Link Up

Login
Password
	Remember me on this computer
	Forgot your password?
	Register

Ronnie Bitten

Hello, my name is Ronnie Bitten and I am the Director of Studies for Language Link Central School Moscow. I originally hail from the west coast of Scotland where I dreamed of becoming either an actor or a folk-singer. The one thing I always promised myself from an early age that I would never become – no way, not under any circumstances – was a teacher. And yet, here I am, I’m a teacher, and I’m happy being a teacher. Here’s how it happened: My first experience with Russia was when my mother returned from a three-week trip to Moscow in the late nineties and I listened misty-eyed to her adventures and determined that one day I would go there and see it for myself. At that time, however, I was still clinging onto the hope that a new renaissance in Scottish touring theatre would emerge and send some work my way. It didn’t. Fed up with waiting, I returned to university and did a degree in literature, because if I couldn’t be an actor I just wanted to lose myself in a library for a few years. When I came out the library, degree in hand, on the other side the Russian idea re-emerged suddenly into my life via a passing comment by my mother that she had friends and connections in Russia and if I was interested, it might be possible for me to get a job teaching English in Russia. She then quickly forgot about it, but I didn’t. I went away and discovered that the best way to get a job teaching anywhere in the world was to get hold of something called a CELTA certificate, and that it was possible to do a course towards such a certificate in Moscow. So I applied, paid my money, and still wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, I got on a plane to Moscow. A month later, CELTA in hand, I applied to Language Link. As soon as I came for the interview I had a feeling that this was a company I really wanted to work for, mostly because it had a friendlier, more laid-back feel than any of the alternatives. Nearly four years on, this city has become my home, and with the help of the company I have evolved from the bookish dreamer I was when I left university into. . . . well, a teacher, or something closely resembling one. And no, I have no regrets. Although I always said I would never, could never, be a teacher, both my CELTA course and my time with LL have helped me to redefine what it means to be a teacher. At school, teachers were strange, disturbed creatures intent on sacrificing the hopes and dreams of eager young hopeful dreamers like me at the altar of an insatiable and merciless demon they called ‘the Curriculum’. They were all part of a sinister conspiracy to discourage creativity and stifle our wayward sensibilities and turn us into – yuck – functioning members of Scottish society. Who wants to be a functioning member of Scottish society? Not me, no siree, I wanted no part of it, so I opted out and came to Russia. And while in Russia, I have discovered, to my relief, that teaching is not necessarily all about disciplining and punishing and taking your inadequacies out on people too young and bummed-out on hormones to fight back, but that it can, on occasions, be a means of inspiring, motivating, and encouraging people to acquire difficult skills that they would have no hope of achieving single-handedly, of getting out in the world and meeting with people you would normally never meet with, a way of providing a service that people really need, that really does help improve their lives, and themselves, for the better – a way, not just of functioning, but of facilitating. That is what excites me about what I’m doing here in Moscow, and why I am now happy to accept the fact that a teacher is what I became, a teacher is what I am, and a teacher is something I’m happy to continue being. Of course, there are other factors that have kept me here, not the least of which is the fact that I have never felt bored since coming to Moscow. There is always something, be it good or bad, to keep your mind occupied and tell your grandchildren when you grow too old to keep up with this place. Similarly, EFL teaching is a job that I find to be frequently high-pressured but rarely dull. To tell you the truth, it isn’t that difficult once you’ve mastered the basic techniques and know what you’re talking about, but I am always surprised by the huge levels of energy it requires. Even after all this time, I really have to psyche myself up before I begin and very often I collapse, drained, at the end of a lesson. Meeting a new class for the first time is always nerve-racking and even when things settle down and they grow to know you and like you they are still always able to keep you on your toes. There are some people who say that a CELTA qualification doesn’t adequately prepare teachers for the reality of teaching. On the one hand, I really want to defend the CELTA course against its detractors because I feel I got a lot out of mine and am a better teacher for having done it, but it is also true that the course makes a lot of assumptions about where and how you are teaching and what makes a good teacher is really adaptability rather than strict adherence to a methodological ideology. For example, although I believe it both right and necessary that learners come to Language Link to communicate