Surprise, it's me. How are you? Today, I'm going to teach you, by request from you, the
viewers out there in England, some classroom language or expressions or vocabulary. Maybe
you are planning to study English in a different country, or maybe you are going to study English
in your own country, and the classroom is an all-English environment. Or if you're lucky
enough to come to a foreign country and study English in an English-speaking country, maybe
you'll want to know basic classroom language. So, the first one that is very important in
the classroom is talking about your grades or your marks. So, you will probably have
an English proficiency test that will test your ability in English, and they will give
you a grade or a mark. Grades and marks are the same thing. The only difference is sometimes
they give you a percentage. For example, you could get 83% on your test, or when I was
in high school, for example, they gave you letter grades, A, B, C, D, E. Now, A is the
best, and it gradually goes down. I cannot tell you specifically where A and B and C
and D start and stop, because every institution and every school is different. Percentages
are easier to figure out, but obviously if you get an A, it's going to be very good.
I'm not too sure if a lot of places go down to E. I don't think they do, so we'll just
take that off. The other thing that they will do sometimes is they'll give you an A+, as
if an A wasn't good enough. An A+ or an A++, I guess an A++ would be 100%, which is extremely
good. So you can get A, B, C, D+, you can also get A, B, C, D+, or minus, which will
look like this, a minus sign. The best thing to do is ask your instructor what the grades
are for that. So the way that you do that is you say, "Teacher," or if you call the
teacher by their first name, "Ronnie," you could say, "What was my grade?" Or you could
say, "What was my mark on the test?" What was my mark or what was my grade on the test?
If you get an F, it means you failed miserably. It's a very bad mark. So maybe F means fail.
That's not right. So you can ask the teacher, "What was my grade?" or "What was my mark?"
The next thing, the thing that everyone hates, are tests or exams. Do you know the difference
between tests and exams? Tests are shorter in length, meaning there's about one or two
papers, and in time, maybe it's an hour or half an hour. It's a short exam if you'd like
to think about it like that. An exam, brutal, is very long. In high school and in elementary
school, we usually have a test. Most language schools will give you a test. If you're taking
something like TOEFL or TOEIC, that's going to be an exam. Exam instills fear of one or
two or three hours of you writing the test. But you can do it. Good luck. So tests or
exams, you're going to want to know what to study for when you have to study for your
test or your exam, and you're going to want to know the date, obviously, of the exam.
It's important to go on the right day and to be a little early, but we'll get to that
later. So as far as the tests or exams go, you want to know what's the material. So you're
going to ask your teacher what's on the test or what's on the exam. This implies what material
you will be tested on. Is it going to be grammar? Is it going to be listening? Is it going to
be making sentences? Is it going to be writing paragraphs? Are you going to have to write
an essay? So it's always good to ask your teacher what's on the test or what's on the
exam. And the date, you can just ask them when is the exam or when is the test. And
probably asking the time is a good, very good thing to ask as well. The next one is important.
If you're in class and all of a sudden you have to go to the toilet. We call this in
English being excused. Being excused means you're leaving some situation and you're going
to be very polite about it. All you have to do, some teachers want you to put your hand
up or just ask them outright. You can say, "Can I please," be polite, "go to the washroom?"
So you can put your hand up and say, "Can I please go to the washroom?" You can also
say, "May I please go to the washroom?" "Can I" is much more natural. "May I" is a little
bit more polite, but as long as you say, "Please," your sentence is 100% polite and correct.
A lot of my students say, "Teacher, I go to bathroom." "Teacher, I go washroom." You
need to say, "I go to the washroom," or, "I go to the bathroom," is the correct beautiful
English phrase of that. And the last one, uh-oh, being late. Maybe you're late for school.
Maybe you missed the bus. Maybe you slept in. In English, we don't say, "I overslept."
I understand what you're telling me, but we don't say that in English. We say, "I slept
in." So maybe you're late. Maybe you slept in. Maybe I missed the bus. Maybe you drank
a lot the last night, and your alarm went off, and you just couldn't wake up. Whatever
happens, happens. I would guarantee that most of the time, the teacher will be very accepting
of you being late once in a while. But if you're late every day, there's a problem.
So the best thing to do is don't lie. Don't tell your teacher that you went to Mars, and
then you had a spaceship, and your spaceship got a flat tire, and then a dog came and ate
your head. Your teacher's not going to appreciate the lie. Maybe the creative storytelling would
be good, but basically, don't lie. Don't just say, "I don't know." What do you mean, "You
don't know?"
The other thing is, if you're absent, which means maybe you weren't in class one day,
again, just tell the teacher the honest truth. Say, "I was sick," or, "I didn't want to come
to school." Be honest. No teacher should get angry at you, or you shouldn't have to feel
uncomfortable if you simply don't want to go to school. That's my opinion.
Now, high schools and language schools are all different. A lot of them will deduct marks,
or will take attendance, and if you have a lot of nights or a lot of absence, this is
not good. Go to school, learn your stuff, have fun, have a good time, and now you can
learn classroom language in English. Ta-ta.