But teacher, I’m not learning anything! (Well, try doing your homework then)

Part IV on my Reflections of 10 years of Teaching: How students annoy us

If you missed parts I, II and III, you can easily find them on the right of this page, from April, May and July.

What started out as a monthly series of ‘this time 10 years ago’ teaching reflections has hit a lengthy hiatus – at least I’m consistently optimistic even if I can’t deliver on my promises. Forgive me – I’ve been busy.

But this has turned out to me one of my most pondered-over, drawn-out posts. I started writing this almost 3 months ago. I wrote a draft and put it aside, to be polished up a day or two later. But then I remembered one or two more ideas and then put off adding them for a week or two. And then I thought of more…and more…and then it started to get out of control and I could barely stop myself. I’ve probably updated this, re-ordered some of the points, added a few, deleted a couple…I don’t know, about 9-10 times now.

I’d make a lousy journalist – I’m undisciplined, can’t keep to deadlines – even self-imposed ones as they are now – and I waffle. There’s no way I can keep to a word count.

This is far from polished, by the way. It may be one of my least-polished posts. But if I don’t quit now and just publish the damn thing, it will never get done.

Anyway, I’ve got plenty to say so let’s get cracking.

This time 10 years ago, I had just finished my 1^st few months full-time teaching in Lviv. After the helter skelter fun of summer school, ‘proper’ teaching felt a lot less fun, though I was certainly enjoying it. But, very quickly, something started happening bit by bit: students were starting to get to me. Not all of them, but the honeymoon period was starting to wear off. In summer schools, you teach a group of kids for a week, two maximum before they move on, with new ones coming in. I’ve already gone into depth regarding the emotional turmoil that this provokes, but one of the beauties of those short and sweet periods of teaching is that students barely have a chance to annoy you before they’re sent packing back to Spain, Italy, Turkey or wherever. Now I was finding that there were no more of these 2 week honeymoon periods: I was stuck with some of these students for the long-term.

I’ve never suffered fools gladly, and over the past few years, my threshold for idiocy, tomfoolery and bullshit has rapidly evaporated. I go into every classroom full of beans – sometimes in more than one sense of the word – but it doesn’t take much to set me off. There are some students that I want to strangle every now and then.

In part II of my reflections on who becomes an English teacher and why, I referenced Jobs Confidential, the secrets of various professions. When I first shared this article and did an activity with an adult business class a few years ago, they asked me to share some of the inside ‘secrets’ of the English teacher’s world. I offered them up a few inchoate thoughts off the top of my head. But then one of them asked me this:

‘Do students ever do things that annoy you?’

Woah…! Do they? Do they, f***! More like, do students not do things that annoy you?

After a 5-minute diatribe, half the class was laughing hysterically and the other half sat there a bit shell-shocked. They’d just opened a whopping can of worms.

Do all teachers feel like this?, they asked.

I don’t know, I answered. Let me ask a few.

So I did. What follows are a selection of things that annoy teachers, though most of the things below are from my head. I’ve intermingled them, so there’s no way of knowing what comes from whom, though I may mention if something only slightly bugs me, as opposed to the full-blown bugbears.

I’ve got three aims here:

1 to entertain and amuse fellow colleagues and other teachers and to see what they think, and perhaps some will find solace in what I’m saying – am I on the right track here? Or am I just being my usual curmudgeonly, cranky self? Alright, don’t answer that 2^nd question.

2 to shed some light to my non-teaching friends and perhaps enlighten you on some of the more inane things that go on in the classroom.

3 to help all students – past and present – become better learners. Though I may sound a bit condescending and too irreverent at times, I hope this can at least be instructive and informative to help you avoid being a bad learner. And annoying.

I should point out that this list applies almost entirely to adult students. Of course kids do a lot to irritate us, but hell, they’re kids after all. If they didn’t annoy us, there would be something wrong with them. I won’t get into petulant teenagers and 8 year-olds trying to clobber each other or stab their classmates with safety scissors – those types of things are more amusing than annoying.

