A British teacher with 11 years of experience,

teaching English at a language school in the United Arab Emirates 

28 May 2020 

Life before Covid-19 

I work at a language school with 21 contact hours per week. Students are mostly Arabic speakers, and there are a few Indian students too. Adults generally participate well in class and are motivated, but there are sometimes some cultural issues, such as gender dynamics. Younger learners are usually quite motivated and there are minimal behavioural issues. 

Before Covid-19, IELTS courses were intensive, with 3 hours of classes a day, 5 days a week for 2 weeks. Young learner classes were 3 hours each and General English classes were 2 hours. We have syllabi for each course and all the materials we need, but we are also expected to cater to our students’ needs. For example, I’ve taught the IELTS course about fifteen times now, so I’ve adapted the materials to create my own version. 

How things have changed because of Covid-19 

We were given less than a day’s notice of our school closing. The following week we were given online training, but no one really knew what was happening. Training was through a different online platform, with different functionalities and we didn’t get to see the platform we were going to use until the day before teaching began. We didn’t get our materials until two days before. Our timetables were really erratic, we didn’t know what we were doing, and management kept giving us tasks to fill our hours saying ‘it’s quantity not quality’, so it was quite stressful and confusing. Management regularly closed classes or switched teachers and students between classes, which was challenging. Our teaching hours also reduced, but at the beginning I was working more because I had to design an IELTS course (I designed three because they kept changing their minds). It took about a month before things became a bit more normal, after we started complaining more about what and when we’d be teaching. I’m teaching more with young learners now and their lesson times have been reduced to an hour. Adult classes are now 90 minutes and IELTS classes are 2 hours, but to encourage new students, the school is offering ‘extras’, such as 1-to-1s and feedback sessions. I’ve got all of the skills I need to teach online because I acquired these skills myself, the training they gave was uniformly awful. I’ve learnt through trial and error, through other teachers commenting and informally sharing tips and ideas. 

I think now for IELTS courses, the students’ needs are met to the same extent as before Covid-19 as the online IELTS course is the most similar. Student numbers for General English decreased because I think it wasn’t what the students wanted or expected. My original class of teenagers were always very good and now they’ve stepped it up and are pushing to try and get the most out of the hour class, whereas a difficult ‘inherited’ class won’t turn on their microphones or cameras or use the chat box which is challenging. For the much younger learners, I feel like I can give them less literacy support because some of them can’t read English or type and I feel like they’re lost, but, they all seem happy. 

Just because something is [a mess], doesn’t mean you stop… 

With the younger learners, my role feels like less of a teacher and more like babysitting because I can’t see that much progress. It’s challenging as well because they’re grouped by age, not ability, so the near-fluent children are very excited to talk while the weaker students struggle. In other classes I heard of adults breaking down and crying during lessons. I had two borderline cases, so I had to be more like a counsellor or customer service agent to solve these issues. We also have more admin to complete, such as scheduling Zoom classes, which we never had to do and I don’t think is my job. 

Just because something is [a mess], doesn’t mean you stop…I’ve gotten to like it. Right now I honestly prefer teaching little kids online. Despite some concerns I have with the amount of progress they’re making, it’s much nicer and actually easier. I now think I am happier teaching young learners online than in the classroom, especially in terms of managing energy levels. There are still some challenges with the IELTS classes, such as the adult men are less likely to turn on their camera which is strange to deal with. I enjoy most of the classes I teach, but maybe I’m lucky, if I had bad students maybe I wouldn’t be happy. I’ve taught in different teaching circumstances before and this isn’t really difficult because the students still participate and I think once a student participates then how difficult is it really? 

Greatest concerns 

We won’t be able to have pair work or group work; kids won’t be able to play, or touch or make things together, and I don’t know what the psychological effect of putting children into that situation would be. 

Initially I was worried and didn’t want to teach online because people might think it’s the future going forward, but I’ve realised they don’t want to be taught online. It’s hard to see how long it will take before we can get back into the classroom, and how we can build rapport with students if you can’t be close to them -and if we need to be two metres apart, is it just better to be online? We won’t be able to have pair work or group work; kids won’t be able to play, or touch or make things together, and I don’t know what the psychological effect of putting children into that situation would be. They see online teaching as something different, but if you bring them back in the classroom with all these strange limitations, I don’t know what effect this will have. 

Unexpected benefits or opportunities 

I think you have to rethink how you teach things, which is never a bad thing as it makes you think if you’re doing it in the right way, but it can be frustrating if you know that one way is the best, or ‘these three ways are the best’ and I can’t use any of them. 

I wouldn’t have ever met or worked with the teachers from the other two branches if this hadn’t happened. I now know who to talk to or who is going through the same issues.  

I think you have to rethink how you teach things, which is never a bad thing as it makes you think if you’re doing it in the right way, but it can be frustrating if you know that one way is the best, or ‘these three ways are the best’ and I can’t use any of them. Doing crafts or tactile activities with children is difficult now because you don’t know what they have in their homes. 

For the weaker younger learners, it is really difficult to motivate them to write in the classroom because they get self-conscious, but now they love writing in the chat box and they are writing more for fun. I actually turn on the chat box as a reward. 

Thoughts on the future 

I don’t really think about the future or what it looks like because there’s no point, but I’ll be happy to see students’ physical faces and interact. Especially with IELTS, because some of the content is quite technical and tough, I can’t gauge if they understand when I can’t see their faces. With children, I think I’ll give them a six-month break from computers. I’ll go really retro with my teaching methods because they’ll be more interesting for them and then I’ll go back to tech once they start to miss it. 

I hope that in the future we will have job security and benefits reinstated and that the company start communicating with us because none of these things have happened for the last few months. I hope our students come back too.