In keeping with the theme of fakeness, a bent I've been on now for my last handful of posts, let me share with you something that I don't think has a name yet but you may have come across it like I have a few times. I'm going to call it pyramid teaching. The first reason why I call it pyramid teaching is because, like many of the cons I've been inundated with in my current confines of Scamada as well as abroad, this one starts with desperation, panic, some sort of crisis and let's be honest - it's usually a crisis of money.
Twice in my experiences with pyramid teaching I was in a money/job crisis, broke, depending on the kindness of friends or family to live and in need of work and I stumbled upon teaching "jobs" that wanted me to teach English in the most counter-intuitive, anti-educational, mathematical, corporate manner and had absolutely no chance of my falling for or buying into this pyramid scheme if I hadn't been. Once in Korea at a corporate training company called SPEP, once in Canada at a business designed to take advantage of taxpayer money (or, in the spirit of fakeness, government funding) from RAP (resettlement assistance program), mostly the IRCC (Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada), and other programs. The business used LINC, PBLA, and CLB (language instruction for newcomers to Canada, portfolio based language assessment, and Canadian language benchmarks) to attain their goals of creating a used car lot of GOOD teachers not working together but in competition with others paranoid of losing their part-time jobs with no benefits or being outperformed on monthly and yearly "performance evaluations," teaching in manners against their instincts and best practices always with the carrot of full-time hours and legal benefits like medical coverage just out of reach. I came across pyramid teaching in one or two courses during my master's too but dropped them both. You see without the desperation and the NEED for money it is easier to just recognize what's going on and get the fuck out. Unfortunately, the lure of money and basic survival forced me to endure the evils of pyramid teaching for much longer than I would have liked. But now I am able to illustrate it for you.
I remember being at my wits' end in Seoul drinking a corner store beer and talking on the motel room phone with Heather in Pyeongtaek who, despite her considerable gifts in this area, almost didn't manage to talk me off the ledge a succubus nicknamed Diane has forced me out onto with highly skilled pyramid teaching. This was after the first day of "training" for SPEP which is the hook day. The hook is accomplished simply by giving the student the most impotent, helpless, useless feeling of failure he/she has ever encountered in the realm of education. You set them up to fail and utterly humiliate them. For me the experience was made infinitely worse due to the fact that I had apprenticed for over 20 years and learned how to teach well, recognized the shit show I was being forced to legitimize by my participation, but was trapped into continued participation on account of my desperate need for money. It was without any exaggeration torture. Let me explain...
Diane was a fairly attractive middle-aged Korean woman and also a hell-spawned demon. She had called me, congratulated me on being chosen for the job, and introduced herself as my trainer. She told me to arrive at the SPEP offices for my first day of training. They had some fake name for the procedure with undoubtedly an official sounding abbreviation. I remember there being a TON of abbreviations childishly thought to sound professional but that made the whole experience even more mickey-mouse amateurish because they stood for something else. I actually think the video lessons I was doing on the first day were abbreviated as ESP. I don't know what that stood for but even WITH ESP I wouldn't have been able to ascertain what it was that Diane wanted from me. With 20/20 hindsight I now know that what she wanted from me was utter failure and humiliation... and she got it... bitch.
Yes, I was going to be videotaped teaching lessons. I was told by Diane that I needed to stand for the entire lesson, (so I couldn't sit with individual students to help, which is a teaching skill I have developed over time), there would be a few students and she wanted me to pretend I knew them already and pretend I was setting them up with conversation partners, not to actually do it. "Don't make me talk to myself," I think she told me. So I was not teaching I was ACTING like I was teaching ON CAMERA. I don't know about you but these are two surefire ways to make me sweat. I would be a crappy actor. I remember filming a lesson for the webpage of a college where I taught in Korea. It was outdoors and the students were my actual students who I had developed good relationships with. As soon as the camera went on I launched into this nervous performance that was nothing like my actual teaching. My students were asking me, "David, what's wrong?" That increased my anxiety. It was outside in the hot sun, which made it worse. And I remember having worn the absolute WORST shirt for the occasion, a powder blue shirt that made any moisture blatantly obvious. I was sweating, the stains were increasing which in turn increased my sweating which made me more nervous and awkward and the cherry on top was the "director" saying, "More character! More emotion!" Basically, dance like a monkey for me.
Not only was Diane making me dance like a monkey for her, she was playing a prog rock Kansas, Yes, or Rush song that was impossible to dance to. She had left the room to allow me to see the lesson in a book and plan my teaching strategies. I rarely do this without employing some sort of secondary exercise or game that relates to the topic or grammar or skill the lesson is teaching. Couldn't do THAT. I also arrange the class to best suit group conversation arrangements. Couldn't do THAT. I bring props, show videos, tell stories from my experience, could only do ONE of those. So I planned a lesson with the resources I had. She told me she was bringing several people, she showed up alone. Then on went the camera and she said, "Go ahead and TRY to teach me bitch!"
Immediately I started saying something like welcome to class and I had planned to call on individuals to quiz them on the previous class. Another skill I had developed over the years. It's called formative assessment and it works. Let me call on someone, hmmmm... Diane blah blah blah. I asked her a question. She answers in this falsetto highly Korean accented, broken English, airhead teenaged girl voice, "I no Diane. I Minnie." I broke the fourth wall or whatever they call is in the biz. "See what I was trying to do there..." She interrupted me, "No no no... continue." I guess she didn't want me to break her method actor transformation into "Minnie." So I continued, "Okay let me ask another question from last lesson to a different student... uh Minnie?" She gives this stunned look like how am I supposed to know and gives a purposely grammatically incorrect answer. At least that's what I thought. So I quickly correct the grammar mistakes and tell her the answer. Well then SHE breaks the fourth wall. "What are you doing?" she asks. So I explain the concept of review to her. She says something dismissive like we don't need that then launches into a defense of Minnie's grammar mistake. I'm wondering if this is a test or if she really believes this. Turns out she really had this bad grammar habit (because I heard her making the mistake again when she wasn't in the character of Minnie) and she was pretty sure she was right. I can't remember what it was but it was something like "I were bowling yesterday," which might be okay shootin the shit with friends at a pub in certain areas of the UK but it's not okay in most places English is spoken. But I need the job - she wins the argument. Off to a flying start!
