs appear just yards before the junction, they’re poorly lit and they don’t always point you towards the bigger cities (I had in my head that we’d follow Santander – Bilbao – Pamplona, but the signs alternated between Pamplona and Vizcaya. Eve is not the worlds best navigator so we had to be a bit careful). Still, at one thirty we pulled into the car park behind the hotel and checked in.

After what seemed like a criminally short time we were up and out. Just 5km to the exam site. But in this part of Pamplona they’re building a lot of streets and there are neither houses nor street signs to help you. There are, however, a lot of roundabouts. Take the fifth exit, according to Google maps, onto Calle Juan Pablo II… oops, there are only three exits, and no street names. It took us forty minutes to find the damn place.

The exam itself is easy to invigilate. Hand out the exams while reading from the script (it’s an american exam) then watch and make sure there’s no shenanigans. For four hours.

Then pack up and head back to Oviedo. This time via Burgos. Total distance 999km. Six hours each way.

We’ve got another one to do next week.

I had my last lesson with the rheumatologists this morning. José brought in a pack of Twinings tea and some biscuits and they had arranged for the cafe to send up some water and coffee (just in case the tea was not to their taste). This was rather touching, as it was when Javier, the senior consultant, dug into his briefcase and handed me a book saying that it was to say thankyou for being their teacher. The book is called Hablar bien no cuesta tanto which translates as Speaking correctly isn’t so difficult. It’s filled with advice from a learned chap on things like how to pronounce words, how to spell them and so on. They seem to take their lead from writers in the 1600s… still, it’ll be interesting.

So that was pretty nice, they’ve been an easy group to teach, always willing to talk and surprisingly chipper at the end of shifts or at 8am (and sometimes even after a 24 hour stint on call).

Hopefully they’ll be wanting another course starting in October.

Lunal Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Since we got back from skiing it’s been relatively busy. Liz has loads of students preparing for TOEFL exams and is doing 22 hours of classes a week at the moment. I’ve just started doing three hours a week with some rheumatologists at the hospital as part of a national scheme to improve doctors’ English. On top of that I’ve got some exam preparation too so I’m varying between 23 and 26 hours a week which is full time (they reckon that 25 hours of teching is a full time level, because of the preparation you need to do). One of my students is doing both TOEFL and SAT exams. The SAT is the US college entrance exam and, while it has none of the listening or speaking parts like TOEFL, it’s got three maths sections. So I’ve been teaching maths too. Which was unexpected.

The poor student is being ‘encouraged’ by her parents, she’s doing the TOEFL exam today and then getting on a train and going to Madrid to do the SAT exam at 7:45 tomorrow.

I haven’t looked at maths like this for ages. It’s GCSE level, simple geometry, algebra and the like. I’ve actually enjoyed doing the exam questions, they remind me of the puzzles in the guardian. This of course, doesn’t help the student at all. Teaching someone how to recognise and solve these questions is a bit more than just solving them, I hope we’ve done enough. In the nicest possible sense, I don’t want to see her again…

A for Effort Originally uploaded by eye2eye.

It’s exam time so a number of students are busy preparing and a few classes are coming to an end (one student, whose mother appears to be the driving force behind her, is doing the US SAT and the TOEFL exams in the next couple of weeks).

So my hours are going down a little. The director called me into here office last week and said she had a new class for me to try, because she had no other teachers. This is not a good beginning, a class because there’s no one else?

Seven year olds.

A class of four seven year olds.

“It fun teaching them,” The director said. “You’ll enjoy it.”

We should always try new things, so I nodded and said I’d give it a go but that she shouldn’t expect great things.”Don’t you like children?” She asked. “It’s not that,” I said, “I just have nothing in common with them.” “You just need to have a sense of humour.” “I do. It’s a very English one, based on sarcasm and wordplay…”

There are good books and CDs and all sorts to use but I thought it was terrible, we had singing along in English, we had me trying to explain what was about to happen in bad spanish and them not understanding. It’s not my best kind of teaching.

The director said the kids told their mothers I was majissimo (very nice) and I said I wouldn’t be teaching them any more (because it’s my choice). She nodded and then said she needed me to do it again this week, just one more time.

Leave it, it’s autumn Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

In a lot of the language academies there are posters advertising TOEFL (rather than tofu), this is one of the more popular English exams for foreigners, in as far as an exam can be called popular. It’s the standard American requirement for non native speakers of English to get into college.

And it’s just a bit tricky.

The reason for that is that you don’t pass or fail, you just get a score. And if you want to do a masters in the US, the college you want to go to can set any requirement they like. A perfect TOEFL score is 120, one of my students needed a 105 to get on his course. That was because he was applying to do pilot training and you don’t want to spend your time learning English when you’re supposed to be learning to fly.

