My name is Judy but my students call me Teacher Judy. I can't seem to get them to stop, so I just go with it. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change ...
I teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to adults and I love my job:). I'll back up a little bit to how I got to be an ESL teacher, but we won't tarry here long. A few years ago I lost my job and decided to "embrace that opportunity to change my career direction" (they talked like that at the unemployment office.) A nice woman named Tanya gave me an aptitude test called Discovery. I answered a lot of questions into a computer and the program eventually identified: what I was good at, what my experiences were and what I liked as three separate fields. After analyzing the data, the computer revealed that it was more important for me to make a difference than for me to strictly make money, therefore I should be a teacher (I am not making this up). It concluded I should teach adults English. That was fairly specific, so I did. That was one smart computer. I sit here tapping before you today, the world's happiest, poorest ESL teacher.
It is easy to make a difference teaching English because English is so messed up. For one thing, English letters and sounds don't go together. For example - r e d - h e a d - s a i d - There is no way to tell from the spelling that red /red/, head /hed/, and said /sed/ rhyme. But they do. Students can't reconcile words they have studied with the language they hear and they don't realize how much guessing is involved in English. I have some fast and easy solutions for these problems, so everyone is happy.
The biggest problem is not that English is so tricky, it's that students take it so personally. When they look at tiny little words like t o and g o and can't figure out why they don't sound the same - they feel stupid. Of course they are not stupid - English is Stupid. Students are on some level relieved when I tell them stories about how I get tripped up in English, like last week when my phone wasn't working. My home phone would ring once, then the line would go dead. I could still dial out so I called the repair number and listened to an automated operator list several options "in order to serve you better..." and I punched a series of keys according to her instructions. Finally she wanted to use voice recognition to verify it was actually me and not some crank caller trying to get my line fixed. I heard her say, "To identify yourself, please repeat this phrase - Adele, my voice is my password". Now, the automated operator that searches for phone numbers calls herself Emily so I didn't think it was especially weird that the machine which reports repairs calls herself 'Adele'. So I repeated her phrase, "Adele, my voice is my password" She responded in her annoyingly even tone, "I'm sorry that is not a match". What the f...! Not a match? It is my phone! It is my voice! What more do you want me to do?!!! She said,"Could you try to repeat the phrase again, "At Bell, my voice is my password". Oh brother.
When I repeated that phrase the machine recognized my voice and authorized a service call to take the mouse nest out of the junction box at the end of the driveway.
When communication breaks down for me and I am a native English speaker, I often wonder how my students cope with this crazy language? In my case it might not be all the fault of the language, there is something else I need the serenity to accept, I'm blond.
No comments:
Post a Comment