Proved right

Three new people joined our Spanish class last week. As a consequence we went back to the start of the book to allow these people to catch up. The teacher sensed Pam and my frustration and asked us whether we wanted to join the second year class. Yesterday was the first lesson we had in our new class. Of course we knew the people we were working with because they were all from Villas Andrea.

In the first year class we had people who would skip lessons for weeks and then turn up out of the blue not knowing where we were up to. There were only a couple of members who would do the homework properly. In fact many hadn’t been able to get the class book to work in so couldn’t do the homework at all. Worse still we had a few people who would start an argument with the teacher. Some of them attend classes with a different teacher who obviously taught things which contradicted the work we were doing in class.

In our new class everyone has the book. They do the work in advance without having to be told to do so. Nobody argues with the teacher and so the pace of the lessons is much faster. At the end of our first session we felt that we had achieved a lot more than we did in most of the lessons with the other class.

It is interesting to see the situations that we faced throughout our working lives from the other side. We have always said that the quality of a lesson is determined more by the class than the skills of the teacher. The low level disruption in our first class could have been enough to make our very good teacher look average.