Fall term training

The summer intensive schedule ended this week on Tuesday. Today and tomorrow I have training for the new classes I’ll be teaching in the fall term. (Specifically, these are “Bridge” reading and “Bridge” listening.)

That CDI does central training sessions for its staff is a good thing – it creates a more-or-less unified way of teaching based on best practices and teaching theory. And while the teaching theories of “internalization, externalization,” or whatever are beyond my concern, I can apprecitate that there’s some sort of rationale behind things.

That said, getting trained is not an easy process. Inevitably, there are two kinds of people who attend training: the people who had some experience from the old term, and the people who will be teaching the subject for the first time in the new term.

The first group tends to get more out of the training, yet probably needs it less. They already know the basics behind what’s going on, so they can focus on refining their teaching methods.

I, however, was in the second group this time, and it sucked. We typically didn’t know what to hand out, what to check for homework, how many books there are or even what they look like. The most basic things are beyond us at the time when we walk into the training room.

For that matter, sometimes we don’t even know where to show up. (There’s no saying what room is for what, and the attendence sheets the trainers have are notoriously unreliable.)

As for content, everyone I talked to said the two hours we spent in training was completely fruitless. When everything ended, most of us still didn’t know what we needed to know, and even worse, we couldn’t ask because most didn’t know that we didn’t know it.

In reality, the best resource for learning how to teach a class is to talk to the person who taught it last term. Training is pretty much a joke.