In no particular order:

1 The late, mid and early arrivals: every teacher should account for late arrivals, but when they show up 30 minutes late and expect you to stop and explain everything they’ve missed…or they leave to make a phone call, come back 5 minutes later and want to pick up where you left off when they left…or they leave their [speaking] partner high and dry…or you’ve set up your final major activity of the class and then someone says they have to leave early, screwing everything up…and they demand you explain the homework in detail while the rest of the class wants to get on with things…

Actually, this is no laughing matter: I failed my external Delta-observed final lesson in part because of a student like this – right in the middle of me giving instructions for a crucial activity, he got up, came over to me, grabbed me forcefully by the arm and demanded to know what I thought of Obama and what the homework was. He was so insistent that he frazzled me to the point where the external observer said I ‘didn’t handle the situation as well as I should have’. What was I to do? The guy was a weak elementary student insisting on a detailed breakdown of Obama’s strengths and weaknesses – which was completely unrelated to what I was attempting to teach – while I was trying to give instructions to an activity, which the students then subsequently screwed up and then I failed the lesson. And no, I’m not bitter Volodomyr, I will find you, you smelly swine!

2 Speaking of which, not just smelly BO or bad breath students but those with overpowering perfume or cologne. But I guess this isn’t just a student thing.

3 How many times have I banged on about the A/C or opening and closing windows? I swear, if there is one thing that will drive me out of my current job, it’s the oppressive heat in the classrooms every month of the year. I just can’t teach when it’s like a sauna and in some classrooms it is. Yet there are always students who insist that they’re cold and don’t want the A/C on (I’m not a fan of it either - pun intended - but what other choice do we have? Sweat to death?) or they complain about the windows open. I just can’t teach in the heat and my brain starts to fry.

But what really gets my back up are the inconsiderate ones who just stand up and turn off the A/C or close the windows without asking anyone else. Because plenty of students are well aware of the fact that we learn better in a colder environment, that our brains start to shut down when it’s sticky and stuffy…and plenty know better than to think that A/Cs and open windows and drafts will make them ill.

4. The dopey students who just sit there, helpless, gormless, staring at you, not talking or participating. The deadwood students.

Or you can call them the osmosis students: they figure just by turning up and sitting there they’ll absorb something, without putting in the least bit of effort.

Or the magic pill students: feed me the magic pill, teacher, with all English knowledge on it!

Or the demanding students who want you to translate everything and give dictionary-precise definitions, especially vocabulary. Or those who want intricate explanations of grammar rules (always best to explain things with collocations or in context; the more brain power you use in trying to understand something, the more likely you are to remember it).

Or those who demand that words have an exact opposite and want to know exactly what they are. It isn’t always that easy – what’s the opposite of ‘light’, I often ask students. They always answer ‘dark’. But then I try to lift a desk and struggle and get them to say ‘heavy’ and they usually realise that it all depends on context.

4a. Then are those who give up easily, don’t want to work hard or use their brains or any critical thinking skills. They want the teacher to explain everything and hand everything over on a plate. Or they immediately turn to their phones and look up any new word they see, not even bothering to listen to the teacher’s explanations. They make little effort to analyse anything and work things out rules themselves. I don’t want to say they’re lazy – we’re all lazy to some extent and language teachers often make the worst language students. Sometimes we’re just as bad as they are. Hypocrites, we are!

5 Students who don’t like bad language: get over it, it’s real English! So I swear every now and then – what, do you not listen to music or watch films or TV series in English? You hear this shit in real life, what the fuck’s wrong with it in the classroom?

(by the way, in my experience, there is a VERY strong correlation between students who are good language learners and those who appreciate profanity and slang)

5a Uptight students with no sense of humour or who get offended by sarcasm.

6 Getting annoyed at ‘stupid’ grammar rules; for example articles, prepositions, do and don’t. Um, sorry, but I didn’t invent these for fun. If you want to speak properly, you’ve got to learn them, there’s no two ways about it. As a colleague of mine once said, articles aren’t sexy, but they’re fairly important. 

Would that it were so easy, right?

(Perhaps one could argue that you can get by perfectly fine without knowing how to use the definite and indefinite article 100% properly – will it ever lead to a communication breakdown? In all likelihood, no, but as a humorous aside, I usually give my students two sets of examples to illustrate the dramatic differences articles can have for meaning:

Take a piss v take the piss; and buy a farm v buy the farm

6a The student who waits after class and then asks a question like this: ‘can you explain the rules for using articles to me?’ Yes, I can, gladly, no problem, especially in the 2 MEASLY MINUTES THAT I HAVE!

