December 01, 2005
What Do You Do About Missed ESL Classes?
"The joys of meeting pay the pags of absence / Else who could bear it?" ~ Nicholas Rowe
Private lesson no-shows
Has this ever happened to you? You spent an hour preparing for a private class, then rush to get to it on time. You set up your props or whatever you will be using, then sit back and wait for your students to arrive. Ten minutes later, you're still waiting, but you have faith. After all, they've been late before. Twenty minutes later, you begin to get that "feeling," but decide to stick it out. Forty minutes later, which is exactly twenty minutes before the class is scheduled to end, you begin to pack up to go home.
If you work in a school, you may be silently cheering your luck. (Extra time to goof off!) But if this happens in a private class, you have to carefully weigh your options. Do I charge my students for the missed class or not? After dealing with this situation for a while, I finally came to a conclusion; my time is my time and I'm going to be paid whether I'm teaching or sitting in a room alone with a bunch of empty chairs.
And guess what? I now rarely have no-shows!
I talk to a lot of other teachers who are afraid of losing their private students if they put this policy into place, but I gotta tell you--it works. Your students will respect you for it AND you won't find yourself twiddling your thumbs with the song "Should I stay or should I go now?" playing over and over in your mind. (If that's not a hint about my age, I don't know what is!)
Do you have anything to say about this? Have you tried "getting tough" with your private students? (From the poll we took, I know that A LOT of you rely on private classes to supplement your income)
If you've got some advice on this subject, I'm sure everyone would benefit from it. Let's hear from you!
Until next time,
Lee Hobbs
ESL Instruct, Editor-in-Chief
ESLemployment.com
Posted by lhobbs at 08:13 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 09, 2005
ESL Classroom Observations
"This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer." ~ Franz Kafka
Yes, we are required to have them from time to time and they are pain in the neck. But, are they really helpful or just more red tape to cut through to keep our jobs safe? I’m talking about the classroom observations that are often conducted by our peers or, in some cases, our employers.
Speaking for myself, I’ve had relatively good feedback from these activities that have served to improve my teaching methodology. When I say “good” I mean constructive, i.e. useful, criticism. On the other hand, I’ve heard some horror stories from my colleagues. Many schools, like mine, require them as part of your job but put the responsibility of scheduling for them on your shoulders. That means you have to go look these people up (other teachers) and somehow arrange for them to sit through a whole class and then submit a signed write-up that you then sign yourself and file with the department. Time consuming to say the least!
The worst part is that very often, the “peers,” as we call them, forget to show up or schedule in other things for that day at the last moment: basically sending you the signal that your job is not important to them. I always get irritable this time of the semester chasing down various people around the campus. So unorganized!
According to a post I recently read by Lynne Wolters (found here), there now exists highly innovative software that can actually do classroom observations for you (so it claims). Have any of you heard of this (or tried it?) It’s called “eCove” and, apparently, it “removes the guess work and opinion from the classroom observation process. It captures and combines empirical data to give a far more accurate view of classroom behavior than any other software tool on the market.” Sounds like a very tall allegation! It also sounds like a person must still be involved to "input" the data. Am I wrong?
I’d love to hear your comments on the subject of peer-review classroom observations in the ESL field and the possibility of having real people “replaced” with some kind of software or robot! Especially if the end-user, i.e. our employers, are using this stuff to determine if we are acceptable teachers or not. Yikes!
With serious consternation,
Lee Hobbs
ESL Instruct, Editor-in-Chief
ESLemployment.com
Posted by lhobbs at 03:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 07, 2005
Evaluating Student Work in ESL
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." ~ Sir Winston Churchill
Perhaps one of the most daunting aspects of teaching, particularly a class with writing as its focus, is how to fairly evaluate a student’s classwork assignments. Of course, I’m speaking for myself, perhaps some of you out there actually like this part of the job (sickos!)
I’ll be honest, I really can’t stand the process of grading papers (although I do love reading them and providing helpful advice). Evaluation, it seems, is a necessary evil and has got to be done (so says the institution) but why does it have to be so stressful?
Distinguishing between the various language formalities and acknowledging mechanical/formatting errors are one thing but fitting a particular paper’s content into a grading rubric is quite another. Do we really want to enforce writing organization rules to the point that every single student paper we read is a sibling to the one before? What about grading style? Isn’t style just what the word implies? How can we really do anything other than give friendly advice on style? Quite often, I actually end up deducting more points for a failure to follow the instructions rather than the actual writing itself (how fascist!).
To make things worse, unless an overbearing institution has prescribed all the rules, it seems that every teacher has his or her own method for handling evaluation. Agreement in our field is rare. Once in awhile I will turn to my colleagues for their perspectives (interesting how secretive some of them are about their process). Sometimes, I actually do get some good advice but usually I come away more baffled than before.