I decide to go into the preface for the lesson and tell a story from my life and ask if she can relate. Again with the stunned thousand-mile stare. She briefly breaks character after stonewalling my attempts to ask if she has ever had this HIGHLY relatable experience or something similar that has OBVIOUS connection to the upcoming lesson and says, "They don't care about you, just teach the lesson, there isn't much time." Or something like that. She might as well have slapped me in the face. This is the very root of my teaching philosophy. I get to know my students in order to attain about a dozen tried, tested, and true educational principles such as relevance, meaning, context, motivation, participation, engagement, learning preference, learning style, etc. She shot them all down in one fell swoop. And on and on she swooped! She was by no means finished!
You can imagine I was sweating as much as the mock lesson for the college website. And worse than that I was enraged at her repeated attacks on my well-established and valid pedagogy/andragogy (two words she DEFINITELY didn't know). When I get really, really mad my mouth dries out and I sound like an Asian man slurping noodles when I talk. Now I got THAT going for me. Each new thing compounded the anger and the sweating and the nervousness until finally I was the one who broke the fourth wall and came a hair's breadth from saying, "FUCK THIS!" and storming out. Instead I presented a long, well-researched and practiced explanation of how I was trying to teach the lesson and why. Diane sat there writing in her book note after note about how poorly I did. She eventually said something that just made things worse like, "Well I wanted you to SHOW me not TELL me."
What she had now was a video that made me appear to be a shitty teacher. This was what she wanted. The very next day I was forced to (red-faced and sweaty again) sit through the the video recording of the whole fucking ordeal with Diane stopping periodically and giving vacuous feedback. Throughout the "training" she referred back to it to illustrate how far SHE had brought me with her brilliant training. She was teaching me the error of my ways you see and I would be a changed man, with gainful employment, all because of her. This would also do no harm to her reputation in the company. But it's all a scam! Pyramid teaching.
As time went on and I learned how to deal with Diane, understand what she wanted even though it was all wrong, and adapt to her messed up style of training, she actually became nice and frequently reminded me of how "improved" I was over where I started. Soon I started referring to that class and the video joking with her about how embarrassing it was. heh heh heh heh. So funny.
I performed one lesson in front of two experienced SPEP instructors and it was what kept me there. I almost chose being jobless in a foreign country over teaching in such a ludicrous manner. But they both told me something that got me through the training and it was basically just dance the dance for a while and do the stupid shit they tell you to do and when you get to your REAL classes you can go back to teaching properly. Which is what I did until the company trapped me PHYSICALLY in living and travel situations I needed to get out of and I really DID say fuck this and quit mid-contract without agreement from my employer for the first time ever. That's how bad this place was.
I enjoy the study of both science and religion and subscribe to neither. Through my personal research I have boiled one of the most universal debates down to an admittedly simplistic but highly serviceable explanation. Wanna read it? It's very short. I have come to the conclusion that science is comprised largely of people who have a tendency to accept theory as fact and religion is comprised largely of people who tend to accept faith as fact. I believe, and to be clear I CHOOSE to believe in Tesla's theory of Aether more than Einstein or Darwin's theory of the permanence of matter or Kant or Augustine's faith in an eternal sentient being. Don't argue details please, I may not have described any of the four people's beliefs exactly, they were only chosen as well-known names associated with the schools of thought to which I associated them. Details may differ. I DID admit to a certain simplification. The bottom line is it is all just chosen belief that we cherish although it is impossible to prove. Although both would argue to the death, science has no more proven the existence of the Higgs Boson than the Catholic church has proven the existence of God. So I really don't know how we all can't just get along... but people have fought wars!!!
Anyway, when I worked in Calgary at the Centre for Newcomers it was very similar in many ways to SPEP. They differed much like the difference between religion and science. Neither went so far as to convince me to subscribe to their teaching methodologies, I had already made my choice, but whereas SPEP depended on their trainees accepting their teaching practices through faith, I found my time at CFN (the centre for newcomers) chock-o-block full of workshops and certificate acquisition designed to convince me of the scientific nature of their educational theory. Neither proved valid, in fact I have solid evidence they were both fraudulent, which I suppose destroys my analogy, but let me describe to you a bit of the pyramid teaching to which I was subjected during the acquisition of my PBLA certificate:
This was the type of pyramid teaching that I had to suffer through and try my best to act like I was employing in the classroom while surreptitiously doing the exact opposite. I thought my days were numbered and when they realized I was teaching properly that would be the end of me but THAT job ended because they constantly promised more hours and had no intention of giving them to me. The final semester they hired about 10 new people and gave me NO extra hours. This is simply because they don't want to pay the benefits that come with full-time employment. Pyramid teaching tends to come at businesses rather than schools and I have been surprised how many of the former there are around the world posing as the latter!
I worry that "dancing the dance," maintaining the fake while I pick and choose a very few moments to be genuine is a pattern that could spread beyond my professional life. Do you ever wonder that yourself? Are we ALL doing this a little bit?
What do ya reckon? Are our lives becoming more fake than real? Have we surpassed the halfway mark? Exceeded it? Are those moments of veracity on the decline? What is an acceptable percentage? Has THAT changed too?
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