7 Students who need to take an exam to emigrate or study abroad – IELTS or TOEFL, for example – and need a certain score and ask you if they can jump a level because they need to get to a higher level as soon as possible…I mean, I can barely even comment on the absurdity of this.

There are also students who want to move to a higher level, claiming that their current one is ‘too easy’, yet they rarely demonstrate this. In reality, they know the grammar well but they don’t always prove that they can use it. They sit there rushing through tasks and then expect to move up. Knowing grammar rules and recognising vocabulary passively is great, but actually using it?

8 Not writing things down – especially new vocabulary or error corrections, or listening to good advice – trust me, all the advice I give is good!

And then are the students who don’t pay attention or listen to vocabulary explanations and then ask you 5 minutes later ‘what does grouchy mean?’

Or the ones who interrupt you in the middle of your explanations or as you’re talking. Half the time, these are the types of students who completely lack any self-awareness and exist in their own little bubbles.

It’s not rocket science when it comes to learning from mistakes – the students who don’t take note of their errors continue to make the same ones. If I notice this, I don’t bother to correct their mistakes anymore. If I see you making careful notes of things and taking good advice, I WILL pay more attention to you. I get very cranky when I’m doing error correction and a particular student who made that particular error has switched off and is playing with his/her phone or staring out the window with nary a care in the world.

9 Translating every new word they see, as well as collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms and then getting annoyed if they don’t understand the figurative meaning.

This goes hand in hand in not listening and trusting in teachers. Students routinely try to understand and translate every component of a collocation or idiom.

Or they ask ‘why do we need to know this word/phrase, is it useful?’ Well, yes, if you want to actually improve your English. ‘Teacher, why can’t I just say ‘very important’? Why must I use ‘vitally important’ or ‘absolutely vital’?’ Because collocations are critically important, that’s why!

Collocations like these, as well as ‘brutally honest’ and ‘utterly ridiculous’…forget translating brutally and utterly, just learn the damn collocation as it is and use it.

Same with phrasal or multi-word verbs. There are easy ones like ‘get up’ and ‘take off’. But then are tricky, illogical ones like ‘go off’ (as in food, an alarm clock, or to go off a person) and then there are the bigger ones like ‘get through to’ and ‘get away with’ which cause all sorts of confusion. Good learners appreciate how phrasal verbs work and see them almost as one word, whereas the bad ones insist on translating each word…and then get annoyed when they don’t understand the figurative meaning.

This goes along with ‘stupid’ grammar rules.

Sorry, I didn’t invent phrasal verbs.

10 Arguing over word origins – not a big problem, but it crops up every now and then. I went through a period last year where students insisted that ‘Maidan’ was exclusively a Ukrainian word, when it actually comes from Hindu/Urdu/Persian.

11 Asking questions – either grammar, vocabulary or content-related – that are WAY off topic and not in any way, shape or form related to the lesson topic and then getting irritated if you don’t know the answer. I remember the class that was incredulous when I didn’t know the opposite of ‘deciduous’ tree, even though it was a question I was asked during the break, totally off-topic. Look, our job is to be prepared for what we have to teach. I’ll try to answer off-topic questions, but don’t get pissy if we don’t know it.

This tends to happen more often with higher level classes. I had a student who asked me what ‘bazinga’ meant, and I had no idea. Turns out it’s from a character in the ‘Big Bang Theory’, which I’ve never seen. But she was apoplectic that I didn’t know it. How the hell would I (or should I)?

One big difference between teaching teenagers and adults: teenagers will watch TV shows and films and pick up slang and then ask you about it. If you don’t know it, they get really excited and then teach it to you. And they love that there is something they know that you don’t, and it’s so endearing. But some adults get downright annoyed.

11a Some teachers don’t like students who talk a lot and try to dominate, but I am a bit more mixed about this. Often these students are just stronger and more confident and I tend to appreciate the more active speakers as long as they stay on topic and don’t ramble. The ones that bug me are those who repeatedly interrupt me or other students and make little coherent sense, going off on meaningless tangents. Unlike my meaningful tangents!