When so much is on the line for a student and his or her future by what score they receive for an assignment, or for that matter an entire course, how do we as instructors fairly “evaluate” (and I purposefully use that work in quotation marks) our students? Our employers insist on this point, the students’ parents often demand it and even the students themselves want to know where they stand, not only from a class ranking perspective but also in the eyes of their beloved teacher.
As much as I’d like to give everyone an “A,” I realize that teachers who do this are only cheating the majority of their students by providing them with a very false sense of achievement. Sooner or later, the skills students fail to acquire in the more elementary levels will be needed to pass a higher level course with a similarly high score.
Is there something wrong with my logic here?
Well, I always knew this was part of the game when I first chose teaching as a career but that doesn’t mean I expected it to be the fun part. I’m curious what my ESL (or other) teaching readership out there has to say about the subject of evaluation. Gripes, insights and helpful advice are all welcome on this blog. What do you find to be a helpful methodology when it comes to this very touchy and controversial subject?
Maybe I'll just turn to that purported software that can do it for you now, lol. Saw it in a post by Hilzoy here.
Your patience with my rant is appreciated.
Lee Hobbs
ESL Instruct, Editor-in-Chief
ESLemployment.com
Posted by lhobbs at 03:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 05, 2005
Plagiarism and ESL
"The more laws & order are made prominent, the more thieves & robbers there will be." - Lao Tzu
What a day.
Today I had my first “plagiarizer” of the semester. With the accessibility of the internet, plagiarism in papers has become easier and easier for students to do and, at the same time, simpler for instructors to detect. Even though I always demonstrate this simple procedure to my own students, there always seems to be someone determined to try and slip through the system.
My colleagues tell me that this particular problem is really beginning to get out of hand, especially since institutional acceptance standards have been dropped in order to increase enrollment. Hell, even our own politicians do it these days, what kind of example does that send to a young audience? (see related article here)
After an exhausting yet thorough lecture in my office on the lying and stealing aspects of plagiarism, I’m having my student write a new, “longer,” essay on the meaning of honesty and his own experiences with it.
I’m curious though, how have the ESL teachers reading this particular blog dealt with the issue of plagiarism in their classes? I’d especially like to hear from those who have a writing component in the upper levels.
In solidarity,
Lee Hobbs
ESL Instruct, Editor-in-Chief
ESLemployment.com
Posted by lhobbs at 01:38 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
October 20, 2005
Greetings ESL Teachers From Pennsyltucky, USA!
"That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...." ~ Peanuts' Charlie Brown
A Big "Hello" to all ESL Blog-Readers and Forum Participants,
For those of you who don't know me (and that's probably almost everybody) my name is Lee Hobbs and I'll be taking over the ESL Lesson Plan blog for a bit as Michelle is currently on extended leave (okay don't start throwing the tomatoes yet!). Please read on:
As the newly-appointed kid on the virtual ESL block, I’d like to first say hello to all the loyal ESL blog readers out there. For those who have already written to me, I thank you for the warm welcome.
I've been assigned to stand in for Michelle, who did a fine job, for both the ESL Instruct newsletter and this blog. I'll also be around as the newest ESL Forum moderator. For you curious types, here is a little blurb on my background :
As a North American native-speaker of English, I spent six years abroad working in the emerging ESL field of Central Europe during the 1990s. During that time, I had the opportunity to work closely with various sectors of ESL teaching, e.g. public grade-schools, public universities and private language schools. Now, in addition to writing newsletters for the publishers of ESL Instruct, I am presently teaching college classes in the United States and completing my doctoral work.
I look forward to hearing from everyone out there. Also keep your eyes peeled for the latest edition of the ESL Instruct newsletter...I'll be authoring the October edition.
With kind regards,
Lee Hobbs
ESL Instruct, Editor-in-Chief
ESLemployment.com
Posted by lhobbs at 11:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 15, 2005
Does Procrastination Affect Your Teaching?
Are you a procrastinator? Do you find yourself rushing to prepare the lesson for your class an hour ahead of time? If this sounds like you, there is probably a lot of unnecessary stress in your life.
Procrastination is something that a lot of us deal with, but did you know that with some quick behavioral changes, you can kick this habit? Just think—no more rushing to grade those papers at the last minute. No more getting your travel documents approved—with 2 minutes to spare!
The first thing you need to do is decide upon your goal. Let’s say that it’s to prepare your class one day ahead of time. Now, you’ll simply need to put yourself on a reward/punishment program and stick to it! If you accomplish the goal, take yourself out for pizza, or give yourself some other treat. But, if you don’t, you should take away something of importance—like that extra cup of coffee in the morning, or that dessert at lunch—in order to feel the consequences of not following through. If you take truly want to stop procrastination and learn to manage your time better, you should seriously consider doing something about it, because if you don’t, the behavior will only continue.
One more thing; don’t wait until tomorrow to start!
Until next time,
Michelle
Posted by msimmons at 09:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
