The pupils who went on strike for their teacher

Some years ago a teacher in Stepney was sacked from his school for encouraging pupils to write poems reflecting life in the East End. Now, he's back with another project.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions below.



1. When did Chris Searle teach at Sir John Cass School in Stepney?
2. What were the poems about?
3. What did Chris do against the wishes of the head teacher?
4. How long did the students remain on strike?
5. According to Faridha Karim, what are the children not interested in?
6. How many schools did Chris do poetry workshops at?


Let if flow, Joe
Let your feelings speak for you
Let the people know what you know

They're the honest words of young EastEnders which got this former teacher the sack. Chris Searle taught English at Sir John Cass School in Stepney back in the 70s and encouraged pupils to write poetry about their lives.
They looked at their area and they saw what was good about it, but they also saw what was bad about it, and that's what came out in their poetry. Quite a lot of their poems talked about bad housing because at that time housing in this area was quite grim for some families.
Against the wishes of the head teacher he published a book of their revealing work. He was told to leave and hundreds of children walked out in support.
And I can remember, even as I came out here, there was one of the parents who I knew, who had been quite active in the postman’s strike, he was a postman, and he was teaching them how to picket at the school gates. I mean, this was very much a part of life in East London during that period.
The children went back after three days but it took Chris two years to be reinstated, so he set up a writers group for his students and other locals, some of whom were young Bengalis.
It's like a way for these young people who are quite dissociated from what was going on, not interested in education, not interested in… well, not… not feeling like they're involved or included in school and education, and then they kind of came out of their kind of comfort zone.
Chris has been back in East London working with young people again as part of a new Spoken Word Project.
The young people that I met in the four schools that I did the workshops in were tremendous, they were full of spirit and full of pride of being East London young people.
And this new anthology of young East End voices has been published without controversy.
Ayshea Buskh, BBC London News.

KEY:
1 in the 70’s
2 the good and bad things in the area / bad housing
3 he published a book with the poems
4 for three days
5 their education/school
6 four

English teacher who earns $500k

When it comes to education in South Korea, the demand is so strong it accounts for 12% of all consumer spending.

Parents push their children relentlessly, with classes in the evenings and at weekends. It's led to some teachers earning very high salaries, particularly to teach English. The BBC's Steve Evans, in Seoul, met one of them.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions below.



1 How many students does Gwen Lee teach in a classroom?
2 And online?
3 Apart from teaching how does Gwen Lee manage to make so much money?
4 What is Gwen Lee as a teacher?
5 Where are Gwen Lee’s offices?
6 Why do Koreans work so hard?
7 Why does Gwen Lee think it is important to keep fit?

7.30 in the morning, the start of a working day. For Gwen Lee’s job appearance is important, so this is essential preparation for the classroom. She earns half a million dollars a year teaching English to students who pay for her lessons, and they expect her to look smart.
My yearly income is around $500,000 and I think I can do that because I can manage a big-sized classroom. Of course, the more numbers of students that I have in my classroom, I earn more money, but part of my income is coming from online.
Every month, she teaches (1) a thousand students in an actual classroom but another (2) 200,000 online.
Hello everyone, it’s me Gwen…
(3) She has a radio programme and she writes textbooks, all adding up to that half a million dollars.
This is very driven teaching. (4) She’s very animated, moving energetically along the pre-arranged strips. And these kids, they want to learn, they’re paying money or their parents are paying money
And teacher Gwen Lee has the accoutrements of business, like a chauffeur. Her day is so tightly packed that she needs to use every moment. Her headquarters from where the teaching is organized are (5) in Seoul’s business district. Lunch is a business meeting, with her assistants, who deal with online requests. This is work at hyper-speed.
Koreans work hard. We work around the clock and, you know, they make best effort because… I don’t know why but(6)  it’s coming from their parents’ generation, you know. We saw our parents, they went to war, you know, era and they thought that in order to survive they had to work, you know, hard.
South Korea is a pressurized country, with pressure on students to achieve and pressure on teachers to deliver grades. Gwen goes to the gym, but even this is part of work. (7) She reckons that keeping fit is a way of fending off illness. When you have 200,000+ students, you can’t afford to take time off.
Steve Evans, BBC News, Seoul.

