Teaching advice from halfwits

She’s about 23, low level English, nice looking and absolutely sincere and she’s explaining to me how this teaching business needs to work.

Thing is I’ve got all confused, I’ve allowed myself to fall into the trap of thinking that what people need to do with English is use it to do things: get jobs, go to universities, negotiate contracts, book into hotels, fall in love and so on. But the truth is that apparently they need to be able to perform 12% better in a grammar test than they did in January.

Obviously I ask if an ability to do well in grammar tests is a fundamental part of building a happy and productive life. Perhaps: I suggest some student’s potential night of joy with a beautiful Portuguese girl might fall foul of a failure to use the correct particle in a series of phrasal verbs. Or maybe that step up from group leader to project manager, that will enable the student to buy a flat big enough for the kids she desperately wants to have, will fall through because her third conditional usage is still uncertain.

 But, I’ve missed the point. What truly matters is that the HR department at the Korean car corporation has to be able to prove to the finance department that they should keep paying money to the school that sends me there, and to do that they need numbers. I seem to have missed the fact that percentages are the only way to judge someone’s ability to communicate, call me a brash old traditionalist, but I had been wildly assuming the best method was to talk to them and see how well they can communicate. Doh!

 I must have looked unconvinced, because she felt the need to drive the point home and told me, in Russian, that grammar tests had been the secret of her success in English.

We did the bit where I explained that I have been teaching English to Russians for 16 years and she offered her six weeks of experience as an admin in our third rate Language school and something that happened in a café with a French guy once when she was a kid, and so we came back to the conclusion that numbers are where it’s at.

 I offered to send her numbers, but it transpired I had come across one of those rare Russian women who is profoundly shocked at the notion of making shit up to keep people happy. The popular sentiment that: “truth is good, but happiness is better.” is apparently utterly alien to this sweet and noble woman. I had clearly wronged her with my base impulse to deceive. So much so that she was driven to insist that I provide her with hard copies of the materials I use that she might ensure their suitability for purpose. She is not a teacher, but such certainty must be a sign of understanding no? Of course I consented to send them, so that I might sustain as pleasant a working relationship as I had over the last two years with the seven other girls who had been doing her job before she arrived last month and found her true calling.

I would write more, but there’s surely a brain surgeon performing the critical climax of a desperate operation somewhere, or a pilot trying to land a 737 with only one engine working, god knows what might happen if I don’t get there in time and raise their percentages.