Daily Dose of English 200
Teaching
Daily Dose of English 200
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about teaching. Teaching. Teaching is something so incredibly important in the world. It is something that everybody experiences in some way. You definitely learn things from teachers and you probably teach things to people at some point. Whether you're teaching something small or you are a teacher who teaches for a living. Our world is full of teaching and learning all the time. It's sort of like reading and writing. A lot of people think about, when they think of reading, they think of like books. But we read and write things every single day. Whether you like it or not, you are a writer and a reader of languages. You write text messages, you read messages, you look at the news, you, I don't know, go to log into whatever you work on and see the work messages. all this reading and writing around, and there's all this teaching and learning around in the world. And so, yeah, I thought I'd just talk a little bit about teaching, my past with teaching, how I see teaching and that sort of thing. I've always sort of had a teaching tendency, you might say. I remember being in middle school and I was pretty good at math. Math was quite easy for me. And it was not easy for a lot of the people around me. A lot of my coworkers, no, that's for work. Coworkers, co-students, classmates, that's what it's called. My other classmates weren't as good at it. And so I would often, if I was sitting next to them, I would often help them. Especially if they were struggling or asked for help, I would usually try, I would help, right? That's the whole point of asking for help is that you could help. And so I would try to help People, especially with math, but occasionally in other things. However, math was the one that is usually the most obvious because people that are good at it, it's usually really easy. And people that are not good at it, it's usually very, very hard for them. So there's like a really big gap between students, essentially. Somebody who's good at history is probably, like, they're better, obviously, than somebody that's not very good or interested in history. But somebody that's not interested can still, like, put stuff together. They can, like, write something or kind of understand something. But math is, like, can be a very wide gap between people. which makes it more obvious for this sort of thing. Same thing with like some sciences like chemistry. I also remember in high school being in a chemistry class with a teacher who was very, very nice. He was a very good teacher, but he had been teaching for 32, 33 years or something like that. And he wouldn't didn't change his teaching materials since I literally think the 1990s like he had been teaching since. Probably the 80s actually, because I went to school. a while ago. So yeah, he probably was teaching in the 80s with the exact same chemistry materials. Now, chemistry doesn't change. That's I can understand, right? There's not really anything new discoveries that you need to learn in a basic chemistry class. But the teaching style and the materials and that sort of thing, I think definitely can change and improve. I understand that he probably didn't get paid enough to care and didn't really want to like redo all of his teaching materials that he had been using for years, but they were really, really difficult for a lot of students to understand. And so I would sort of have to translate them and help them to understand, be like, okay, so this is what he's trying to say. I get it. But like, I totally see why you don't. It is very confusing. He's not being very clear with this. And so that's definitely a time that I remember sort of teaching a bit more like with other students and starting to be like, yeah, here's how I can help you. I can explain this. And this sort of became a relatively common role for me because people would learn that I generally understood things and was able to explain them better. Um, not necessarily better than the teacher, but like better for them because like, for example, in my German class, I remember a sort of, I think the fourth year was it, I don't know exactly what year, I think it was fourth year. Um, but my, my senior year, one of my classmates was like, Hey, can we just like go to the library one day? And can you just go over these things with me to make sure that I understand them? And I was like, yeah, of course. So we go over and she brings out her books and we go over the different things that we had learned and I would re-explain it. Not necessarily better, but I could ask her what she was struggling with and we could figure out a solution on how to understand that thing. That's also why it's so important to have fewer teachers in schools, or sorry, more teachers in schools, fewer, that was wrong. Lower ratio is what I was actually trying to say. We use the word ratio for student teacher ratio. The ratio of something is basically how many of one thing there are for another thing. That's a terrible explanation. In a classroom of 20 students and one teacher, there is a ratio of 20 to 1. Very simple. If there's a classroom of 30 students and there's two teachers, one teacher, one assistant teacher, that's 15 to 1 or 30 to 2. The ratio usually goes down to the lowest it can, reducing. And so a lower student-teacher ratio is important. That's what I wanted to say. Which it means more teachers, less students. So, for example, like in my high school, there were so many students, right? Like 4,000 or I think over 4,000 in my high school. Or it was in my class, or I don't know, it was a humongous, I think it was 4,000 in my class, my year, which is 4,000 times like four. So there was almost like 1,500, 1,600 kids in this single school or something insane. And the student to teacher ratio was really, really high. There were not very many teachers for a lot of students. And that makes teaching harder because you can't give as much time to individual students to be able to work on what they need help with. That's where I'm going with all this. Anyways, continuing after school, like high school, I also taught English eventually. I went to learn to teach English at, I actually did this in London with three other people who were in that class with me. It was me, an American and two Americans and an Italian. There were no British people in the class despite us doing the class in London, which was sort of just ironic. But it was a very interesting and I definitely learned a lot about teaching and teachers. and the kind of teacher that I would want to be. I didn't agree with a lot of the things that we were taught in the teaching class. A lot of the ways that you're supposed to teach English. I have what's called a CELTA, Certification for English Teaching. No. C-E-L-T-A. Certification for the English Language Teaching to Adults. Something like that. It's a weird name. And I lost my train of thought. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I didn't like how some of the things were taught, how we were taught to teach because they didn't really resonate with me as being very good for the student or for their language development. But I did well in the class when I left there and then I started teaching myself. I started teaching specifically accent and the American accent and how to produce the sounds and the flow that we have. And it was very interesting. I worked with lots of students from all over the world. Some great students, some terrible students. And I learned a lot about that kind of teaching and how I want to teach English. I eventually stopped doing that. I don't do that anymore. It was a great experience. I wouldn't change it, but I definitely don't want to teach again in that context, just because it is very difficult to, I feel like it's very difficult to make progress if there's no structure that you can lead the student through, because all of my students were just signing up for classes, right? And so I couldn't, we couldn't really make a long-term plan that they could then follow and improve over time. And this is especially clear in the less dedicated students. I had many students who would happily come to class, but that class time was 100% of their English practice, right? It's like, okay, you're not going to get better if you're expecting me to just magically make you better. That's not going to, they weren't sick. But when I say that they were making you better, it makes it sound like they were sick. You know what I mean. But yeah, so. I'll probably go back to teaching things, right? I generally just, I think it's just what I do. I teach things, I want to teach, I want to help people learn things. It's interesting to me, it's rewarding. So I'm sure that I'll go back to teaching something in the future. I'm not sure what. Right now I'm doing a lot of language teaching via these videos, via refold YouTube. At refold, a lot of the content that I do and a lot of the things that I make are basically teaching stuff, right? How to do something. And it's really great, I really like it. I also teach people in my life some lessons. If they want, I try not to push it on them. I'm probably not great at not pushing it on people, though. I definitely need to cool my jets, if you ever heard that expression. But I think I've been doing good at that recently. So, yeah. Anyways, I'm blabbering, blathering. Blathering, is that a word? Blather, to blather. It sounds like it is, but I don't know what it means. It'd be like blab, blab, babbling. Anyways, I'm babbling, so I'm going to end this episode here. Thank you very much for listening, and I hope that you enjoyed. And if you are a teacher or like to teach or like to learn, I would love to hear your experience down in the comments below. But that's it for me. I'll see you next time. Bye.
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