Thursday, September 14, 2006

Hey Kids, I’m A Groovy Teacher.



Secretly I always thought to myself that, should I ever become a teacher, I would be a trendy one.

You know - the one the kids thought was cool, wore shades to class, knew more about music than they did and threw text books out of the window saying “Rubbish. We’ll do it my way”.

However, it is apparent that that if you are a) older than them and b) a teacher you’re already irredeemably uncool in their eyes.

Why? I don’t have leather patches on my elbows. I don’t have a slightly suspect tache. I don’t listen to Chris Rea. Apart from Road To Hell, obviously, because that’s actually quite good.

My problem at the moment is that I’m running out of fun stuff to do. The emphasis at SHANE is on making the lessons fun for kids. And that’s fair enough; the last thing they want after coming straight from school is more straight-laced instruction.

But I am finding out that paper, scissors, stone, find the pairs and blind man’s bluff really have a shelf life and increasingly the children are beginning to look fed-up.

One girl in particularly has never once smiled in my lesson, and last week responded to the question “Are you happy?” with a flat “No”.

“No?” I said cheerfully, before re-prompting the correct answer “Yes I am happy”.

I thought she’d caught on, so I tried again: “So, are you happy?”

“No” she said.

Don’t know why she looks so miserable. We do play a lot of games in that class.

Still, such is her mood, I suspect I could dress up as a robot clown from the future and spend the lesson shitting out Twixes and Tizer and she still wouldn’t be happy.

Alternatively, in an extension to a previous post on the subject of indoctrinating the Japanese with Midlands dialect, I could always introduce “Supwiyo?” into the classroom. And they could always respond “Note”

Southerners should consult a valid copy of Phoenix Nights for translation.

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