The end of this World Cup will be bittersweet for me. Part of me will be sad at the conclusion of the world's greatest competition, while part of me will be relieved that I won't be compelled to stay up until ungodly hours of the night anymore. With a packed schedule over the next four weeks, I need to be more energetic than it's possible to be after a broken four-hour sleep. Also, my Championship Manager exploits have come to a head, it seems. Having guided Eastbourne Borough to a respectable 13th in the Premier League, I went on a foreign spending spree, in an attempt to take the club 'to the next level'. However, after about three painstaking close-season hours tinkering with the squad, and a successful tour of Turkey, my laptop decided to be a wanker, and froze. Three hours down the drain, and I don't really feel bothered about taking it all up again. Besides, after eight seasons, I think I've taken the club as far as it can go; with my guitar gathering dust, several songs unfinished, and my Korean linguistic skills still in the 'shamefully ignorant' stage, maybe it's for the best that I'm eschewing such an idle distraction. I could just load from the previous saved date, but no, I think that would be just on the cusp of the 'Get a life' realm.
English camps loom large on the horizon, and I would be looking forward to them - except that my two-week camp is making me do boring, rigid 'key expression' lesson plans, which will be pretty much the same as the remedial English they learn from elementary textbooks. The ethos in public schools is 'don't leave anyone behind', so the lessons tend to be excruciatingly boring for the kids who actually have a decent level of English, who go to hagwons and English camps. I generally have more behavioural problems with my gifted kids than I do from the low-level ones. Coming from public schools in rural Wexford, where intelligent, thoughtful students were forced to share classrooms with scores of inbred, knuckle-dragging morons, I have something of a problem with this mixed-level, go-slow policy. My (shamelessly elitist/pragmatic) attitude is; 'Encourage, challenge and stimulate the kids who actually want to learn'. Learning a foreign language is an incredibly difficult individual undertaking, and a child will only learn as much as he/she consciously puts into it. They won't just magically pick it up from sitting in a classroom listening to a foreign teacher. Some kids will just point-blank refuse to participate in the class, because they (a) have no interest, and/or (b) are simply too dumb. I don't generally waste too much time on these kids. If it was a private school, it'd be a different story, because the parents are paying the wages, and there's a real reason for the kids to be there... but these kids are in my classroom because there's nowhere else to put them. If I can keep the dum-dums from disrupting the lesson, and I'm actually teaching rather than babysitting, mission accomplished.
Back to the point, it seems like the English Camp classes will even be mixed from 4th to 6th grades, where the difference in levels in the same class will be ridiculous. It's a shame, because English Camps are a great opportunity for gifted kids to challenge themselves, develop and practice what they know in a creative, open setting - not to be hand-walked through a regimental series of mundane, facile activities.
Just finished teaching my 5th graders. We had a vocabulary game, with the class divided into four teams, and I'm glad to say everyone participated, had fun, and seemed to grasp the grammatical concept behind it all. I asked the kids to make up their own English team names, and among the predictable ones like 'The Tigers', 'The Smartest' and 'Manchester', the 'troublesome' boys chose that inspiring moniker; 'The Republic of Ireland'. And guess what? They won by a point!
P.S. I believe in Paul the Octopus.
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