Well, I'm kind of one of those, now.
Smart boards!
Like 'em. Used them in my last job, and now we have them at this job in America.
I believe SMART Board is a trademark, and that there are different kinds, but "smart board" kind of seems to be the general term for these giant tablet computers at the front of the classroom. I hear "interactive white board" also but that seems an oxymoron.
I had to use chalk at a couple of my first jobs. Whoa! Sucky! White boards are a little better, but not much. My shirt sleeves were constantly covered with ink.
We have smart boards at this job, and they're damn useful. Interactive games on ESL websites, lessons and presentations that I can save and easily recycle, an internet connection to instantly look up or clarify facts, Google images and Google translate to help the students understand words. And videos on YouTube, et al.
What could go wrong?
On Fridays after we finish our tests, we usually watch movies. We are urged to stick with PG or PG-13 movies, of course, even though our students are 18 to 25 year old adults, as they are from the Middle East and might be easily offended.
(Yeah, right.)
I was trying to show something on free-streaming service Crackle, a short webseries about a high-school student who becomes a spy. (Of course violence is okay, but nudity is frowned upon.)
It started to stream, and it even said the name of the spy show at the bottom of the screen,
But some stream got crossed somewhere, and it instead showed another show, a scene where the hero beats up another guy in a sleazy bar in Mexico and takes a French chick back to his hotel room ... and she immediately takes off her top.
General hilarity erupted.
I lamely explained my mistake. The students (only 5 of them, we have very small classes) wanted to watch the rest of it, but I turned it off and found something more innocent.
There are stories about guys losing their job here for showing porno to the students, but the stories are vague and change with the teller, gaining "urban myth" status. It would seem one teacher was actually fired for showing the students ads for prostitutes on Craigslist when they asked about them.
But anyway. This happened a couple months ago now, and I still have my job, so it will remain just a wacky story, I guess. The students won't rat on me, because I'm the only teacher who routinely shows violent action movies, and they don't want to have to watch any more Pixar movies or National Geographic documentaries.
Repeated attempts to find the actual video with the naked chick in it have failed. Because it looked like a good movie.
5 comments:
The way to do it is to find your presentation/video FIRST then turn on the EWB which allows you to burn a minute or so while the old style EWB with projector bulbs to warm up.
Or to password your porn folders so that you can't accidentally open them!
TBH I don't use the damned things. I used them a lot in the college (UK 6th form) but found them not to work. So I'd have to prep some non EWB work. I found I was prepping two lessons since the EWB was so frequently broken.
In the end it was fuck it just use the white board and pens. I've never looked back.
Plus due to the budget cuts there are no videos. It's just solid this is the grammar these are the structures. Copy them. Right make me 5 examples of this structure.
Now use irregular verbs! I used to have 480 hours to teach a single level (reading, writing, speaking and listening). Now they give me 45 to do each of those skills.
Agree with Ken regarding the so called smart boards. With a full timetable there is no time to prepare.
Showing films would be so nice but not really allowed here.....
No return to the Gulf Mr TX? Not looking good on the job front for example Aramco are planning to outsource all teaching to outfits such as Kaplan with the plunge in pay that entails, 380 teachers fired from HTC in UAE and new contracts offered on much worse conditions......and so it goes.
Wish you luck in your work there.
Yeah, extremely grim. If Saudi goes broke, that's the last retirement option for English teachers out the window. As well, of course, as further destablizing the Mideast and all that.
Well it looks like my decision to become a maths teacher (I'm still going through the training but will be qualified in May I very nearly gave up the course as I felt I've been through this BEFORE why are you just repackaging it and charging me $2300 for it!?!!).
Was a good one.
Did Bob ever go work for that PMC btw?
An American guy in Saudi once showed his class porn from his phone just to liven the lesson up. Guess what? Long beard miserable Mohammed complained and the guy got canned.
Post a Comment