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Teachers Discussion
Can Monkeys Really Teach English?
Posted By: David
Date: December 17, 2007
Can monkeys really teach English? Apparently they can in Japan. I worked for a small private school in Japan, the same school in my earlier post. The owner made a habit out of hiring young, and inexperienced teachers. They usually held bachelors degrees, (Japanese government requirement) but had little or no experience in the classroom.
The conversation classes were 40 minutes long and the teachers (monkeys) could use the school textbooks or bring in their own materials. The monkeys quickly realized that bringing in their own materials was the easiest way to teach and brought in all kinds of irrelevant news stories and articles and spent 35 out of 40 minutes listening to themselves talk. The walls were pretty thin at this school and all you heard from the one or two students in the classroom was the occasional “oh”, “uhuh”, or something to that effect. They understood and learned nothing.
Finally one of the monkeys brought in a story about bugs eating their regurgitated food. The poor student was subjected to 35 minutes of information that was technically difficult enough even for a native English speaker to understand. I complained to the owner to no avail. The conversation classes continued as usual and the students continued to be unable to converse, even at a minimal level, in English.
This kind of situation no doubt contributed to the recent demise of the infamous Nova schools.
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