How bad is it if you DON'T learn English....really?

It's not a disaster if you don't learn.

Spaniards put themselves under a lot of pressure to master English. Why this is, I don't know. It's not like they speak a language that is useless beyond its borders. It's not like there's so much trade between Spain and English-speaking countries – companies from English-speaking countries do not dominate employment in this country.

There is a lot of embarrassment and fear about being left behind.

There's a lot of jealousy directed towards people who have mastered English. Worse, there's a lot of resentment towards people who make an effort to improve their English. Why this is, I don't know. But it's sad to see it happen.

I don't want anyone to think that they're totally incapable of learning English. (Spanish students of English say this a lot, but I have yet to meet someone who shows it's true.) But being able to do something, and having the time, the determination and the interest in doing something well are different things.

If you decide to learn something, and you say that you're doing it to improve your future, remember that you basically enter into a contract with two people: yourself, and the teacher. The teacher's responsibility is to create a positive, educational environment that helps you get you where you want to go, literally and/or figuratively.

It's YOUR responsibility to do what you can to make sure that happens.

And if it doesn't happen, and you don't learn to speak English perfectly...ask yourself this: What, exactly, have you lost? You can probably still communicate fairly well. If you had to go to London tomorrow, you'd probably do all right in the airport and at the hotel and in a restaurant. So what if you'll never be able to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal, or act in an Oscar-winning movie, or any of that stuff? Do you want to commit to the amount of work and study and practice that a person needs to be able to do that effectively?

Trust me...there's no shame in answering "no." Unless you're marrying someone who speaks English, unless you're going to work for an American company or you're moving to an English-speaking country, "good" is good enough.

The teacher still has a lot to learn.

I try not to say that I know everything. A lot of times, I don't. And there are a lot of times when I really, honestly feel that I will never, ever, know everything.

I have a student who hates grammar. I don't think that "hate" is too strong a word, here. This is a problem in classes, obviously, because grammar forms a big part of commmunication: if you don't have the structure, it's very difficult to communicate well.

I just found out why this person hates grammar. As a kid, this person was taught by priests who would physically abuse the students when the students made mistakes. From what the student told me, humiliation made up a big part of classroom time; students were not given any kind of positive feedback or encouragement while they were in class. They just tried NOT to get beaten up while they were learning. Thirty years later, grammar still means humiliation, still means revealing how stupid you are....

How can you fix something like that?

How much is the teacher RESPONSIBLE for fixing things like that?

We have come to an agreement that we will focus on vocabulary and expressions for the next little while. Vocabulary is safe, it's not risky or dangerous. I know that this is not effective teaching, but there are times when being a teacher is less important than being a facilitator and coach.

Part of me thinks: This is not my problem. But it is my problem. I have an unspoken contract to help this person as much as I can, and if grammar is not helping, well, it'll just have to wait for now.

Oh, Spain...if only you guys had gone through the 1960s and had the benefit of educational psychology...we wouldn't be dealing with the scars, forty years on...

In the meantime: vocabulary, and lots of it. Let's see if that helps.

It's not you, it's me. Uhh....No. Wait. It really IS you, after all.

Teachers are normal people, most of the time. We laugh, we cry, we have good days, we have horrid days. Generally speaking, if you're working with human beings, you have to be able to accept that people are going to behave like people. And sometimes, being humans, they have human ways of dealing with problems. Or not dealing with them.

I just had class with a student who I'll call Oxford. Oxford is a very successful lawyer who's had senior positions in the Spanish government. Oxford has a hell of a time with English, however - it takes forever to get sentences out, there are a lot of problems with vocabulary, and I do wonder about Oxford's ability to handle information. For the past two years, Oxford has had conversation classes, but it never occurred to me to ask Oxford why the classes had to focus on conversation and nothing else.

I think I learned the reason why today.

Since Oxford is setting up a lot of meetings, I thought, OK, maybe a lesson on taking notes and manipulating written information would be a good idea. No way. At first, Oxford didn't resist directly; Oxford asked a lot of questions and didn't quite get the idea behind reading a text and condensing information into notes. It was as if my questions were bouncing off Oxford at every angle, like a basketball that has too much air in it - you could get close to the net, but not in it.

It turns out that Oxford doesn't read. I don't really know the reason why. When reading the newspaper, for example, Oxford claims to scan for the most important words, but once Oxford more or less understands the article, that's it. The newspaper goes in the garbage.

Okaaaay...what about law school? Or laws? Or legal briefs?

Same thing.

(Pause.)

Okaaaaayyyyy....

So we have fifty minutes left of class, and the class has just hit the wall. Oxford cannot or does not want to do the exercise - I'm still not sure why. But then it occurs to me: Maybe Oxford has some kind of reading disability or dyslexia or something. The best thing would be to ask Oxford what's going on, but that's not a good idea: Oxford keeps getting more and more agitated.

