Recently I read an article at JAMIEKEDDIEDOTCOM that a teacher lost his job because of one of Jamie's lesson plan. Basically, the activity involved using Google to investigate frequency of collocation pairs. The teacher was fired because his boss did not agree with that. Ok..here we go. How can we be teachers, I mean, English Teachers if we cannot use all the tools around us to make a class a little bit more interesting than usual? How come? I've seen this before. There was a teacher in a school were I used to teach (the same one where all the innovative projects were declined), who was fired because his classes were very noisy, consequence of the students' excitement...so, if students like it, it means that it is wrong? If students don't like it, the teacher is also fired...so, what do we have to do?
TTC (Teacher Training Course), Workshops, Teachers' meetings, all kinds of training we participate, for what? If we cannot use it, why bothering going to those training courses? Do you know why I had the urge to write about this? Because here in Brazil, specifically in my city, Recife, most of the schools here are like that...they want you to teach, but not to be very innovative, because it may disturb some of the "school authorities", or it is not the school's teaching philosophy, and you know what? It sucks! I keep motivating myself by using twitter, following teachers around the world, visiting websites, blogs and also going to teacher training meetings because I hope, I said I hope someday this will be over, and we will teach using our creativity to improve our way of teaching.
I wish we can reflect abou what happened to that teacher, and I also would like you to have a say and tell me what you think.
See you.
Hey Mario
ReplyDeleteI agree with you - its sucks!
But (as you know) it's still no reason to give in and stop with the professional development.
It's very important for people like me who go around presenting ideas to remember about situations like these. I always wonder if participants at talks and workshops that I give have access to the technology that is necessary to replicate the activities that I demonstrate. Or if they are obliged to stick to a course book. Or if they are appropriate, etc. But rarely do I ever consider that they may not be permitted to use those activities in their schools!
Thanks Jamie, I really appreciated your comment...
ReplyDeleteI know It's not the way we would like it to be, but we have to keep improving our teaching skills and discussing those situations with our co-workers, in order to find a reasonable solution to all these annoying situations.
Take care!