Advanced English Classes Blues

I have been ranting about my Advanced English classes two weeks ago, and thank God it's already through. I just do not like the idea of waking up during vacation when you are supposed to be sleeping in only to go to work. The pay, as I told you before, is far from appeasing me, actually, it rather adds up to my rage. However, the only consolation that I have is that I have brilliant students who really wanted to learn and develop their speaking skills.

Yep, I want them to talk sensibly. I want them to wow people every time they speak

This advanced English classes is, well, supposed to hone the whatever skills the students already have. These students already mastered the language forms in the classroom, so I decided to focus more on sharpening their speaking and listening skills.

Teaching these students is a whiff of fresh air. They are indeed very, very different from my unruly, crass, and unmotivated students from the past school year. They made me feel that I was doing something right, and that my efforts for them are not laid to waste. I listened to their monotone poetry reading turning into something more promising, I watched their anxiety as they delivered their speeches in front of the incoming Junior students, and I felt elated with their sadness when I told them that we can't have debate anymore because of time-constraints.

It was a challenge teaching them, yet, it was at the same time very fulfilling. And in a way, they made me become aware of the things that I do and don't do as a teacher. I realized that I am not at all the steel-tough teacher that my school wants me to be; I have always felt that I always wanted to reach out to my students, to be relevant to them, thus making a more harmonious classroom. It doesn't matter to me if they would consider the subject as easy, because, for me, it's actually the purpose of learning (and English is actually easy), that you are doing impossible feats in a certain aspect that you don't notice it anymore.

But still, all good things need to end. And come June, another set of unruly, crass, and unmotivated students will come my way.

I think I will miss this summer.

Advanced English Classes Rant

I am going to have an advanced English classes this coming Monday. And I am having mixed feelings about it.

It will be a 2-week class and the students will be attending classes in their major subjects, English, Math and Science. What I like about this is that my students will be the best students of the incoming sophomores. And I am toying with the idea of making this an almost college course. No predictable motivation, presentation, discussion and all those things that bores students in a normal situation. And I am planning to apply everything that I have learned in college about task-based teaching. Therefore, it would be the students who would be doing more work than I am, which, you see, the very reason why these techniques were formulated in the first place. That every lesson must be student-centered and students must be the ones responsible for their own creation of meaning.

But still, I couldn't get rid of preparing an outline of the topics that we will tackle for these two weeks, and I plan on making it oral-intensive. And this is because I noticed that most of our students, if not all, know English grammar perfectly based on standards-based assessments. They know the grammar forms, but they, even the best students, have difficulty in speaking in the language. So this is what I want to hone for two weeks. Apparently, a cohort told me that my lessons for these classes must be introductions of what they are going to discuss come regular school year. And that is just like cold water thrown on me, because I know that our lessons will be research paper and grammar intensive. Yes, we do have a speech program, but sometimes, it is relegated to the sideline because we need to cover topics that will be included in the summative tests. And this defeats the purpose of learning in the first place. But still, still, I am going to push through with my plan, anyway, this is advanced classes. What they must know are things which are not going to be discussed in a regular classroom.

One thing that made me pissed off with this affair, though, is the compensation. We are already spending our "vacation" by making and editing lesson plans and this added burden of teaching in summer is just a bummer. We teachers of the advanced classes will only be given $16.00, tops. Two weeks, people. Fucking two weeks. That wouldn't make so much difference in the long run, wouldn't it?

Well, that's life. Get bored with it.