Teaching the Teachers: Talent and Techology (NOT!)

As of Monday I've been on the "Teach the Teachers" program. These are elementary school instructors (all but one is a woman, for reasons I've covered elsewhere on the blog). And they are achingly sincere in their desire to learn English.

It must be a very difficult thing to be an L2 learner and be teaching that language as an L2 instructor. My mind boggles, anyway. So, they sign up for our "camp" to improve their skills. Perhaps what is most amazing is how skilled they are. I won't say that there aren't some amazingly difficult accents among them, but they are all smart, tenacious, and have vocabularies that would make many native English speakers quail (if English speakers didn't think that meant "be a bird" - or, more likely, didn't understand it at all). I only have them for 10 days, so each day I'm giving them an in-class writing assignment and taking it home to grade. Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't also going home and dealing with the sh*tty technology that I'm forced to use in my other class.

My other class is "Listening and Dictation" which really means "listening and then writing down some answers to questions about the listening." And this should be the easiest class ever. If it works right, the students just listen and then write.. the instructor is really just a carbon-based on-off switch for the sound files. There's more to it that that of course - we toss in cultural info, etymology, idioms, whatever we can to bring some kind of relevance to the content of the sound files. But still.. pretty automatic.

Except that they provided us with tapes and rooms without tape players. So, I noted the computers and began digitizing the tapes and making CDs..

It was with much amusement I got out of my writing class - which had a thoroughly killer teacher's multimedia station I really didn't need - and into my dictation class.

Which had a blackboard.

Wha?

So I switched classes with another instructor and got the CD thing working. The second day there was no room change and I had to sock-puppet the dialogues (and in many cases make them up, since there are no transcripts in the teacher's manual) and generally make entertaining shit up as I went along. Thankfully, a discussion with an INCREDIBLY helpful staff member seems to have resulted in a room change.

Still, this means that every night I am rushing home and digitizing the next day's tapes.

Tapes may have been cutting edge once, but they are now shit. No random access to files or locations --- that whole "hit rewind and pray you stop at the right point" sucks. Then there's the issue that rewinding takes time and.. well, tapes suck....

So every night I digitize about 40 minutes of tape into tracks. Time that really should be used on drinking grading.

It is possible that BPU is not completely cutting edge....