Freelance Teacher Self Development
For you, then your learners
//I have a couple of bits knocking around at the minute.
One is a blog post about working conditions on the iTDi blog.
The other is a piece called ‘Accommodating students with ADHD by a teacher with ADHD’ for IATEFL’s IPSEN SIG’s newsletter (link will be added when it goes fully public).
Hopefully one or both will be edifying.
//
Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I am following and retweeting more and more UK and Australia based accounts that tweet about (anti)precarity and (anti)casualisation in academia. Why? Well, I work in multiple universities on renewable one year contracts with the number of hours I can work for each university usually capped. I am relatively comfortable in the knowledge that I can renew for a generally unlimited number of times but one frequently hears of colleagues whose contracts do not get renewed and then need to take any work that comes up last minute. Continue reading “Development Interrupted? Precarity, stress and effects on my CPD”
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Image from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, 1966. Public domain. Could it be a group of teachers worrying about whether they will survive the industry/profession dichotomy?
OK, I know. “Marc, you are one of the people that are involved in Teachers as Workers, aren’t you?”
Actually, probably less than you think but, you know, I support them. I just don’t know how much I actually do apart from I’ve wrote a blog and struggled to archive some stuff for the group.
Anyway, yes, I could have submitted a presentation about how ELT is less exciting and more exploitative. However, I did a bit about listening, and other people did stuff about working issues for teachers.
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Peter Brereton presented Teacher Low Points: Disillusionment, Demotivation, and Burnout. Sadly, I ended up walking in halfway through the 10-minute plenary because I had other stuff to sort out upstairs, but what I did see was good, engaging and made me happy that somebody is talking about this.
Bill Snyder talked about the notion of isolation in teaching, despite being part of a community. There was also the difference between isolation and solitude, and the amount of anxiety and how we can help each other by talking and stuff.
Sam Morris talked about emotional authenticity in teaching, and the issue of rife fixed-term contracts and the massive amount of part-time teaching (in universities) happened to crop up, because teachers sometimes become more “emotionally authentic”, or ‘themselves’ close to the end of a contract. Basically teachers who know they are getting to the end of the contract, with job anxiety and such, stop worrying about masking their feelings and let them out. I raised the question about whether there was a link in the research about whether there was any link to teaching quality by keeping teachers precarious. He said he’d read research and it pointed to the opposite. I think I also had a longwinded comment-question thing (yes, I can be am one of those people) about feeling guilty for being open about my feelings with adult students. I think the crux was: students are adults, they arguably need English of the real world, feelings are the real world, why hide feelings (though, don’t be weird, you know).
Of the videos, Scott Thornbury painted a vulgar picture of the Spanish ELT employment scene, with pitiful wages and no development to speak of in the language school sector. That would be mainly the same in Japan, though there are a very few cracks of light to be found outside the chain schools.
On a side note – I was a bit worried that it was going to be a bit of a talking shop for people who just work in universities, which kind of happens at a lot of conferences, I guess, and that was the majority of people, but there were some people from language schools and high schools as well. I like talking to people, especially people who don’t just work at universities, because what is a conference for if not to learn from people you might not otherwise meet? (Not wholly a rhetorical question, by the way).
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In the past I have described Twitter as ‘my living room’. It was a place (and we can go on about paradigms of representing networked digital media as actual media or as de facto pseudogeographical sites but I would like to keep the word count down and avoid a reference list, so feel free to think of the internet however you want) I enjoyed being in. Unfortunately, I didn’t own it and therefore I had little way of guaranteeing an environment that would always be pleasant.
In an essay for my MA, I wrote about why Twitter was not a particularly useful website for learners of English (or other languages) and that it would be unwise for teachers to recommend people with vulnerable senses of self – in part due to to the way L2 learning affects one’s identity – to use Twitter. I said that Twitter was good for language teachers’ CPD.
I now disagree with myself. I now think that Twitter is becoming an ever more toxic venue, with ranting being an ever increasing form of discourse. This makes sense for people selling advertising. The more ranting, the more tweets in argument, the more promoted tweets you can insert into the time lines and the more money you can get.
However, what is the effect on our mental health, individually and collectively? When our phones vibrate in our pockets to give us a dopamine hit, does it really help us to build community or does it build dependency upon likes, retweets, confirmation and identity politics dumbed down to hectoring people who operate under different beliefs? I don’t have answers, but anecdotally, I’d say I disliked the person I became when participating in the Twitter ELT community.
So I left with a rant (see a pattern?) of asking people to not be awful to one another and actually try to be nicer. Perhaps this was wrong. The people who are always nice came out to be nice and imploring me to stay (some while carrying on skirmishes created on/made bigger by Twitter). One user asked if it was something he’d tweeted. I was furious and righteous BUT! I knew I had seen something from a perspective that I’d never appreciated before. I could have said, “Yes, it was,” and been correct; but I would have been equally correct had I said, “No, it wasn’t” because while a particular hectoring series of tweets back and forth made me decide that, yes, finally it was time to delete my account on a website that totally sees Nazism as an acceptable point of view but won’t happily tolerate ordinary users tweeting the words ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ to its verified users, it was simply one incident building up to a sum of many. I then saw more hectoring, gathered email addresses from my direct messages and deleted my account. I never replied, perhaps rudely. But would it have been ruder to call that person an obscene name in the heat of the moment? I think I feel OK being a bit rude instead of being a shitbag, actually.
What makes it worse is that much of the ranting was and is probably still being done by people I respect immensely. Unfortunately, I am too knackered to be able to read much more of it.
So, Twitter, it’s not me, it’s you. It’s your cynical manipulation of people by boosting controversy (hot topics, or things to get irate about) and having absolutely shit community guidelines.
You can find me on Mastodon until that succumbs to the darker side of human nature.