This ironic post is designed to highlight all the wrong things I've seen one person do when teaching, so if you want to do all the right things, I would suggest something close to the opposite of this. Follow on to see how you can "Maximize your Mistakes"!
Firstly, you need to seriously limit how much time students spend practicing. Because language is best trained like a sport, you need to steer students away from anything that will actually improve their skills.
But if you have all this scheduled class time with your students, what should you do?
You need to spend as much time as possible explaining unimportant nuances of the language elements you are teaching. For example, explaining how a single Chinese word is pronounced in different dialects, and the trivial details of how a character is written. But limit this to the unimportant details, or you may be in danger of teaching your students something. Another important point: Never, ever, give examples of how these words might be used in a real life sentence. In fact, never use realistic language with the students at all. This way, when they hear a native speaker talk, they will be completely unfamiliar with it.
Using the language in class is a dangerous slope as you risk putting real information into your class, so as much time as possible should be used for talking about things completely unrelated to language.
So secondly like our teacher you can spend a lot of time talking about your past issues in class. It's a captive audience. Therefore it's like free therapy, isn't it? Furthermore, you can spend extra precious minutes boosting your ego about how much you must know to be teaching a language to all those students.
Thirdly, to ensure the students don't start doing dangerous things like asking questions or experimenting with the language, you need to demoralize them. Here's some of the great ideas used by the teacher in question:
- Tell students that because they haven't studied linguistics or phonology, they are at a serious disadvantage in learning a language
- Tell them that because they are learning a language at a later age, they will never been really good at it
- If their language is very different to the one they are learning, tell them they will never understand the grammar or the nuances of vocabulary fully
- Tell them that if a sound doesn't exist in their native language it will be impossible for the student to make the sound correctly in the future.
Finally once the students are demoralized and bored with your personal rants, then you can tell them you will teach them one thing, and then continuously change your mind. This will have them second guessing anything that comes out of your mouth and even the most dedicated student should be giving up by now.
So if you follow these 4 simple steps; teach trivial details, keep conversation away from the subject, destroy your students hopes, and make false promises, then congratulations! You have Maximized your Mistakes.
