Mad panic, lesson in an hour, I print sheet after sheet of poems and story extracts and reading comprehensions and grammar exercises. I realise I have almost used up all the materials on BBC Bitesize as well as all my paper and ink and start to get into a frenzy. Do I REALLY have enough material to keep a lesson of two hours going? Can I honestly say I have prepared enough to earn my much needed £25?
When I arrive however it turns out the agenda has been set. The concerned pregnant mother wants her children to drastically improve their punctuation and grammar. So it’s away with compliments and free open discussions and on with a drastic critique of every word, sentence and paragraph written in their last homework I commissioned, as well as every phrase they utter. In the two hour lesson we went through a mere three pieces of homework.
Instead of a nice tick and a few useful comments for improvement, I initiated formative assessment in one devastating swoop. Far from making a few tentative suggestions for future essays, I massacred the work of my two lovely pupils, effectively making them rewrite it in its entirety.
They endured me with my cruellest persona yet: NO you are not allowed to use good as an adjective – it does not MEAN anything! Why are you repeating yourself? Did you really think that sentence was interesting or meaningful? Do NOT write ‘I think that’ write ‘It IS the case that’, Your younger brother does not write like that! REPETITION. That word is pointless, as is the sentence, in fact cross out the entire paragraph! What could you have written instead? Is that sentence logical? Really?!
It was rather a lot of fun and required absolutely no preparation, it even had the added bonus of making me feel I was genuinely teaching them something useful. Indeed, this style of lesson radically reduces lesson planning to as little as a minute – I decide what insane amount of homework I will give them for discussion next week. At the moment I seem to have a backlog of undissected homework, so I guess I can sit back and relax.
My fear is simply that too much criticism demotivates and demoralizes. I’m also dubious about the usefulness of the pupils writing down verbatim all the improvements I suggest. They need to think for themselves and be encouraged to do so. At the end of the day, though, I must do what I am told by the mother and wage payer. Who knows, maybe the kids will improve at a crazy rate. No more Mr Nice Guy.
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