My frustration

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I have a parent who wants to take her child out of my school because she feels that her daughter isn’t good enough at grammar, writing and reading. In actual fact she is fairly good and it is very difficult for me to convince her mother otherwise.

Here is an extract from a 350 word creative writing assignment on Alien Abduction:

Suddenly, there was an alien sitting on a UFO. He was smiling at me. I felt it did something to cover my eyes. It made some special smell all around me. Then I passed out; I didn’t know what had happened.

When I woke up, I felt my head really hurt. I propped up my body and looked around the environment I was in. I was staying in a big room, and I was sitting on a water bed! There were some fish and a mermaid inside the water bed! There was some kind of fringe around the bed. I got off the bed and stirred up the fringe. The floor was made of marble. It had a ditch through it that went under the bed. There was some purple like jelly flowing through the ditch and around the room’s rim. Finally, that jelly flowed into a pond. It stayed at the highest point in the room…

Now, I think that is a more than reasonable writing effort for a grade 6 student. She has been studying at my school for five years. Her speaking is very good and this year we are reading Jack London’s “White Fang” from Starter Classics.

I believe her mother would like her to do a test preperation course for GEPT. I don’t want to lose a student who is capable of excellent work because her mother is unable to appreciate what she is capable of.

Any suggestions?

2

Are you sure there’s not an ulterior motive to this mom’s behaviour? Financial perhaps?
Has the mother read her child’s work? Can she grasp it? The child’s prose is flowing, descriptive and enabling.
A good read, in other words.
Get mom to lighten down.

3

I’ve got jnr high students who have already passed GEPT and they can’t write that well.

I’m not sure what you can do. I’ll show this to my boss tomorrow and ask for an opinion from him. He shares the GEPT class with me, and we’ve recently started to focus more on writing (as the students keep coming to school even though they’ve passed the highest level we offer).

4

Perhaps I should just have GEPT preperation class time. I’m afraid of it taking over.

5

She mistook my Dragfire for a UFO? How precious!

6

How do you do that?

7

Cabbage, beans, the usual. You know.

8

I do know.

9

Aside, what do your kids think of “White Fang”? Mine claim they hate it and they don’t get all the violence and the arctic scenery and indians despite my very best efforts to teach them about it all, with pictures and everything.

I find with parents like that the best thing to do is extoll the virtues of their son or daughter gushingly with examples of previous work. I thought the story was pretty good. I wanted to read more of it. I would hate to lose a student that produced stuff like that.

I got to keep one of my students as I heard she was going to a different school because her lazy-ass mother didn’t want to take her to mine on time. I bought her a nice notebook and a small box of chocolates and had all the teachers write something in it about how we would miss her. It worked. For now.

I don’t know much about GEPD. Is it so difficult that the principles of it can not be threaded into the lessons? I’ve been thinking about learning it.

10

I guess the age group for “White Fang” is important, probably anywhere from grade 5 to form 2. I don’t focus so much on the setting as I do the story of growing up under hardship.

I emphasize the Wild (living by instincts aspect) and the captivity aspect (the cruelty of man etc). I even venture into cruel farm practices for discussion such as battery hen and pig farming. There is a lot of vocabulary work involved so we do many vocab exercises, which can be fun. There is also a lot of idioms and idiomatic language so I spend time on that.

One time I read a whole chapter with my best French accented trapper accent. The kids were begging me to stop by the end of it.

I also prepare plenty of worksheets where I take a passage of the text and do conventional reading comprehension exercises like true/false, clozes for key vocab, multiple choice and sample sentence construction.

As for the mother, I’ve known her for 5 years. Apparently she is concerned about her daughter’s confusion over appropriate tense usage. Recently I have been giving them exercises to distinguish between the use of the past simple and past continuous, past simple and present perfect etc. I can appreciate that it is not easy; however, it’s not easy for everyone not just her. Though I think she feels the other students are doing better than her daughter. In some ways the other class members probably are, but so what; she is still very capable and is learning.

