Hello everybody
and once again Covid has managed to rear its ugly head and we are closing from tomorrow the 13th.
Of course, all the kids are absolutely excited by it all.
They see the advantage of not having to get up early in the morning and go to school.
It's dark. It's cold. It's January, so you know, it's nice to stay in bed
and I feel the same; I have to be honest, so in that respect I'm kind of looking forward to it, as well.
I actually said to my class, today, that you know you can do the lesson in bed. I don't care.
I know you're going to be in bed, so don't pretend that you're not.
You've got to be realistic about these things,
but I know a lot of the teachers don't like it, because it really does disrupt their class and their work,
so I've never taught online such a large amount of kids, so I don't know what that's going to be like.
I'm pretty good with social media. I'm pretty good with video,
so already my brain is starting to think about you know maybe I can just video something
and then they can watch that in their own time and playing around with some ideas,
but that's not really what I wanted to talk about, which is a shame because Covid still takes over everything
and it's so annoying. This is 2022.
Anyway, what I did want to talk about was: the idea of not working from a book.
It's my old thing of never teaching English from a book
and I had an incident happen a couple of days ago that I am so happy about
and I really wanted to share with you:
so I have a student and he's not the best in English. He's a really nice kid.
He works hard, but you know, he's still learning and developing his English and he finds it difficult
and we're doing Future Perfect now
and at the age of 12, 13, 14 in the French system they're not supposed to be doing Future Perfect
and I'm doing it with them at the age of 12-13, because my belief is: give them everything and then slowly they will pick things up,
but if you give them English in this very protracted way; so it's simple past for three months and then we go on to past continuous and...
It's boring. It's absolutely boring, so I throw all the twelve verb tenses at the kids from day one
and then we slowly go through them until they get more and more used to what the concept of it is.
They've got twelve months to do this, so by the end of the year, hopefully, they will know the twelve verb forms in English. That's what I am aiming for
so Future Perfect is a great thing to do at the beginning of the year,
because you can start to say things like:
"By the end of this year, I will have done this"
so I get the kids to talk about their goals, their ambitions, what they imagine they're going to be like
and when we were practicing doing this we put sentences on the board and I got all the students - one by one - to give me an example of Future Perfect
and then what this one student, who I say is not the best in English, wrote on the board:
"By the end of the year, my friend will have a good mark in English"
and this is not quite right. This isn't Future Perfect and
I asked him: "What's wrong with this sentence?"
Whoever makes the sentence I always give them the first opportunity to correct that sentence
so I said to my student: "What's wrong with this? How would you put it right?"
and straight away he said to me:
"I'm missing the verb. After "have" we need to have a verb"
and I was so happy and I could see that he was happy, too, because he had managed to understand Future Perfect
and I know, under other circumstances the traditional understanding and belief of teaching English is:
you can't teach young children complex sentence structures like Future Perfect, Future Perfect Continuous
and it's just not true.
Little kids in England can use Future Perfect; there's no reason why teenagers in any other part of the world can't.
I feel a bit validated by that and I know my student feels he has achieved something.
He had the opportunity to be very proud of himself for getting that right.
Yeah. So, now we go online
and that's going to be an interesting opportunity for me to learn even more about teaching in the classroom.
Yeah it's going to be sad, because I actually really enjoy interacting with the students
and a few of them came up to me at the end and said, "It's going to be really sad because we're not going to see you face to face."
That's how I feel, too.
My kids get really annoying sometimes, but I care about them all and I love them all,
so it's going to be going to be a little bit....
Ah Covid! Covid Covid!
Anyway, thank you very much. I'll see you in the next video.