Reading test: Stress pushing teachers to leave profession

This week's reading test is based on the Telegraph article Stress pushing teachers to leave profession,' figures show published in March this year.

Read the text and complete blanks 1-12 with one of the words or phrases below. There are three words or phrases that you do not need to use. You can only use each word or phrase once. 0 is an example.

(0) Growing stress is the leading reason (1) … teachers taking time off work or leaving the profession entirely, new data has revealed.
In fact, stress (2) … more than double the figures of days taken off for sickness, numbers from an insurance firm specialising in covering schools against members of staff being off work showed.
The analysis of its claims showed that 55 per cent its 1,800 schools made stress-related claims in 2014. It also revealed academies experienced the highest proportion of lost teaching days (3) … stress.
“Stress in teachers is caused largely by heavy workload, a particularly pressurized (4) …, tight workforces and additional pressures not directly related to teaching like Ofsted inspections,” said the firm’s Harry Cramer.
(5) … the company's analysis of 138,500 absence days taken by 31,900 staff within the education sector, 3.5 per cent of school staff take a stress related absence every year. The (6) … length of a stress related absence is 26.9 working days, over twice the length of an average staff absence which is 13 working days. The analysis was commissioned by the BBC Radio 4’s File on 4.
Separately, a preliminary online (7) … of 3,500 members of the NASUWT teachers’ union revealed stress and poor mental health. It found 67 per cent of teachers said their job was having an (8) … effect on their mental health.
The report, (9) … is to be published at the union’s annual conference over Easter, found 76 per cent of teachers said they are “seriously considering” leaving their job in the last year, compared to 69 per cent in 2014. Separately, 68 per cent said they considered leaving the profession entirely.
Other (10) … findings include:
• 83 per cent have experienced more workplace stress in the last year, compared to 80 per cent in 2014
• 84 per cent say their job has impacted negatively on their health and wellbeing in the last 12 months; compared to 80 per cent in 2014
• 78 per cent have experienced work related anxiousness, 84 per cent (11) … of sleep, 33 per cent poor health, 25 per cent (12) … use of caffeine, alcohol or tobacco, 11 per cent relationship breakdown and nearly 2 per cent self-harm

according to
adverse
amounts for
as a result of
average
environment
for
growing 0 Example
increased
key
loss
of
raising
survey
that
which

Photo: Alamy in the Telegraph

KEY:
1 for; 2 amounts for; 3 as a result of; 4 environment; 5 according to; 6 average; 7 survey; 8 adverse; 9 which; 10 key; 11 loss; 12 increased

Talking point: My favourite teacher at school

In our weekly 'Talking point' section we continue focusing on the anecdote feature of Macmillan's Inside Out.

Today's topic is talking about your favourite teacher at school. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below, so that you ideas flow more easily when you get together with the members of your conversation group and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand.

• Was it a man or a woman?
• What was their name?
• What did they look like?
• What sort of clothes did they use to wear?
• Were they strict or easy-going?
• What subject(s) did they teach?
• Were you good at that subject?
• Where did you sis in their lessons?
• What sort of things did you use to do in class?
• What was special about your favourite teacher?
• How did they affect your life?
• Were they popular with your classmates?
• Are you still in touch with them?

To illustrate the point, watch this Vimeo video where Aspen Aman, from Which Advisor School, talks about the teachers that most affected her life.

My favourite teacher by Aspen Aman from Which School Advisor on Vimeo.

Reading test: Why tough teachers get good results

This is an adaptation to the Wall Street Journal article Why Tough Teachers get good results, by Joanna Lipman published on 23 September 2013 and which I came across through The Prop Room.

We are going to do a multiple matching reading comprehension activity based on the article. You will be given a number of headings and you will have to match each heading with the corresponding paragraph. There is one heading you don’t need to use and another heading is used as an example.

A) A little pain is good for you. – 0
B) Creativity can be learned.
C) Drill, baby, drill.
D) Failure is an option.
E) Praise makes you weak.
F) Resolve and determination trump talent.
G) stress makes you strong.
H) Strict is better than nice. 

