Come on, Nature

It's the end of week one and, boy, am I feeling tired. Luckily, Monday is a bank holiday so I'll be able to rest a little more. I had intended to visit G in London but after spending a couple of hours trying to plan my lessons for next week, I realised I needed a lot more time, so I'm going to plan with a colleague on Sunday. The idea is to plan for the whole week and draft out the following week so that during the week we can just tweak it to suit our students.

I'm beginning to love my students (in a purely platonic way), they are becoming more adventurous and, I think, are starting to trust me. Unfortunately, my other group are like sacks of potatoes. I have never known such an unresponsive group in all my teaching career. Even when I ask them questions directly, using their names, they either avoid my eye or mumble something incoherent. They also like to hide behind their dictionaries (which are electronic and therefore translate everything into Chinese for them).

Things got so bad today that we had the 'talk', the one in which I use my special teacher voice (sometimes it even scares me), about them listening when I'm talking, concentrating on the task at hand, and asking questions if they don't understand what to do. I know it's not just me as the other two tutors have said they have similar problems. How these students managed to get a test score high enough to convince anyone they could function in an English language academic situation is beyond me. However, people do perform differently in test conditions, especially if they have been trained to do the test. This is one of the things that make language learning so difficult. Anyone can learn a few set phrases and questions but how do you deal with the response from a native speaker who will almost certainly not use complete and grammatically correct sentences, and will use lots of idiomatic expressions?

In completely different news, my mouse has stopped working. The cursor will go up and down but not side to side. Oh dear, I guess that means I'll have to buy a new one (one that doesn't need a mouse mat and has a special roller function - life is hard).

Weather update - believe it or not, the sun was shining as I walked to work today. But it was still raining, big ploppy drops. Not enough for a rainbow but enough to dampen my enthusiasm!