Not a wholesome day.

It is one of those days where I cannot be arsed with this job. In other words, it's Course Review Day. This delightful little thing is where the Programme Leaders have to write a report based upon OFSTED criteria, analyse data, prove retention and achievement statistics and explain why we're all doing such a wonderful job, thank you very much. This produces ream after ream of report, stacked to the hilts with unreliable numbers and unprovable facts, all done in order to keep some bloodless little number-cruncher in meaningful employment. And, just to add to the fun, the government's new Every Child Counts Strategy has been introduced, adding another ream of paper to each report.
As you may have guessed, it is not my favourite activity, and I've spent the best part of the day trying to drum up enthusiasm and inspiration while staring at my computer screen. While I don't mind targets and aims - I am, after all, a teacher and the Exams Officer - it's the extremely anal nature of what we have to write that I object to. It's the insistence that everything is a measurable, gradable, quantifiable thing that I hate. It's the theft of the teaching mojo: that magical, inexplicable part of the job, the moment when it all goes right and the student goes 'yes!', and these humourless beancounters think it can be all measured up and tucked in a box, in this case a coffin.
Oh, yes, I am also getting stress ulcers because of the bloody exams. Two more sets this week, then a whole week's worth in a fortnight, then two more sessions at the end of June.

sodding dilemma.

well, the last post seems to work: I wish I could say the same of me. I am at a crossroads, professionally speaking, and feeling deeply frustrated. Partly, it's because of the time of year. It's exam season at the moment, and I find myself kicking my heels in the classroom because of the revision and practice stuff, but also because I'm spending the vast majority of my time right now organising the bloody things for my faculty. I'm responsible for the smooth passage, organisation, implementation and execution of students,er, exams, and I find it a colossally tedious process. Indeed, I find all the paperwork associated with my current job tedious (I'm also responsible for the Part time EFL programme and the smooth flow of data in the department - the latter is rather like being Hercules trying to wash through the Augean Stables with a slightly flabby hose). All of my work commitments effectively mean that I'm hamstrung when it comes to doing the study and research I really need to do in order to further my career, a situation I have begun to suspect my manager has actually engineered. And now she is off to pastures new, and everyone is expecting me to apply for her post. It's a job I could do, no problem: The difficulty lies in the fact that I don't have the qualifications I need, precisely because I've been too damn busy doing what I do. There is also the nagging fact that it's not really the pathway I want to go down. On the other hand, it is something I should strive for, simply because I need the extra cash; But do I need the extra grief?

High time I reactivated this thing..

..so let's kick it off with the presentation I gave at the EnglishUK teachers' conference last year. It's via Google docs, so I don't think the animation stuff works, meaning it'll look a bit messy.

busy.

Deary me, I'm not keeping this as much up to date as I'd like, mainly because of work: I'm up to my eyeballs in exam arrangements (part of my job is to organise the Skills for Death exams and the Cambridge Main Suite one), and running round making sure certain other people do their jobs vis a vis looking after their own areas and getting data to me. Also, I'm embedded - no bogged down in - reading about the history of ELT and the various methodologies, approaches and theories, written by the kind of writer for whom a night watching paint dry would count as excitement beyond belief. However, write this I must, as I promised myself I would. Well, what's on the menu for me today? I'm startingh with an upper intermediate class, and we're visiting the wonderful world of homonyms and homophones; After a quick dash into town for an urgent bit of business, it's on to the Academic English class, and Language Comparison; then in the evening, an Advanced class, where I'll be looking at some reading skills and probably a bit of CAE related stuff. Excitement. And once I've got home, round about 9.30, it's aquick meal and some more dip work.

half term.

Half term holidays. Invented for the ease and convenience of the teacher, so that he or she may catch up with the mountain of marking from the previous six weeks and bin/set fire to all the stuff that was marked urgent a few weeks previously. In no other profession is it easier to understand how the tomorrow we worry about today will itself become today: In other words, if it really is urgent, it will make itself utterly bloody obvious, and the rest is just bollocks.
I have been in work today, and amazingly found myself with very little of the bin/burn variety. instead, I have been developing Blended Learning material using the Blackboard Platform - that is, gap fills via the interweb thingy - and pushing onwards with my studies. Actually, I am very much in favour of using IT in class, as it's engaging and fun, and means you can recycle tons of stuff ad nauseam once you've put the initial legwork in. I don't particularly like Blackboard, which is a very dated piece of software, but until my educational establishment stops paying for the licence, it's what we've got.

I wouldn't say bad hair day...more flat hair day.

I had only the one lesson today, and while it was OK, I didn't really enjoy it. It hung off its foundations like a 20-year-old's clothes off a 70-year-old's body. It was my upper intermediate class, and we were looking at the perennial fun favourites of relative clauses and present and past participles. Whoo. I didn't do any pyrotechnics this time round - I just didn't feel up to any, for some reason.
The evening saw me handing out information and smiles to potential students, most of whom wanted either ESOL or something more intangible - something to remove their ennui, perhaps.

lesson idea: your life in the news

quick idea: your life in headlines
The aim of this exercise is focusing on key words within texts. The idea is to model one or more parts of your day on the board as headlines, e.g. Teacher in early morning no tea terror. Try to get students to guess what the story is. Students then write a headline for themselves and other students have to guess what the story behind the headline is. An exercise that can be done in conjunction with a reading exercise centred around looking at newspapers. It should be pointed out to students how headlines tend to use present simple in order to be dramatic and omit articles and auxiliary verbs. By getting students to deliberately omit these, it helps them focus on the reasons why they are used in the first place.