Boom. The exercise goes in the garbage.

Next plan: Listening. I decide to improvise a listening exercise from something we did the other day, but there's a problem: the academy has lost the CDs for that textbook. All right. Oxford wants conversation? That's what we'll do, then. This would be a good plan, except that Oxford is now in such a bad mood, conversation becomes a one-sided, somewhat understandable monologue about steel, Chinese manufacturing, how evil Coca-Cola is...you get the idea.

So what do you do in those situations? The same thing, I imagine, that parents do when their kids have tantrums. I just sat there, nodded, tried not to look at the watch too often, asked questions slowly, and tried to understand Oxford as best I could. At the same time, however, I kept thinking, Where is this coming from? Why is this student behaving like this?

The reason why is probably irrelevant. But when you first start teaching, it's really, really, really hard to realize that, just like us, students are going to have horrible days. Students are going to react badly if they feel they're being attacked. Students will get frustrated if they don't see why an exercise is important, and when a student explodes, sometimes the best thing to do is to try to be sympathetic and not pass judgment.

I don't know if Oxford will ever make progress; in some ways, that doesn't matter. Oxford still attends classes, and that's the most important thing. The second most important thing is that we, as teachers, do not think that you are crazy or weird or unstable or nuts because you have days like that. We all have days like that.

"Some days, you're the windscreen; some days, you're the bug." -- Mark Knopfler

Showdown at the (not) OK Corral

I don't like conflict. I don't "do" conflict, really; first of all, because I'm Canadian (aside from hockey players, when have you ever seen Canadians get really nasty with people?); and, secondly, because it's not my job.

I teach. Within the scope of teaching, I do a lot of things - I coach, I suggest, I co-pilot, I design, I research. But it's not really my job to be rude or mean to people, even when they're rude or mean to me. Why bother? It's the reason why I don't teach kids: I don't appreciate being put in a position where I have to be the hard guy.

We had - have? - a situation in one of my classes where three of the five participants don't participate. The class has been going for a month. Two of the guys are former students of mine, and we got on really well; but when their group was mixed with another group, trouble started. The new people didn't talk. They still don't. In fact, nobody talks at all, and when they do, it's usually to make some thoughtless generalization to break the silence, nothing more. They wanted a conversation class, but they don't bother participating in any conversation.

Now, unless I've missed something in these past twelve years of teaching, conversation usually involves interaction, and moving information back and forth. In most English classes, that can be very controlled (a telephone conversation, a presentation), or it can be looser, more open to improvisation. The information, though, has to go two ways.

It didn't, in this class. The information kind of didn't do...anything. I tried speaking exercises; nothing. I tried reading; nothing. I tried pronunciation; nothing. Now, keep in mind that (as I've said before), a teacher is a lot of things -- but a teacher is not there to be an entertainer. If you want entertainment, there are a lot of other options which cost a lot less money than English classes do.

Furthermore, English classes are not a way of avoiding work or hiding from your boss. Not in my classes, anyway. If you sign up for one of my classes, you're going to work.

Now, I'm about to make a sweeping generalization that will probably not be about you, specifically. (If you're a Spanish student of English who's reading this blog, this generalization will NOT be about you, that's for sure.) One thing that has never failed to shock me about teaching in Spain is the amount of WASTE that happens in classes.

When I taught in post-Communist Prague, companies didn't have a lot of money. If someone was selected to take part in an English training program, they treated it like a golden opportunity. Back in 1999, Czech companies did not get money from the European Union for training; they had to pay for it out of their own money, and they were so desperate and eager for new ideas and new ways and new opportunities that they did not waste the chance to get better. This is not the case in Spain. There are a lot of students - not everybody, as I said before - who think that their companies or parents or schools owe them English, and that the teacher should do everything because if the students are paying, they shouldn't have to work. So the students come to class, or the teacher spends 45 minutes on the Metro (each way; 90 minutes lost) and the student plays with his or her mobile phone, and complains about her boyfriend or her job, or her mother, and refuses to do anything educational, like reading or grammar or reviewing and NOTHING GETS DONE. And you're paying money for this?

I'm not sure why this happens. In the case of our class, it may have solved itself. Nobody came to class today. I saw two of the students standing outside the VIPS across the street, smoking, about ten minutes before class. I assumed they were coming. Nobody showed up. Maybe they decided at the last minute that they didn't want to talk. Maybe they don't like the idea that they're expected to work. Maybe they think that, somewhere in the office, there's a CD-ROM I can stick in their mouths, and then they'll be able to speak perfectly. I don't know, and to a certain extent, I don't care. I would rather spend sixty minutes with a perfect beginner than ten minutes with a perfect jerk.

