complaints and the whore

I love to hear this complaint from my students: "We want to talk even more in class!" Sometimes the complaint expresses a misguided desire for "free talking," a teaching "technique" of dubious utility. Free talking is more beneficial for students in advanced levels: they have most of the basic problems out of the way and can set about finding ways to express complex ideas. Short, directed talking sessions are better for the lower levels, and it's my 9am Level 1 class that wants to talk more. That's fine: I'm glad they told me now rather than waiting until Week 12. Thanks to their heads-up, I'll be incorporating some short, directed talking sessions into my Level 1 lessons. This will be on top of the talking the students already do. What I won't do is give in to one student's suggestion that we devote about twenty minutes to a "talk with Kevin" session.

Let me back up and explain what that's all about. Monday was quiz day for the Level 1s. On quiz day, I'm usually nice and let the students go early after we're finished with the quizzing. During the quiz, students visit me in pairs and work their way through the quiz problems, which cover anything from question formation to tense grammar to a one-minute directed talk that's more about ideas than mechanics. The students awaiting their turn are given something else to do, and aren't allowed to open their books or look at their notes. On Monday, my 7:50am class finished the quizzing with about twenty minutes to spare, so I told the students they could either go home or sit around and just chat. The students, bizarrely, opted to stay, so we chatted, and apparently word got out that this was much more entertaining than what we normally do (textbook, handouts, you know the rest). So that's what I mean when I say that some students in the 9am class now want a "talk with Kevin" session.

From my point of view, however, the Monday chat was basically 15 minutes of me talking and only 5 minutes of short, scattered student utterances. It was a great opportunity for me to give in to my inner ham and put on The Kevin Show, but that's not what the students need. What they need is time to talk, and to talk in a directed manner, doing dialogues with a purpose that apply the skills they've been learning.

The best way to realize this goal when you've got eight to ten people in a class is not to put on The Kevin Show: it's to get students in pairs or groups and have them talk for five to ten minutes at a time. Students already get this opportunity in my classes: they probably talk, in total, for the majority of the hour, and I always walk around monitoring them, periodically correcting them, even writing corrections on the board for everyone's benefit.

So I'm wary of the "talk with Kevin" idea, and my counterproposal to certain students was that, if they really wanted a one-on-one with me, we could bring back my old one-on-one sessions from last year, where I sat with a single student for ten or fifteen minutes and we talked about whatever the student wanted to talk about. The idea was something I brought with me from my previous job, and students loved it. So we might go back to that. It'll mean a couple more hours per week doing unpaid work, but to me, such a task would be worthwhile.

At the beginning of this spiel I talked about complaints I like. Here's the sort of complaint I hate: "It's too hard! I can't do it! We should do something easier!"

The above complaint comes courtesy of a girl in my 7:50am Tuesday/Thursday advanced-level reading class-- a class of Level 3s. I was pissed off all morning after hearing this complaint, and truth be told, I'm still pissed off because the girl who made the complaint has done precisely jack fucking shit in my class. She routinely arrives 20-25 minutes late. She hasn't posted a single blog entry on our group student blog, and for this morning's class, she didn't read a word of the current four-page passage (a short by George Orwell titled "A Hanging"-- see for yourself how short it is). For this student to have the gall to complain about how hard her life is because of the assigned work she isn't doing is rich beyond compare.

Now that I've taken the measure of this student-- as well as of the others in class today who were similarly late and unprepared-- I've decided to dig in my heels. I have no plans to lower my expectations of these goofballs. They will either rise to my standards or fall by the wayside. If this means losing my entire class because they refuse to accept responsibility for their own effort, so be it. I'll explain the situation to my boss if necessary. The students paid for a Tuesday/Thursday session; it's their choice if they decide to waste their money.

The students who attend this class on Tuesdays and Thursdays also attend a Mon-Wed-Fri conversation class at the same hour, i.e., 7:50am. My impression is that that class is a lot easier for them. I have no idea whether they're being given homework, but I do know that some students quietly skip the reading class in favor of attending only the conversation class. Having been the "conversation" half of such a teacher pairing before, I don't feel personally slighted: students constantly bitch about reading assignments, so the reading teacher inevitably gets skipped on first. Anyway, if this means I'll be starting later on Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on because the 7:50 class has disappeared, then so be it.

To top it all off, I must now proclaim myself a whore: I hit Hannam Market yesterday for some overpriced Western goods, but despite a microscopic inspection of the premises, I was unable to locate my treasured Nutella. The lady at one counter offered her sympathies and showed me a plastic tub of a different chocolate-hazelnut spread from Greece (!!) called NuCrema, an obvious goddamn ripoff of my one and only love.

"People say it's the same," the lady told me with a shrug.

So of course I bought a tub.

O, Nutella! Can you ever forgive this wayward Kevin?

I took the spread back home, heedlessly ripped open the seal, and plunged my rigid spoon repeatedly into NuCrema's moist, creamy depths. Then I licked my NuCrema as it's never been licked before.

And let me tell you:

It's not the same.

But-- God help me-- it's not bad, either.

I am a whore. A cheap, crack-smokin' ho-ho-whore.


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