You can't always please everyone ...

Or: You can’t please everyone all of the time . . .

This is my first draft for my video-blog entry with the title above. Of course, in the video I tried to improvise a bit because otherwise I sound awfully unnatural. I suppose I'll be doing more of that as I go along.

  

Hello, my name is Steven Starry and I’m going to talk a little bit about stress in this video for English teachers in Madrid, Spain.

Now, I can’t complain too much about it because, I mean, at least I’m not clearing mine fields, or saving patients’ lives in life-or-death operations, or anything like that, but I still suffer quite a bit from stress. I think most teachers do. As do, in general, lower and lower-middle class people because of the economy and economics, and so on. Lately, I’ve even seen a few of my upper-middle class students suffer a bit of stress themselves.

In my case, my stress comes from trying to please everyone all the time, and we all know that’s impossible, so my body gets me back in a big way for that one because I tend to push my luck and work long, hard hours. But, I’ve got to bring home the bacon so what else can I do? I’ll want to expand on this particular subject - the price a body pays – in a future entry and link it from this point in the video.

You can’t please everyone all of the time

Expand on the physical problems with stress

But, to get back to what I was saying, you know, we’re usually stuck between a rock and a hard place in this profession. As Janice Haywood puts it in her blog about running an English academy, “Business by Janice,” (no longer active on Jan. 4, 2011) it’s “like juggling with 10 different balls.” If you’re sensitive to it, you can see just about everyone around you is stressed, so why should we teachers be any different? The only difference is how we or our bodies react to it.

Now, what inspired this video-blog entry in the first place is something Francisco Vazquez from Andalucia wrote on Janice’s blog about teaching English to kids. He said that some of the 6 and 7 year-olds attending the academy that he directs were going to be tested on the verb “to be” in their school and since the parents had requested it, he had to teach them that in order to help them pass. So, he sounded a bit frustrated about it when he wrote: “Naturally, what went through my mind was: What good is there in teaching a 6 year old ‘I am’ ‘You are’ He is’ in isolation etc… ? And, how am I going to do this while making it fun and memorable and, most importantly, relevant to them?” Francisco sounds a little frustrated when he wonders what 6-year old children would actually learn from something like this and why their “qualified” teacher at school would try to teach them something as difficult for 6-year-old children to actually learn as that. Finally, he says that he thinks that English teachers would benefit from receiving more training on teaching children, especially because so few of the teachers that he interviews actually have any real experience doing it.

So, from the point of view of the topic of this article: “stress,” you can see from this example that there are all sorts of conflicts going on that will produce it in varying degrees depending on the teacher. To begin with, no matter what else happens, as teachers we are expected to get our students to progress, but we can’t even always be sure of our own profession’s materials, techniques and methodologies (do students progress because of us or in spite of us?), and we don’t always get the rationally organized institutional support you might expect if you haven’t yet worked as an English teacher. In my experience, for example, I’ve had to get most of my own materials at every school I’ve ever worked at.

Another article from The Telegraph that Troy mentioned in the same thread said that Germany was considering throwing out the entire TEFL program for children under 11 because their studies showed that children who started studying English earlier showed no significant advantage over children starting afterwards. Imagine that! One thing’s for sure, two or three hours of English a week with the attention span that a group of 6 year-olds has is probably not good enough, especially with long holidays and sick days, and the fact that control problems tend to burn up so much of your teaching time, and so on. These groups will usually have lots of other screwy characteristics too such as mixed abilities and levels. And, of course, pulling out a copy of Murphy’s English Grammar in Use probably wouldn’t help much either.

All rationality, or irrationality, aside, as we work, whether we like it or not, everyone around us will interfere with what’s already a complicated job. In Francisco’s case, the parents are pressuring the academy to change their approach to support the school’s teacher and the teachers will feel pressured by both the director and the parents.
As an experienced teacher, I know that teaching the verb “to be” in isolation to 6-year-olds won’t likely yield good results and it will probably create control problems in the classroom to boot because it’ll probably be boring and incomprehensible for the children.

In other words, I think there’s an appropriate time to teach everything and you just can’t, for example, toilet train a child at the age of 3 months. Knowing this at the very outset means that I will probably lose all enthusiasm and motivation for the lessons myself, making it all the harder for me to motivate the students. If there’s a sure-fire way to kill a lesson yourself, it’s to start out by knocking it, or even getting bored by it yourself; if there’s a sure-fire way to get stressed, it’s to get paid to do something you know is plain irrational and will ultimately be ineffective. What a waste of time and energy!