I know what's going to happen next: the students will probably not come to class for a week or two weeks and the Director of Studies (who was perfectly ready to give them an earful this afternoon - she's had run-ins with them before) will call them. They'll tell the Director of Studies some kind of lie, like they're too busy with work or they've been transferred somewhere else. And if they choose to lie, rather than dealing with whatever is bugging them... that's not my problem. English teachers are not entertainers and, most importantly, they're not psychics. If you're not willing to be mature and work out issues, that's not my problem.

OK, sorry to rant. I'm going back to work now and I promise not to bite anyone. I promise.

Just because you can...

doesn't mean you should.

One of the reasons why I created this blog was because I wanted to give students a source of information on how to improve their English. What isn't obvious, however, is that improving your English means having a good relationship with your teacher. To have a good relationship with your teacher, it's important to get off on the right foot (=to start well/badly) with that person. (I've touched on this topic before on the blog: http://tinyurl.com/2upr77v)

Here's how you can get off on the wrong foot with a new teacher, and guarantee that you'll be looking for someone new very quickly.

S. calls me on Wednesday and doesn't leave a message. Normally, I don't call people back if they can't be bothered to leave a message, but, for some reason, I do. When we start speaking, it becomes obvious that he doesn't like speaking, so I try to find out as much information as I can. It isn't much. He wants to speak in English. (Don't we all?) We agree to meet the next day to talk about I can help him.

So the next day, I run out of a class to meet S. on the other side of the city. The conversation lasts about ten minutes, and I don't get much more information out of him. He's in a university course that is very grammar- and vocabulary-intensive, but they don't get a lot of chances to speak. OK, I say, so why do you want to hire a teacher? There are a lot of different ways to practice your English for free.... arrange an intercambio or go to a pub night. (The guy is a university student, after all. I'm assuming he's seen the inside of a pub or two in his life.) Shrug. Not sure. I'm not getting a good feeling about this. We arrange to meet the next day for an hour and a half of class.

It turns out that the hour and a half we were supposed to have at lunchtime becomes thirty minutes before dinner. It was painful. I go to his university residence, because he doesn't want to come to the office, and when I get to the (all-male) residence, I have to wait ten minutes for him to come down to get me.

Then he insists on taking me up to his dormitory room, which was disastrous: Clothes all over the place, notebooks, padel ball racquet - and the smell. Oh, dear readers....that smell. If you could put that essence of "teenage boy" odor in a bottle, you could use it as a repellent for small animals. (There were teaching rooms available in the residence, but he didn't want to take one in case someone needed it. It must be a very demanding university, indeed, if they expect a bunch of twenty-something young men to attend classes at 7:20 PM on a Friday night.) I'm not sure which was more difficult, frankly - trying to teach while only breathing in and out of my mouth, or trying to pin S. down to a regular schedule and get some information out of him.

In the end, I'm guessing that S. probably will not have class this coming Friday, either. Students who don't have a clear idea of what they want to do usually don't keep up with classes, and it seems a waste of time to hire someone just because you want to talk.

Please remember that finding a teacher is a lot like finding a husband or a wife. If you want to have a productive, healthy, long-lasting relationship that helps you grow and get better, first impressions are important.

Why studying doesn't work.

"I have to study more."

How many times do you hear yourself saying that? How much studying do you actually do during the academic year?

Instead of studying, think about practice. Why? First of all, most people say that they feel that they should study.... but they actually don't do anything at all. Maybe they buy some books or maybe they have lists of vocabulary, but I'll tell you from experience - 90% of students don't even go that far.

Can you imagine what would happen if Alberto Contador wanted to win the Tour de France, but never got on his bicycle? Or if Cristiano Ronaldo wanted to win the World Cup for Portugal, but never put his shoes on? If you say that you want to study, but you don't do anything, all you do is guarantee that you will fail.

Here's an easier idea: Don't study - practice. Use your English every way you can. Listen to music. Write a journal. Watch short videos on YouTube. After all, you're learning English so that you can use it in the real world. The best way to use it in real situations is to practice in controlled situations, and to make it as diverse as possible.

If you think this advice is ridiculous, read this article from The New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/353qvzo.

Remember: You are the boss of your learning. Teachers are there to help you, but they cannot do your work for you.

It's all in your mind

Years ago (and I mean many, many years ago), I had a college classmate named Allison who was, shall we say, a little bit radical. She thought that many languages were fundamentally sexist because (she felt) that there weren't many ways for women to be present in grammar, and that that meant that if a language tended to favour masculine forms, the language caused people, in turn, to think in a sexist way.

That idea may appear to be radical, but it's not a new one. As this New York Times article shows, people have been trying to make the connection between language and thought for a very long time (http://tinyurl.com/33adeud.)

It's a good article, maybe a bit long, but works well in describing why that idea (called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) isn't always correct.

Enjoy!