11

[quote=“Fox”]Suddenly, there was an alien sitting on a UFO. He was smiling at me. I felt it did something to cover my eyes. It made some special smell all around me. Then I passed out; I didn’t know what had happened.

When I woke up, I felt my head really hurt. I propped up my body and looked around the environment I was in. I was staying in a big room, and I was sitting on a water bed! There were some fish and a mermaid inside the water bed! There was some kind of fringe around the bed. I got off the bed and stirred up the fringe. The floor was made of marble. It had a ditch through it that went under the bed. There was some purple like jelly flowing through the ditch and around the room’s rim. Finally, that jelly flowed into a pond. It stayed at the highest point in the room…[/quote]

That’s far beyond the capacity of most of the recent college graduates I deal with on a daily basis. This girl’s writing is amazing for a 6th-grader whose native language is not English.

I’d say the mom is fishing for excuses. Maybe they’re low on funds and need a face-saving way to economize.

12

What the hell is she doing in an English class in the first place? Are all the other students that good?

13

In a class of 15, there were 7 writing assignments better than this one. I judge by vocabulary usage, structure, general accuracy, punctuation, colloquialisms, and of course imagination.

14

Where did they learn English so well?

15

From me. I’ve taught the same group for 4 to 5 years. Some joined in grade 2 the others started in grade 1. They’ve done 4 hrs of English a week consistently over a long time.

16

Yes, spending that much time with one teacher certainly does help, but I have my doubts she can write that well just because of that exposure to you. There must be some other influences. Sorry, I just highly doubt it. Either they copied it or something. Even if they spend all day learning English from grade 1 to grade 6, it would be very difficult to achieve what I just read.

17

Are you sure she’s not worried about the topics that you’re dealing with? For some parents, alien abduction would be on a par with prostitution, and not somethign they want their child writing about.

18

[quote]There must be some other influences. Sorry, I just highly doubt it. Either they copied it or something. Even if they spend all day learning English from grade 1 to grade 6, it would be very difficult to achieve what I just read.
[/quote]

She has no other teacher. Neither of her parents speaks English. That’s why they want to leave. They believe she will get a better understanding of grammar elsewhere because she can get a translation of key grammatical terms. Of course, we have all this conversation in Chinese.

Her writing is good, but it is not exceptional.

This is exceptional. I discussed Orwell’s Animal Farm with one class and then gave them an assignment to write about themselves as if they were pigs leading a revolt on a farm. This starts off after two pigs had escaped from the farm and find themselves in a forest that surrounds it. It’s very Monty Python.

“I’m hungry,” said Henry, “and tired.”

We were walking in the forest. The lake and all the chaos were behind us, but we were not really happy. Through out the past several hours, we could see nothing but trees. We were discouraged and exhausted. Sigh! It was really hard to live outside the farm.

“Maybe we will find a place to rest tonight soon…,” I said. A shadow suddenly shot through the bushes.

“What’s that?” Henry shouted. Within a minute, those shadows surrounded us. They closed on us gradually. Now I was sure they were pigs like us, but they all wore red bands on their heads and pointed us with sticks.

“Who are you?” asked Henry.

“Ha. Ha. Ha! I can’t believe there are pigs that haven’t heard of us before!” laughed the biggest pig. “We are Forestrians, the pigs who can’t stand the farm and the humans. We are the hope of those poor pigs. We are the headache of the humans. We are shining stars in space. We are…”

The only thing I couldn’t believe was the number of nouns he thought of for them. What was the relationship between the pigs and the stars anyway?

I’ll leave that one up to the Twisted Sisters.

19

Something smells fishy.

20

I’m not sure what you mean.

If you think it’s not possible to teach kids to write well then that is simply not true. Any experienced teacher will tell you the same. Years of persistence, constant unrelenting practice, sound teaching skills, a good deal of creativity, understanding of your curriculum, and a cheerful classroom is all it takes.