Be an enthusiastic and encouraging teacher

Running my own outreach centre at Redhill is a fantastically rewarding job, and though the hours I do are more than those I am paid for, I take a pride in how my centre is run and how well the sts achieve and are cared for. I know that the sts can turn to me and tell me what’s going on in their lives if they want to, but they don’t have to, and I hope they feel my sympathy even if I don’t say it.

I have a quite elderly man with learning difficulties doing maths with me. I’m not sure he’s going to achieve at the level I’ve put him on. I don’t want to set him a challenge too far. But it would be great if Learndirect could take him a bit further than his is at present. His problem is word blindness. He had trouble with a task for sorting number values just because he really can’t see the difference between Tth (ten thousand) and Th (Thousand). I stood over him and made him write each number down before he entered them in the table onscreen. I noticed he occasionally transposed numbers. He is a typical dyslexic. I told him he has word blindness. He had never heard this term and asked me about it yesterday. I said, without any obvious sympathy, that he can’t see the difference between certain groups of letters. He was really pleased to know what his problem is. He told me that 10 years ago he was discovered to be colour blind. I thought this very interesting and pointed to a patch on screen that I might call “the green button”, and I asked him what colour it is? He said he couldn’t really tell. He could see blue and lilac. At first I was a bit scared of this man I’ll call K, because he has an odd manner, but I have changed. I start off wary of everybody in case they want more of me than I want to give.

Another interesting learner is a woman of my own age who can’t read. She is a mum with a happy smile and nature who always comes in with her sister. They always come early and wait for me to tell them it’s OK to sit down and log on. They bring in a great sense of excitement. Maria had never used a computer before her Initial Assessment. She was thrilled that she so soon got the hang of clicking the mouse and now she enjoys using the keyboard to type words. She told me she couldn’t read and write, and my heart dropped because for people who are really illiterate there is nothing we can do, except refer her to her local FE college, but her assessment came in at a low level of literacy so we can build on that. I noticed that she has no difficulty with recognising or forming numbers, and that for someone who has had very little education she is quite numerate. She can recite the alphabet and knows the difference between vowels and consonants. She’s doing really well with letter blends and I know she is going to progress through the levels because she wants to, she really wants to, and this is her time, this is the time that she will do it, partly for her children. Now I have never made a fuss of M or treated her any differently from other learners. I am very interested in her progress partly because I am interested in the methods and strategies the course provides. Sometimes learners do just vanish and one never finds out why, and when one has built up a relationship with them this is particularly hard. Perhaps I am a bit hardened to that happening now, so I want to keep things impersonal as far as possible.

There is one learner who has just taken a low level Maths qualification, and getting that woman through her Maths has been like pulling teeth, and I do sometimes get quite irritated by her ability to give wrong answers to really simple questions. I panic her by questioning her and she answers at random.

Then there are lots of learners who are like me, really, just wanting IT quals so that they can go for office jobs, or Maths quals so that they can move from admin to take a degree and become professionals in schools or social work. There are some fantastic people coming to the centre in Redhill and I really enjoy giving them time and encouragement.

and I want to write a tribute to the students I’ve had who’ve meant soemthing to me, especially Hilda.

Hilda came to England from Hungary to improve her English so that she could progress in her job as a speech therapist trainer at a University. Her understanding is good, and she is very literate, but she is shy and so her speaking is slow.

She first took a job at Beech Care where she drove around the district and cared for old and inform people in their own homes; lifting setting them on a commode, bathing and dressing them and making them comfortable twice a day. The workers at Beech care live in fairly squalid conditions – 3 to a room I think, and are paid about £3 an hour. They work from 6 am to 11 pm. They are trained for the first two weeks by “shadowing” an experienced carer, and they pay £200 for this training. They mainly come from Estonia.

After a while Hilda’s clients liked and trusted her sufficiently for her to continue to care for them independently of Beech Care. She had very little money, so she could only visit clients whom she could reach by bicycle. She also took cleaning jobs, which pay £8.00 hour round here.

Hilda realised she must have a car, and took another job 4 nights a week stacking shelves in Tesco to pay for her car.

Hilda is 37. When she was 21 she fell in love with a young man who was very famous in Hungary as a martial arts champion. They married and had a daughter. Her husband was very attractive to women. Although he loved Hilda he was unfaithful to her. Hilda found him with another girl and “something broke inside”. She divorced him. However, I am pleased to say that Hilda now has another fiance. He is 32 years old and a social worker who used to run a home for single mothers, but at present he is working in Tesco’s at night. His English is very bad so he cannot work in Tesco during the day. She says this is a very cheap form of birth control!