12 Complaining about teachers not having ‘proper’ pronunciation, or RP (Received Pronunciation) or in layman’s terms, ‘BBC English’. Sorry, but most of the world doesn’t speak like that. That’s why good coursebooks feature a range of accents in listening tasks. The English-speaking world doesn’t speak like a BBC presenter.

‘But teacher, you have an American accent!’ What should I do, speak in a Cockney one?

(Funnily enough, when I was teaching in New Hampshire – in the USA – most of my students would comment on my ‘British’ accent. I mean, really, do I have anything remotely like a British accent? I’ve been mistaken for a Canadian many times – that riles me up. I suppose in the classroom I do enunciate my ‘T’s a bit more and I do pronounce words like glacier, controversy and tomato the British way, but still.)

13 The rapid-fire, minimum-comment round:

a. ‘My hobby is sleeping’

b. ‘Can you teach us some idioms and proverbs?’

c. ‘It depends on the situation.’ (with no follow-up)

d. ‘I’ve never thought about that’…followed by silence

e. when discussing hypothetical situations (or conditionals) as in ‘what would you do if you found $1 million?’ and then students say, ‘I don’t know, it’s never happened to me’…

followed by silence

f. ‘I don’t have time to do my homework and study outside of class but/and I’m not seeing any progress’

g. ‘Why should I do writing homework, it’s not useful or interesting’

h. plagiarizing essays or using Google translate

i. using phones in class (for phone calls or texting or checking Facebook)

j. ill students, especially when they’re hacking and coughing and spreading TB

k. insisting on nothing but grammar and showing no interest in vocabulary or functional language

l. not following instructions

m. asking for something specific and then not showing up to class when you’ve planned something specifically for them (this happens more in business or specialty classes, where someone may want something on the pharmaceutical industry or property law)

n. the ‘know-it-all’, who most of the time actually doesn’t

o. Teacher: ‘Do you like going to the cinema?’ Student: ‘Of course!’

p. Teacher: ‘Hello, everyone, how are you?’ Student(s): silence

q. sighers and groaners

14a Wanting and expecting to understand 100% of reading or listening texts. This is connected to point L above, when students don’t listen to instructions and don’t do the actual task you’re asking them to do. They start translating every new word they see in a text. They freak out in the first few seconds of a listening task if they don’t understand every single word immediately.

Look, trust us. Teachers have a reason for what we do. If you understand everything you hear and read immediately, then you’re not actually learning anything or developing your skills. Speaking of which…

14b Thinking that learning a language is just grammar and vocabulary. The four skills – reading, listening, writing and speaking – are just as much, if not more, a crucial part of learning a language. Students don’t think they need to develop their skills. Grammar homework is important but so is developing your skills and having realistic expectations. My Russian language skills stink, but I know how to scan or listen for key information to accomplish what I need to.

15 Rushing through a speaking task and then saying ‘finished!’ or ‘we’re ready.’ Ready for what? To not develop your speaking? To develop your speaking you’ve got to speak, speak and speak. Make the teacher interrupt you to tell you to stop. Don’t rush through the questions answering yes, yes, maybe, no and then waiting for the next task. The students who do this are usually the ones with the least-developed fluency. Wanna develop your fluency? Answer why to every question. The ones who rush through tasks are more often than not the ones who complain that they don’t see much progress. (along with those who never do homework)

A: Do you like vegetables?

B: Yes

A: WHY?!

B: Uh, because…

A: Have you ever shoplifted?

B: No.

A: WHY THE HELL NOT YOU LYING SHIT?!

B: Um, well…

16 Students who only talk to you, not with their classmates or partners, or who want you to be their partners or don’t even listen to other students. Part of good conversational ability is being good, active listeners and it’s amazing how many students fail to listen to or converse with other students and who sit there looking at me waiting for my next story.

17 Demanding native speakers and insisting that native speakers are better teachers. This is a topic for a future post, and I’ve already dealt with how I severely dislike the term ‘native speaker’.

18 Doing the book ahead of time and attempting to outsmart you. It’s so much fun to catch them out by jumping ahead or doing something different. Then they sometimes complain that it’s ‘not fair!’. Tough. Life ain’t fair.