If you get a good score you can be sure that you’ll understand the majority of lectures and college situatuins. This means that the exam proceeds at a fierce pace. Full speed lectures to listen to and answer questions on, difficult, technical texts to read and understand. A speaking section that native speakers would struggle to score perfectly on (for example, read a 200 word passage in 45 seconds, then listen to a part of a lecture on, say, the folk tradition and the song ‘The Briar and the Rose’, then talk about it, answering a specific question (in this case it was: What defines a folk song and what elements of The Briar and The Rose place it within this tradition).

The difficulties of the exam are compounded by some students’ lateness in preparing for the exam, such as: I need a score of 85 and I have the exam in three weeks. It does mean that the lessons sort of plan themselves, and you just do a lot of practice questions, but sometimes you just know that a student is not at the right level and it’s distressing to see them realise it, to see them understand that the masters they wanted to do will have to wait.

Maradona and Castro Originally uploaded by cardiffteam.

One of the things I like about teaching English, especially to adults, is that you get to learn stuff you never even thought about before. One of my students, who works for a big business software house, was telling me about his relatives. For some reason we got to talking about the first dead body we ever saw (it’s a conversation class, so we generally just do a lot of conversing, and you can cover a lot of ground in an hour and a half). He said his was his uncle, who had been a diplomat, and who had been thrown out of Cuba in the late fifties after slapping Fidel Castro during a panel discussion live on TV in South America. Another told me he might not make the next lesson because he had to go to Cadiz in the south because he’s the quality manager for an arms manufacturer and he has to go and supervise the firing tests… he said that they fire shells of up to 40km range, straight out into the sea, and that the fishermen in the area love it when they do live firing exercises because it makes the fishing just a matter of scooping up the fish afterwards.

Glassy square Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

it’s not the chief medical officer on the Enterprise, oh no, but a mere week after arriving I’ve taken my first classes here. The majority of institutes I wandered into were like kindergartens, crayoned pictures on the walls and bright colours, tiny chairs… I was beginning to be a little concerned (for purely practical reasons… I have no experience teaching the tots). But one of the schools seemed to be more focussed on adults and they were very keen to get me to work for them (maybe because they pay less than the others but there’s a complicated formula to work out when you consider taking an offer which is based on how much lesson planning you have to do… also no one else had asked). They said they do stuff in companies, and for that you get double (for the travelling time), they do some classes for business high-ups and they’re usually at 8am for which they pay double (either getting up pay or going to bed early pay). Both of those scenarios are fine with me, I was doing both in BA without any extra money, and when I think of those three hours a day on the bus…

So I’ve got two students already and a very short probationary period (I think it’s over: they like me). When I say yes I’ll be getting a contract then I have the joy of obtaining a Spanish social security number. I have a feeling that might make its way into a blog entry…

Not just old buildings Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

The bells stopped after their midnight fun, and didn´t get going again until 8. I thought I’d found some wifi in a cafe that was pretty close, until I tried to use it that is. The waitress told me the password, and I checked I was spelling it right, but for some reason, even though the signal meter was saying 98% for the wifi signal I couldn’t get onto thweb. I’ll just have to go and have a wander until I get to a cafe where I can log on. There are a number of wifi signals in the flat but I reckon I’ll have to ask the neighbours. I tried the TV again. I noticed another arial socket but there was no real difference to the lack of picture, a bit more static, a bit more noise but nothing you could actually watch. I’m not sure I’ll bother about it though. It’s not like there’s a ton of stuff I feel I can’t miss.

I wandered for most of the afternoon, although I did have a plan. Thanks to the EBC, the people we did TEFL with in BA, I had a list of the English schools in Oviedo. Then it was just a case of finding them, so this morning was spent with a map and a pen, and this afternoon was about walking. I got to a dozen schools, there are a few more for tomorrow. The bad news so far, which I was pretty much expecting, was that the courses are coming to an end, rather than starting. Largely because the schools tend to cater for kids, and the kids’ courses tend to follow the school year. The good news, I left my CV with everyone, and one of the chaps, at Oxford school said he’d be able go get me work in July/August at summer schools, and next year. So we’ll see. I did get to orient myself with most of the city (the centre at least), even if it was pretty warm by the end of the afternoon.

At the moment I’m sitting in another cafe testing out the wifi, unfortunately I seem to be unable to connect anywhere it needs a password… which is a pain.

A couple have just sat down opposite, they, and more than one other table have got a set of four shot glasses and are bouncing coins off the table into the glasses. It´s just a tad annoying. They fill a couple of the glasses with coke and if they get the coin in the coke the other person drinks it (unless they do it on the second bounce, when they have to drink it). Fortunately I´ve just about finished my caña and I´m out of here.