It's just been one long social whirl this week as I host a series of farewell soirees for my English students. For the teenagers it's been Sprite, sandwiches and games based around Taylor Swift lyrics and I actually got some of my big, tough, thirteen year olds singing.  Yesterday, I was sad to say goodbye to my ten year olds.  I had got more sandwich stuff in, but I needn't have bothered as they trotted in happily with plastic carriers bags full of cake, curry, chicken frankfurters and other goodies.  Most of them also brought gifts.  I have been inundated with presents, including diaries, pens, key rings and even a powder compact from Shanghai, from this lot since we started in May last year.  During our last lesson we sang songs, had a treasure hunt around the ground floor of the house, ate all the food and played games.  After a final game of "killer shark" ("hangman" without the capital punishment overtones) I stood outside in the warm night a...

"They all look the same to me."  How many times have I heard that remark spoken by a racist or xenophobe?  So often it is used to imply that an ethnic group are somehow less individual, less important and somehow less human than the speaker and their chosen audience.  And yet, I have to admit to a practical cognitive difficulty.  When I first arrived in Sarawak I felt myself to be in a sea of Chinese and asian faces and I found it very hard to tell people apart.  To a degree people did "look the same to me".  When I started teaching I used name labels for the first three weeks even in classes of three or four students to be sure I didn't make a mistake.  After this initial period I was still paranoid about getting a name wrong and left little notes to myself in the files for some classes like "'X' has glasses" to make sure I didn't confuse her with 'Y'. Then the strangest thing happened.  A phenomena familiar I'm sure to ...

I said in my last post I was on a steep learning curve when it came to using the internet for teaching.  I was obviously not as far up the curve as I thought.  As I started making friends with my students I began to feel less and less comfortable about the amount of information that it gave me about these young peoples' lives and Sue made it clear that she had serious misgivings about the way I was going about things. So, I started to do some more extensive reading about Facebook's policies and their advice to educators.  I had not even realised that Facebook require you to be at least 13 years old before you can set up an account.  Many of my students ignore this by making themselves out to be older.  This also has implications because Facebook restrict the access people can have to the timelines of children aged 13-17, so by making yourself, say, eighteen when actually you are twelve, you over-ride all this stuff. Anyway I've put my own house in order by...

I started a new experiment in my teaching career this week by setting up a Facebook group for my English students and it's been a steep learning curve. My first task was to create a new Facebook identity in simple English which would be open to my students to look around.  Facebook doesn't like you doing this, they want you all in one place so they know who and where you are.  As a result, they don't make it simple or give you any help.  Anyway, having created my new identity, I then started to get quite a few "friend requests" from people I'm already friends with on my existing account.  It was at this point it struck how much Facebook behaves like a virus, albeit a largely consensual one. Going through the process of creating my group it also hit me how insidious the Facebook model really is.  They want to keep us in their world and they make it subtly difficult to break out into the rest of the world wide web.  For all the talk of people like Mark...

It was Sue's birthday on Tuesday and she got home in the afternoon with leftover cake from a surprise birthday party at one of her schools.  In the evening I had my regular class of nine year-olds and little Ivy brought yet more cake.  Sue cut it and brought slices into the classroom for the kids as we worked on making pictures of "beautiful clean" and "ugly polluted" beaches.  The nine year-olds are a delight to teach and my relationship with them is becoming more and more relaxed as I get used to being around little ones and they get accustomed to being taught by a big pink old man.  I was especially impressed with Qian Hui's "ugly polluted beach", which included a rabbit on its side with its eyes closed, obviously dead and a mysterious lump with some squiggly lines emerging from it, helpfully labelled "smelly vegetable". Yesterday evening Sue invited our neighbours' children to come into the house and play.  Jasper, Jason and F...

One of the problems of teaching English in Sarawak is that almost all of the readily available material is very Europe and US centred.  This even applies to the climate.  Brits are famous for talking about the weather and English textbooks are full of it too.  Whole chapters are devoted to the seasons and the way they change, but then we have a lot of weather to talk about.  Not so in Sarawak, within spitting distance of the Equator.  There are just two seasons here - "rainy" and "rainier", the annual variation in daylight hours is about ten minutes and the annual temperature range is about fifteen degrees, from 25-40c, day and night.  God knows what the locals do for smalltalk. Earlier this week I was preparing a lesson for a sparky group of nineteen year olds and the textbook had some photos of the Beatles and the fall of the Berlin Wall as teaching aids.  I assumed they'd have heard of the Beatles and I decided to use the material to see what re...

Sue's and my cup is running over.  She took part in a blowpipe competition at one of her schools yesterday and was given one as a present by a teacher who had been given it by his grandfather when he was a boy.  An honour indeed.  Following a period of indolence I am now working flat out.  After some tweaking of my prices for English lessons to encourage groups of four and five to get together, I've had a rush of clients and now find myself with thirty odd students in seven classes and our downstairs bedroom has been transformed into a classroom complete with tables, chairs and a whiteboard. Although I trained hard for my teaching English to speakers of other languages course in November last year, I am still a novice and having to work up lessons for seven separate groups has been very hard work, even though I have only about ten contact hours per week.  So for the last three weeks I've been hoovering up like a maniac illegal copies of English course books ...