WHY TOUGH TEACHERS GET GOOD RESULTS

The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and memorization are dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation.
But the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the following eight principles explain why.
0.
True expertise requires teachers who give "constructive, even disturbing, feedback," as Dr. Ericsson put it in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. He assessed research on top performers in fields ranging from violin performance to surgery to computer programming to chess. And he found that all of them "deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance."
1.
Rote learning, long discredited, is now recognized as one reason that children whose families come from India (where memorization is still prized) are creaming their peers in the National Spelling Bee Championship. This cultural difference also helps to explain why students in China (and Chinese families in the U.S.) are better at math. Meanwhile, American students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtraction—and few of them were made to memorize their times tables.
2.
Kids who understand that not succeeding is a necessary aspect of learning actually perform better. In a 2012 study, 111 French sixth-graders were given anagram problems that were too difficult for them to solve. One group was then told that not getting the problems right and trying again are part of the learning process. On subsequent tests, those children consistently outperformed their peers.
3.
What makes a teacher successful? To find out, starting in 2005 a team of researchers led by Claremont Graduate University education professor Mary Poplin spent five years observing 31 of the most highly effective teachers (measured by student test scores) in the worst schools of Los Angeles, in neighborhoods like South Central and Watts. Their No. 1 finding: "They were tough," she says. "None of us expected that."
The researchers had assumed that the most effective teachers would lead students to knowledge through collaborative learning and discussion. Instead, they found disciplinarians who relied on traditional methods of explicit instruction, like lectures.
4.
The rap on traditional education is that it kills children's' imagination. But Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisberg's research suggests just the opposite. Prof. Weisberg has studied inventive geniuses including Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso—and has concluded that there is no such thing as a born genius. Most geniuses work ferociously hard and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve things that appear (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs.
The bottom line, Prof. Weisberg told me, is that originality goes back in many ways to the basics. "You have to immerse yourself in a discipline before you innovate in that discipline. It is built on a foundation of learning the discipline, which is what your music teacher was requiring of you."
5.
In recent years, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth has studied spelling bee champs, Ivy League undergrads and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.—all together, over 2,800 subjects. In all of them, she found that grit—defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals—is the best predictor of success.
Prof. Duckworth believes that grit can be taught. One surprisingly simple factor, she says, is optimism—the belief among both teachers and students that they have the ability to change and thus to improve. In a 2009 study of newly minted teachers, she rated each for optimism (as measured by a questionnaire) before the school year began. At the end of the year, the students whose teachers were optimists had made greater academic gains.
6.
Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has found that 10-year-olds being complimented became less confident. But kids told that they were "hard workers" became more confident and better performers.
"The whole point of intelligence recognition is to boost confidence and motivation, but both were gone in a flash," wrote Prof. Dweck in a 2007 article in the journal Educational Leadership. "If success meant they were smart, then struggling meant they were not."







KEY
A little pain is good for you. – 0
Creativity can be learned. – 4
Drill, baby, drill. – 1
Failure is an option. - 2
Praise makes you weak. – 6
Resolve and determination trump talent. – 5
stress makes you strong.
Strict is better than nice. - 3

Talking point: The best teacher

8 May was National Teacher Appreciation Day in US. The celebration is a bit far-off now, but the topic has a universal value and can be useful for this week's talking point.

Get together with the members of your conversation group and discuss the questions below, some of which are taken from The New York Times learning blogs.

What teacher, or teachers, do you appreciate, and why?
Who was the most important teacher for you?
What did he or she teach you?
How did he or she do that to make it so memorable?
How important do you think teachers are?
What problems do teachers face as a profession?
What can we do as a society to show them they are appreciated?
Are teachers highly respected in Spain? Are they well paid?
What do you learn from a teacher that you don't from your parents?
Do/Did you prefer to be taught by a male or female teacher?
Should teachers express their political views in class?
Do you prefer strict teachers or easy-going ones?
What subjects are the easiest and most difficult to teach?

In preparation for the topic you can read these two articles: The first one, “Teaching Me About Teaching,” by Charles M. Blow, comes from The New York Times, where Mr Blow writes about the teacher who taught him the most. The second article comes from The Guardian, How Finnish Schools Shine, and was written by Adam Lopez, who tells us about the success of Finnish schools.

Photograph: www.alamy.com