Hilda’s mum died when she was very young, leaving her to be the main carer of her mentally handicapped sister. Her daughter is 15 years old and is at home in Hungary, where she is looked after by Hilda’s aunt and uncle. These relatives have also been looking after Hilda’s sister, while she sends money home to pay the bills for her flat and for her daughter’s living expenses.

Hilda was thrilled when she got a job as a learning assistant in a school, as a helper for autistic children. She tried to help them to communicate. However, the children are very troubled and are sometimes violent. But Hilda’ really liked the job: it was much more useful to her in her speciality than care working.

She had done so much to make a life for herself in this country: she had a learning assistant job, cleaning job, Tesco job and English lessons for 3 hours a week, which she hardly ever missed. She hoped to be able to bring her daughter over to live with her, and went to the local school to talk to the head and to fill in the necessary forms and then…

her sister became very depressed and troubled that Hilda had gone away, and her aunt and uncle told her they could no longer cope.

So next week, after a whole year of effort, Hilda is returning to Hungary. i feel so sad that she hasn’t made more progress at English, and I feel that I should have done more to help her make accelerated progress. She was one of the strongest in the class, and I often asked her to help another Hungarian who had poor understanding and was very slow, and Hilda is so kind and patient that she did that. I wish now that I had found some way of giving her a differentiated syllabus. The trouble is, I found the class really hard work so I kept them all at the same pace, to avoid extra preparation. Hilda took E3 exams anyway in writing and reading, so I guess at the end of the course, the result was that she had learnt more.

She gave me a card to say thank you and she wrote that I am a nice person, but I am not nearly as nice as I should be, and I wish I had done more for Hilda.

On Friday I had only 3 students, but I knew the German girls and Paula weren’t coming, so I tried to find somethig interesting and “talkie” for the Japanese ladies and Maria. This worked very well and I was glad I had tried to find something interesing and had chosen the right kind of thing.

I’ll say that I did pretty well last night with the Entry 2s. As usual, I didn’t feel like going out at 6.30 pm to teach them, and our usual room was not available so we had a computer room. But in the event, the six who came had a good lesson and they learnt new things that they could use.

This morning I tried to give Maria a catch up lesson in her coffee shop, for free, but she had popped out to the doctor, and Coffee Republic was too busy anyway. This is just to show how I’m being a bit more enthusiastic again.

have arrived at Cobham, (and four of them are men for a change)so I’d better make sure they attend and learn and do homework and generally get a good vibe from there.

At Walton I taught a good lesson apart from the fact that Saskia kept talking, and even went rabbiting on in German which she would normally scorn to do. But the othrs were fine.

because so many of the students are leaving. I’m not the only teacher in this situation and something in the system has gone wrong. I mustn’t worry so much about it. I don’t get paid enough to worry.

because 10 of the L2s turned up and the two who did not had good excuses. So, L2s, I lurve you all!

L1s you are baaaaad.

that watching students do tests is weirdly unfulfilling. What you want them to do is learn, and how can they learn while they’re doing a test? So I let them all use dictionaries because it showed they were learning new vocabulary. I also gave the entry 2s an oral test and feedback and it revealed that they are very shy about speaking in front of an assessor and that I will have to practise with them a lot more.

The level 2s have a reading as well as the quick grammar test, and I’m dithering about giving them a writing question as well.

Only 6 of the level 1s showed up. Maybe I shall have a similar problem with the Level 2s.

for example, you have to convince some students that they ARE making progress, nd make it fun for them when it’s difficult (E2s).

Other students need convincing that they don’t know everything, but at the same time, they have to be encouraged to make that next step, which will require extra effort. it’s no good me just filling their time. (L2s)

The perfect level is Level 1 where they know something about a lot of things, but they’re not using it altogether or correctly.
I wonder why this level has such a high dropout rate? They all want to go home!!!

The level 2s got more attention that usual because all the German girls did n’t show up (must message them).

The Level 1s are never difficult but they were great today because they spent nearly all the lesson doing speaking activities, and I was pleased, it was just what they needed, and they had a good time doing them.

Tonight I’ve got the Entry 2s and I feel really tired, but mustn’t be!!! I have to teach them something new and complicated. Oh dear.