​Private education community, financially driven

This is one in a series of blogs that explored the effects of education communities for the teachers who work in them. Despite our best efforts, we are inadvertently killing teachers.

Educators do excellent work in the development of the social-economic conditions in which we collectively live. They should be fully supported and have their experiences included in the ongoing discussions that inform the necessary changes to the system.

Each of these stories - based on my personal experience - has a few suggestions for developing the education system to better support teachers.

​The five communities in this series are:​

1. Hierarchical community
2. Closed community based on fear 
3. Loving community, financially anaemic 
4. Alternative community, desperate for solutions
5. Education community, financially driven 

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​Private education community, financially driven 
- high expectations, no resources

One of my last visits to the education world as a teacher was to a private adult education company which offered, amongst other things, English lessons for immigrants who were seeking employment. A certificate in English would help them in their job applications.

I had been given a timetable with eight hours a week teaching English at Secondary level. There were two lessons, each of four hours that would be held on Mondays and Fridays. I thought it was a crazy solution, but I was told that it was the only space in the timetable.

During the first week of my employment, I was required to go to the other classes that were already running at the school, to recruit students to my classes that would start as soon as possible. 

As the number of recruited students increased so did their diversity. There were students who simply wished to have a certificate for their already well-developed English and there were others whose journey through the English language had only just begun. They were still learning the English alphabet.

On the first Monday, I arrived at the classroom to find a huge crowd of eager men and women ready to get started learning English. There were more students than there was space in the room and we started bringing in extra chairs and folding tables out of the way so that everyone could have a place. 

At the back of the room sat the people whose English was weakest. At the front of the rooms sat the people whose English was strongest. It seemed to be a natural arrangement. The students had come from many different countries and yet they seemed to understand that where they sat in the room was an indication of their level of English.
I made a start by saying hello and asking everybody to share their name and where they came from. That indicated their grasp of the English language and that is how I discovered the unofficial seating arrangements.

The greeting process and the spelling of many different names of forty or so people on the whiteboard occupied the first two hours of the lesson. We had a lot of fun but the room was becoming airless. We needed a break.

After the break, I encouraged those students who were most able in English to come up and share one experience they had where English had been useful in their lives, or in their work. This actively involved a handful of students at the start of the second half of the lesson.

I then paired students according to how much English they knew calling one ‘little teacher’ and the other one ‘little learner’. It was their choice of names. 

During this stage, there was a lot of translation between languages going on so that everyone understood my instructions. We discovered that the 40 students represented a dozen different languages. We also discovered that most students already spoke two languages other than English. I was impressed.

The assignment for the pairs was to prepare their partner to say 2 to 3 sentences about who they were, where they came from and why they wanted to learn English.

My aim was to create as many ‘little teachers’ as I could. I knew I was going to be challenged to teach such a wide range of students at the same time on my own from the front of the room. 

The lesson ended on a high note when one student who had limited English skills struggled through the two sentences which his more developed partner had given him. We laughed with him because his struggles were our struggles and his determination was our determination. Tearful eyes and outrageous applause came at the end of his performance.

On Friday, only half of the students turned up. I was shocked. I thought perhaps my interpretation of their enthusiasm was misinformed. Was I being too enthusiastic?  Had I been too demanding?

It turned out that most of the missing students had the same religious background. According to the school’s timetable, Friday was a working day. According to their cultural timetable, Friday was the start of the weekend. They had never had lessons on Friday before and didn’t expect to have them now.

On Monday, we were at almost full strength again and had a great lesson teaching in pairs and small groups - the better-able students would learn from giving support to the less-able student colleagues. I can’t remember exactly what we studied but I do know that we spent quite a lot of time on numbers, letters, colours, animals, other vocabulary exercises as well as verbs associated with work, home, sports, studies so that we could enrich our conversation about such subjects.

The four hours on Monday were quite a slog with forty people in the room or should I say twenty pairs, or were they ten small groups? I put my energy into facilitating the learning that was going on rather than teaching anything specific from the front of the room.
It was soon becoming clear that we needed an external source of teaching materials to support the little teacher - little learner pairs and groups. We needed exercises and activities that could engage them. I went to the school administration and asked which books I should use. They told me there weren’t any books available. I should have ordered them before the start of term (before I started my employment) but I was welcome to use any book I wished.

At the local bookshop, I selected a number of books that I thought would be appropriate for this wide range of students ranging from beginner to post intermediate on the standard scale. I bought, using my own money, a workbook from each step on the scale. About five books in all. 

I presented the books at the next lesson to the students and suggested that they choose one they will work with this term in groups or pairs. I fully expected that everybody would turn up the next lesson with one or two exercise books that they would use for the next month. Naturally, we would also be doing large group activities as well, and even some ‘front of the room’ teaching.

I requested the administration refund my expense for the books. They told me they had not approved the expense in advance and so would not pay for them. I think by now I should’ve realised what was going on, but I was so deep into facilitating the learning of forty immigrants to better able them to get into the job market that I completely ignored the nagging feeling that I’d been fooled.

When we got back together again for the next lesson, I noticed only a handful of students had bought a workbook. I enquired why. I was reminded that being unemployed meant that you had limited money and the expense of buying the book was beyond them right now.

Using my own copies of the book I made photocopies for the students who did not have a book. There were grumblings from the students who had paid for the books out of their own pocket, but when I told them that I had done the same, we felt that we were at least on the same page. And we realised that we were on a very different page to the school administration.

When I was hauled to the administration office for making illegal photocopies I realised that I was well and truly out of my comfort zone. I asked the administrators how they expected me to work without books or photocopies and they told me it wasn’t their problem that the students had no money, and it was not their responsibility to provide material for the students. They showed me the course documentation to that effect. 

My determination to be a teacher in a school system vanished.

​My enthusiasm for teaching never waned. 

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SUGGESTIONS

• End education companies that are a for-profit business
• Stop playing games with teachers and students, be honest. Full disclosure.
• Administrators, educators, teachers and students, should be on the same page, not separated into an ‘us’ and ‘them’
• Allow teachers to blow the whistle on unfair treatment without the risk of reprisals