The bane of my existence

Despite many frustrations in my first five months here, the biggest one has somehow not made it on the blog. It has a name: Stand Out. It is the textbook series that the "great minds" of the institute selected for their intermediate and advanced classes. It is horrendous. The main problem -- and it´s a doozy -- is that it´s designed for ESL (English as a Second Language) students, that is, immigrants living in the U.S.

So, rather than teaching my students practical communication skills, I have to teach them how to read cleaning product labels, apply for a credit card, and rent an apartment in the U.S. How often do you think they´ll need to use soak, social security number, or landlord in conversation? I´m thinking never. Yet not only was this series chosen for a program teaching young adults in Chile -- cringe -- but the exams are based on the book. This, to me, is adding stupidity to stupidity. I can´t just scrap the book and teach useful things because then my students won´t get good grades. It´s maddening.

Enough mumblings of complaints made it to the higher ups and they arranged for a representative of the publisher to come talk to the teachers. The Santiago meeting was scheduled for Monday morning, when most of us (including yours truly) have classes. We were told to cancel and reschedule them, even though normally classes missed for official institute activities don´t have to be made up. But whatever.

Well, the representative never showed. It turns out that teachers in other cities were told the week before that the rep couldn´t make it. Yet those of us in Santiago received nothing, and therefore dozens of teachers congregated downtown for the meeting. We weren´t told "sorry, we goofed, please go so we don´t waste any more of your time". Oh, no. The chief of chiefs of the English program read us poetry for two hours to fill the time. Unbelievable.

Rumor has it that next semester´s book has us teaching our students about the U.S. Constitution, jury duty, and the U.S. political system. Shoot me now.