Here's my first guest blog. It's from Charlotte Jones, a travel and education writer, enjoy.
We all know learning a language can be a
long, arduous and often stressful task, and sometimes students just don’t get things. It’s a natural
part of the process. But with persistence, hard work and experience, a good
English teacher can get the best from even their most difficult students.
However, if you are an English teacher, you’ll know that some days you just need a good scream! When students arrive having
forgot everything you taught them last week, no motivation to learn and you’re
just begging for the clock to tick a bit faster and signal the end of the
lesson, it’s probably time to take a breath and relax. If you’re an English
teacher in need of a laugh, or you’re an English learner trying to empathize
with your seemingly ever-stressed-out teachers, take a look at the videos
below. Teaching English to non-native speakers can be brilliant and difficult
in equal measure, but we have to laugh
at ourselves every now and then or we’d go crazy.
We start with a clip that shows just how
tiresome and unforgiving teaching English can be. If your students are on the
same wavelength as you, teaching English
can be a wonderful vocation. If, however, as we see in this case, your
students can’t quite grasp your classroom activities, you can be left
screaming, wanting to run for the door.
This clip doesn’t exactly show English
language teachers at their best, although it is his first day so I suppose we
can cut him some slack. In the video taken from a film, we see Russell Ziskey
leading his first Beginner’s English class in front of a room full of students,
unfortunately, the first few minutes don’t go exactly to plan. It might be every teacher’s worst nightmare for
their students to start repeating swear words in class, but at least they seem
eager and willing to learn new things... Something tells me this teacher might need to go back to
school himself and work some more on getting his online
TESOL certificate, though I can’t fault him for his enthusiasm and attitude.
Sometimes even the simplest of words or phrases can cause havoc in the classroom,
as any experienced ESL teacher will know only too well! Getting your students
to snap out of their natural accent and way of pronouncing words can be a very
tricky task indeed, but as you can see in this video, at least this poor teacher has a lot of persistence.
Plus it shows Steve Martin at his best, which is never a bad thing.
This is a great example of how brilliant English language teachers like us can
be! We’ve taught our students so well that they don’t even know they’re
doing it! Or something like that. This clip from the BBC comedy series Big
Train shows how language skills can help you when abroad, and just how important English is as a language,
even if things don’t go perfectly to plan.
Here we have a very funny advertisement for
a company that teaches English grammar online, they surely get the point across
of the importance of using proper
grammar when speaking English. This is a good video to show your students the
next time they complain about having to do yet another grammar test in class,
as I’m sure none of them want to trip themselves up like this young man did. As
teachers, we try not to act like police interrogators in the cells, but maybe,
every now and again, we should take a
leaf out of this man’s book, what do you think?
Finally, we come to Catherine Tate. A
brilliantly talented British comedienne, Tate has a particular talent for
poking fun at anyone and everyone, and
here demonstrates brilliantly the importance of proper language learning.
This video, with over 375,000 views on YouTube alone, should be a guide for how
not to behave when dealing with foreign languages, but it is very funny
nevertheless. If ever you needed a reason to learn foreign languages or more of
an incentive to teach them, watch this clip and it should inspire you. Nobody wants to end up in a business
meeting like this one!
We all know teaching English is a great
job, with a lot of perks that most people don’t get from their boring nine to
five office jobs, but hopefully the videos above have shown you that we need to
have a laugh and joke at ourselves every once in a while. Take a look at this website for tips and tricks
about teaching and learning English as a foreign language, or getting qualified
to teach abroad. Have you seen any funny videos about teaching English we
should add to the list?
(If anyone else fancies writing another guest blog then just get in touch)