Creative Corner

Last night I was sitting on the couch, doing nothing special but watch TV series and sip red wine when I went on FB and saw a photo one of my contacts had shared. The photo was nothing to ring home about, but the sentence on it was, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this on a Sunday before ten in the morning. The sentence reads: “Teachers need other teachers. This is not a job that can be done alone. Collaboration and friendship are vital in keeping teachers sane and happy”. I don’t know what kind of friendship teachers should be after according to whoever came up with this sentence. Maybe it’s camaraderie more than being BFFs, or comrades and BBFs all at once. Who cares! What I really find to be the most important (the most vital ) point here is the fact that sharing is key to this job of teaching. Of course staying friends with your colleagues is important: who doesn’t like to get on well with those you’re going to spend 8+ hours every single day of the working week? My point here...

    Do you ever get students come to you and say: “I went to an English-speaking country last summer and nobody could understand me!”? At first, you might seem to ponder the reason (or reasons) why this had happened, but then another factor flashes up in your brain as a light bulb that lights up all of a sudden when you replay the student’s sentence in your head and some of its words sound like “/esPIkin/, “/noBOdi/” or “/koul(d)/”. There. Three words. Three inoffensive words students shouldn’t apparently be struggling with when it comes to uttering them. However, there’s moments (lots of them to be honest) when students do struggle with pronunciation. It’s not just difficult words like “awkwardness” or “chivalrous”. There are dozens of words students aren’t getting right and that’s something that really matters and needs some of our attention.  When I started teaching English some years ago, I was particularly keen on teaching everything there was in the b...

Let me start with one question today. Do you think revising is important? And now the second, biggest part of the question we English teachers adore: why/why not? Discuss. Maybe you didn’t have anyone to discuss this with, but let’s not make a big deal out of it. What matters to me here is what you think, your personal opinion, whether you’re an expert teachers or have no teaching experience at all. For some teachers, revision isn’t an essential part of their everyday teaching practice. They might only look back at course contents for the sake of using up the last minutes of their final lesson(s) before exam day. Other teachers, however, do believe that revision is necessary, a rudimentary exercise that should be practiced at least once every one or two months (or at the end of each semester). For a few others the idea of revising only a couple of times falls short because they would like to revise every week or every day if you may. I mean, there’s no harm in doing so, but let’s...