19 Correcting you and insisting they are right. Sometimes it’s pronunciation - Parizh, Einshtein; often or offen; other times factual information that may be culturally different – 6 or 7 continents in the world?; 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 or more American states; things like Dutch v Deutsch when they fail to see a difference and think you’re wrong

They also see things on TV, films or in adverts and insist that it’s accurate and right. Or they insist that they know more about British or American culture based on watching films or the trip their friends took to America 5 years ago. ‘My friend spent a week in California and said all Americans are fat and eat nothing but hot dogs and are totally fake and plastic.’

Or the student a few weeks ago who argued with me, saying that all health care in America is 100% free to anyone who wants anything and you’ll never have to pay for a thing and then gave me the example of her friend (a Ukrainian on holiday) who had surgery for free.

Some students claim to be an authority on everything.

There are lots of lazy generalisations and inaccurate stereotypes floating around and many of them find their way into our classrooms. I roll my eyes at these, but they do bother me. As do…

20 Homophobia, racism, sexism…but these certainly aren’t confined to the classroom.

21 Saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when it’s clear they mean ‘I’. Or they insist ‘yes, we understand’ but as you dig deeper and ask probing questions (or, concept check questions in the lingo) it’s clear that they don’t. And then they get irritated that you made them look bad.

And then they sometimes say ‘I disagree’ to a vocabulary explanation and don’t accept your explanation, or they really insist that they understand when it’s clear they don’t.

Or they disagree to a factual statement that really isn’t disagreeable. For example ‘Why do you think some people actually enjoying arguing?’ ‘I disagree. People don’t like arguing.’

22 A student who asks you for private lessons and then when you answer no, they insist. Look, if I say no, it means no. That’s it. Some really insist and when I tell them how busy I am and how my contract forbids it anyway, they try to find any small time slot in my hectic schedule, even deigning to suggest times like Sunday mornings. When I tell some of them that I am busy and often only have 1 free day (a Sunday) a week and they respond with something like ‘okay, Sunday is fine for me!’ it raises my hackles and I want to lash out and say ‘no you muppet, I’m not saying that Sunday is my only free day because I want to fill it by giving lessons to you, I’m saying this to emphasise that I damn well need at least one full free day off, not teaching!’

23 I’ve saved the worst and most egregious annoyance for last. These are the students I like to call the ‘lottery’ losers, and I must confess that I take this idea from my good pal Mark, who taught for many, many years and said that this was by far the most irritating thing teachers encounter in the classroom.

Learning a language in a group setting means that you have to go with the flow to a certain extent. There can be anywhere from 1-15 students in the classroom. Everyone had different needs and interests and our job is to make sure everyone is happy. Compromise is an inevitable part of life, whether in love, politics or language learning. But there are students who demand you attend to their needs, who demand attention, who want everything centered around them, who won’t do things that don’t interest them, who are uncooperative and unruly and generally insolent when they feel forced to do something that they don’t want to.

In short, and to put it diplomatically, there are students who would probably be better off studying on their own, privately.

But you know what? The reality is, studying in a group is like a lottery: you win some, you lose some. You might get a good group, you might get a lousy one. It’s the luck of the draw.

I’m also indebted to Mark for another example along these lines, which we’ll call the Chinese buffet theory. When one student at his school complained to the director that not all of his needs were being met and that he wanted everything tailored to meet his specific desires, the director responded thus:

‘It’s not a fucking Chinese buffet: you can’t just come in and take what you want and eat it and leave what you don’t.’

Brilliant.

In closing

A good language learner:

* is open to everything and anything

* does their homework

* tries to work out the meaning of words in context

* tries to work out grammar rules on their own

* appreciates the importance of vocabulary and functional language

* is curious

* isn’t afraid of mistaking mistakes

* is patient

* has realistic expectations (we can’t expect to be able to use all the vocabulary we learn; most of it will be passive and you’ll activate what you need, when you need it)

* spends time outside of class developing their skills – reading, listening and not expecting to understand 100% of every text

* forces the teacher to interrupt them (notice I didn’t say anything about ‘dominating’ students – good for them! When a student dominates, I’d like to think it forces other students to work that much harder)

* pays attention to collocations as they’re used in context

* revises the vocabulary they’ve learnt and puts it into a personalized context

* writes things down (but not everything)

* smiles and tries

* makes an effort
Learning is done by you, not to you.

And a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.