My English Pages

Building a Better Teacher
Good teaching:
good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars
This is a New YorK Times magazine article about how to build good teachers.  When actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, flounders, what should be done? Fire bad teachers?  Train them? Read the article. Here is the link:
Better teachers

Pygmalion effect
The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which theere is a parallel between teachers expectations and the students performance. The effect is named after a narrative by Ovid in Greek mythology in which Pygmalion is a sculptor who fell in love with the ivory statue of a woman he had carved.
Education
In education the pygmalion effect is said to play a crucial role in the students’ performance. Good or bad, what teachers expect from students they generally get. For exapmle negative expectations, which are often …

What it means to be a teacher…
Have you ever asked yourself what it means to be a teacher? Teachers with a vocation know that it means hard work. But not everybody knows this truth. Not all parents. Not all students. Sometimes, you suffer not from the stress but from the ingratitude, not from the piles of students sheets on your desk that need marking but from the things you missed to teach, not from the lesson plans you have to prepare everyday but from the demotivated students, not from your …

Inconvenient truths about teaching
Yes, there are truths about teaching that one may not be comfortable with. Although teaching may be one of the noblest professions, teachers are the first to be scapegoated when something is wrong. Teaching may also be the cause of so much heartache. No matter what a teacher does, no matter how hard he works, only few people will see the difference he/she can make in students lives.
1. Ingratitude
In spite of all the hard work that teachers do, they will always be subject to criticism. If the …

ELT Links
English language teaching links in different categories prepared by Sean Banville.
Sean needs your contributions to develop his new website. You can suggest new links or submit your own blog or website. Enjoy!

Free ESL materials

I’d like to share with readers the  posts I’ve read recently. They all carry insightful thoughts and creative ideas that I hope will be of great interest to teachers and educators.

Would da Vinci learn in Today’s Classrooms?
The habitudes that separate creative and genius minds from “the rest of us” and which are discouraged in our schools.
Failure is not an option but it should be!
Failure as part of the learning process.
T is for text
Using texts to teach grammar.- Very insight post and comments on how to use texts as the …

My blogging experience
All revolutions occured thanks to writing! Even when the internet appeared, writing took the most significant part of the magic of the web. The blogosphere revolutionized the web. Millions of blogs have emerged with billions of posts dealing with all parts of life from very personal thoughts to business-oriented information. Communication has shifted towards endless words on a screen. As this is my hundredth post,  I will present my personal experience with blogging. I will share what I have learned and what I was successful at.

Do you use a blog to teach?
This is a very informative, valuable slideshow that covers key concepts. It presents all the advantages that a blog can bring for teaching.

A classroom management issue
“Why Do You Let Othesr Control You? ” said to a student may be a clue to ending a fight in the classroom according to Larry Ferlazzo’s experience with a bad class. Instead of using punishment, this kind of straight forward strategy can work perfectly to solve classroom management problems. It focuses on the psychological outcome, on valuing the self, humanizing the students and  building a tolerant peaceful personality.

The age of paper
When I was a student, I had sometimes  to save my pocket money to buy books. My only resources consisted of these few books  and some newspapers and magazines. Our teachers were the holders of the truth and we had to be attentive to every word they utter. Now things have changed and will undoubtedly change ever more. Technology has entered every room, fulfilled every human need of knowledge and made our lives interwoven with information.  So  shall we, as teachers,  stick to the conventional ways of …