In my experience, so much of what I hear and see that actually works in classes depends on our relationship with the particular group of students and on our intuition and improvisation, or rather our ability to adapt to situations and opportunities that present themselves throughout the class in “real time”, that I actually tend to resent any intrusion from outsiders: parents, human resources people, directors of studies, and so on. It’s also hell when some schools force you to teach using their own weak textbooks when you know you have some things that’ll work a lot better. Maybe, the students in the groups are against it. It’s happened to me, for example, when a company forced me to teach Market Leader to a group which openly rebelled and wanted to talk about Operation Triumph instead, for example.

Also, what gets me is how much stock we put in degrees and certificates when we all know people who have got one, or two, but who can’t actually do the job. It’s unbelievable, but I know a few “qualified” English teachers, for example, who haven’t ever taught their own children English. I also know families whose parents have degrees in education but whose children drop out of school. I mean, I think you’re better off with a degree than without, but the work doesn’t stop there.
On the other hand, a lot of people expect teachers to be some sort of magician, even at 9 euros an hour. I know one elementary school teacher who is about 25 years old, and a parent referred to her as an “eminencia”. Talk about putting her on a pedestal! (“eminencia” means a “leading teacher” in Spanish. In this case, she’s a good teacher, but it’s not true.). Besides teaching half a dozen other subjects, she’s also got to teach the English classes and she hasn’t even finished her 4th year in the official school of languages yet. Believe it or not, she’s a little stressed that a certain native speaker in her class might point out her mis-pronunciations, and frankly, I’ve known a few Spanish English teachers who don’t pronounce perfectly, but who manage to get students to learn English just the same.

Well, anyway, I don’t teach children any longer, I just teach in-company classes, but I still have stress problems there mostly due to differences in their levels and wants. Also, the spotty attendance of students in groups tends to be really irregular making it more difficult to be “dynamic” or to generate a sense of “continuity” and “growth” in the class. I’ll talk about this more in a future entry.

Expand on these problems teaching in-companies

Of course, the main problem I have is that despite my 16 or 17 years of experience, almost no student of mine will agree with me to do some homework every week. But, the ones who do it, progress a lot faster. In fact, I think the main difference between advanced students and the others is the fact that advanced students do usually do something at home, and so it would seem, they do advance in spite of us. HELPING People. I’d like to talk about this some more also in a future entry because I think it’s so important.

I'm Losing Students - Next blog entry

March 3, 2009: A video blog entry on Youtube: In this video I answer a teacher's question. He talks about a problem he had with a class and a boss and asks what I would do in a similar situation. Basically, his boss wants him to teach using the book, but the students prefer his materials off the internet.

I'm losing students - The text

Hey, Steven I'm a ESL teacher in Los Angeles, I teach ESL to Japanese businessmen. And right now I'm having a bit of trouble, I was hoping to get your advice. Well, first of all the students don't want to be there. But, they are required to go by their company. (not good). Second, in the beginning when I first started at this school, I brought in articles and interesting stories from the internet, the students liked it a lot, and they were very interested. My boss didn't like that at all, and told me to stop bringing in other materials, stop entertaining them and just teach the BOOK. And now that I have done that, followed the BOOK. I have lost 65% of all my students and my paycheck!! What would you suggest? Thanks Rich.

I would say, think about it long and hard and do what you think is right because it’ll probably turn out better in the end. Whether it turns out for better or worse, you’ll learn something important. What have you learned from doing things your boss’s way? Probably that he won’t stand by you if and when things go wrong even if it was him who messed things up in the first place; also, that you can’t be too hard on your students unless they ask you to do so, and usually not even then. If your students were engaged and you had them going, and you suddenly changed to something they didn’t like, it doesn’t sound too good all around. Besides the obvious part that they’re otherwise de-motivated, your boss de-authorized you, or took away whatever “authority” you had, possibly making your students lose whatever respect they had for you.

As I said in my video, we’re in the people business and working with people can get a little complicated. One of the biggest problems you can have is a nag of a boss telling you what to do. I mean this is a cliché. Watch any TV series with any type of professional such as doctors, policemen, lawyers, etc. and you’ll see people having to defend themselves and their decisions from bosses who have their own reasons for doing things. Maybe your boss guaranteed everyone would have to follow his textbook in his sales pitch, I don’t know.

Basically, I think you have to try to find the job and boss that will support what you want to do in your classes. It takes all kinds to make the world go round and there are plenty of teachers who would just love to not have to prepare anything regardless of what the students think of it. There are also bosses who leave it all to their teachers and that's the kind I'd go for.

Regarding this particular case, people who play sports know that you win some and you lose some, so just wash your hands of it and move on to your next job is all I can say. What you can't do is just sit on the fence and expect to get somewhere. If you want to play the game, you'll have to learn how to move on after your losses.