Image from Flickr By mikefisher821 Some rights reserved

I sometimes look back to when I first began teaching and can’t believe some of the things I recall. Like handwritten worksheets made on a banda machine, barely legible worksheets photocopied from Tricolore, not allowing pupils to see the words when you introduced them orally and naff songs! But, as this quote says, I do better now!

Image from superkimbo

So – what will YOU do?

Image from ransomtech

I think that’s fairly self explanatory!

for more reasons, have a look at Why study languages? and Why languages?

Image from acjeppo

I was shocked the first time I son talked about ‘stealing’ a friend’s idea. ‘but my teacher told me to do it!’ was his response to the look on my face.

Gone are the days when my planning was mine  alone and a colleague teaching the same lesson had to plan their own lesson. Pooling knowledge and ideas is positively encouraged, and I for one am VERY grateful for this.

Image from klmontgomery

A new mini series starting today of ‘thoughts’.

This is increasingly what I aim for in my lessons – for pupils to discover for themselves, and to accept that there isn’t always an easy answer, that I am not a walking dictionary and Google is not the source of all knowledge.

Image from Colette Cassinelli

Image from gcouros on Flickr

This really struck a chord with me – I am definitely a glass half full type of person. I know that there have been times when I’ve stayed out of the staffroom, or have avoided certain members of staff as their negativity has dragged me down. And I can identify my worst periods in teaching as when I’ve sunk into negative thinking and lost all hope about my abilities, or those of my pupils. It certainly did my teaching no good and made my life rather miserable too.

So, now I’ve been reminded, I’m going to do my best to be Optimist Prime and encourage others to think positively. Tell me off if I don’t!

In what seems like a past life sometimes when I used to teach Spanish to secondary pupils, we used a text book called Vaya.  Apart from my gripe about their assertion that Spaniards have pets ‘grillos’ on their balconies (yet to meet one!), my other main problem with the book / course was the fact that the pictures looked nothing like what they were supposed to be illustrating, particularly the food.  The ‘churros’ looked like those posh butter curls you get on hoity toity places, and if I showed you the ‘paella’, you’d be hard pressed to identify it.

Not sure why I thought of it today (perhaps I had a nostalgic thought?) but I did, and it reminded me of this marvellous group on Flickr called Comida española which features over 2000 photos of Spanish food.

So much easier to explain ‘chocolate con churros’

or ‘albóndigas en salsa’

or the scale on which paella’s are sometimes cooked

when you have a decent picture to help you!

You can search the group – for example, ‘tapas’ or ‘garbanzos’ or ‘tortilla’

To finish, here’s a picture that might come in useful in the next week or so…

NB watch out for the CC license under which images are shared – some are All rights reserved which means they’re copyright.  Look for CC Attribution Share alike that you can use as long as you say to whom they belong.

PS if anyone has ever met a Spaniard with a pet ‘grillo’ could you please let me know!

These images pretty much sum up my thinking on the use of ICT.