in another language rather than to discuss grammatical tables in Russian, teachers who are perceived as not having a solid base of grammatical knowledge tend to get short shrift, as do teachers who ‘do not correct’. ‘Just going in and chatting with them’, that classic EFL fallback lesson plan, more often than not falls flat on its face in Moscow. In LL we use English File for our general English adult classes, supplementing with other course books, principally Cutting Edge, and I think this is a good formula because EF is very grammar-oriented, and like I say Russians usually feel cheated if there isn’t a strong focus on grammar, and Cutting Edge is a good lexical course which can compensate for the weaknesses of EF. On top of that, thanks to the work of my predecessors in this job we have a good bank of resource files from which you can photocopy, cut and paste fun activities to break up and add a bit of variety to even the most grueling of grammar practices. Another reason that we use EF is because it is very teacher-friendly. I would dispute the often repeated trope that it requires no work whatsoever from the teacher to use EF effectively in the classroom, but it is true that a competent individual left alone with a copy of English File to prepare a lesson can do very little wrong, because a great deal of the hard work has already been done for you, and all that is required is to add a little bit of a personal touch, a little bit of spark to distinguish your lessons from the ordinary, run of the mill EFL tourist. I think one of the hardest things about effective teaching is trying to capture a loose, informal, almost improvised feel to my lessons while still preparing them thoroughly enough to ensure that the lesson aims are taking priority and that the learners are getting the practice they require. Drawing up lesson plans on paper may be a useful tool for assessment in teacher training courses, but in my experience it tends to be detrimental to the lesson to draw up rigid plans in real life. This is partly because student expectations are generally unrealistic. They do not want to feel as if they are following a fixed program, a well-trodden path that has served others well in the past and will serve others well in the future. They want to feel as if they are in the hands of a magician, someone who is keeping a bag of tricks under their desk that one day they will untie and let loose and everything will be illuminated. Of course, we aren’t magicians. We are functionaries, pure and simple, and learning a language is often a long and difficult slog and the learners are in fact doing what everyone else before them has had to do and it doesn’t get any easier and nobody has any magic wands to wave and grammar must be ground and drills must be drilled, but in a world where knowledge is no longer as jealously guarded as it once was, and every episteme is free at the clink of an interlink, the teacher needs to find something to add to his or her lessons that cannot be found in a textbook or on a website - they have to give them the nerve, the drive and the inspiration to continue. Our role, therefore, in the modern world is not so much educational as it is psychological. The knowledge is already there, gathering dust. We just have to blow the dust off and make it seem fresh. To do that we have to make it seem as if we’re doing all this for the first time, even when we’ve done it so often we’re sick of it. To achieve that kind of spontaneity takes a lot of long careful preparation, which you then have to forget about and just do it. In Central School we try and keep an informal atmosphere where teachers who really wish to excel can come in, swap lesson ideas, tell funny stories about lessons that went horribly wrong, slag each other off, sleep on the couch, and play ping-pong. On top of this there is a very lively social calendar. There are parties when somebody arrives, when somebody leaves, when somebody has a birthday, when someone moves to a new flat, or very often just whenever somebody feels like having a party. This can make it difficult for teachers whose primary goal is to come here and pick up a bit of Russian, because we spend all our days teaching English and then we go out at night and speak English with our friends. To be honest I wouldn’t really recommend this job to anyone who wants to learn Russian, although very often you find that learning Russian is something people do by osmosis just by the simple act of being here and trying to get on with life. And so, having made it through good times, bad times, and downright mediocre times, Moscow remains my spiritual home and both personally and professionally I’m still having fun. There’s nowhere else I would rather be right now and that’s a lot more than most people can say. I set out to travel the world and ended up attached to the first place I went, and sometimes I wonder if I should have cut the strings and moved on, but now I realize that travel is about more than just going places – all destinations ultimately lead to yet another road – and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved here so far and I’m looking forward to staying a little bit longer and doing whatever needs to be done, because this is my home, these are my people, and this is my world. Ronnie Bitten, DOS Central School Moscow