Regent's Summer School

After completing my CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English Language to Adults) in May 2009, I took a job at Regent's International Summer School, based at St Mary's College in Twickenham, London. St Mary's is now being kitted out to be the base for the South African Olympic team in 2012. I was offered a two week stay, which turned into six. The school is run for international students aged between 14 and 17, whose parents have, shall we say, ample means.

We had quite a mixed group including students from Korea, Japan, China, U.A.E. Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Crete, Greece and others I can't remember. I think there were about forty languages represented anyway.

Mine was a residential position and that meant staying at the college in the on-site accommodation, so I was basically living in halls for the summer - weird! Part of the job also involved 'night-duty' whereby the teaching staff had to take it in turns to bed down in the student buildings to keep an eye on them. Basically we were supposed to prevent a building full of teenagers, away from home for the first time, from making noise, drinking alcohol and having sex with each other. This, as you may imagine, is somewhat of a futile endeavour, which leads only to sleep deprivation for the teaching staff involved (teaching grammar without having slept is less fun than it sounds...).

From time to time I would be 'on duty' in the corridor with all the Arab boys. This was considerably easier than trying to deal with the Europeans. Being largely from Saudi Arabia, they were all quite strict orthadox Muslims and so they wouldn't touch alcohol and seemed content to leave the girls well alone for the time being. This made life a lot easier for me. I was welcomed into their communal space where we would play games and chat until, well until long after my bed-time anyway. They insisted on buying me an entire pizza every night I was on duty - can't say how much weight I gained on account of that...

They taught me a game called 'Hamza' - a little like wink murder, if you know it? Every player takes a piece of paper from a pile, one of which is marked with an X or something. The player with the marked piece of paper has to subtley signal to selected others that he has it. Once you are sure who the marked man is, you cast your paper into the centre of the gathering (If you get it wrong you will be punished). The last one holding a piece of paper would be subjected to having his had slapped really quite hard (I remember the bruises)by every other player. This person was invariably the youngest among the group, poor little Khaled...

The course involved a three-hour class in the morning (split into two, one and a half hour classes with two separate groups) followed by two three-hour 'social programme' slots for various activities and excursions, including sports, discos, poker and such. The idea is to give the kids a chance to socialise and speak English as much as possible. This kind of language immersion is a really effective way of improving language quickly.

My first ever class was with the beginner level students. I had only taught for six hours during my CELTA training (over a four week course) and so I was a little nervous going in. I hadn't really had a lot of advice on how to discipline mischievous adolescents. I ended up allowing the students to devise their own punishments for those of the class who couldn't find themselves able to act with respect to either me or their classmates. Those who arrived late to class would have either to perform their national anthem for the class or, when words failed (and they frequently did) they would 'drop and give me fifty'. Before you get upset, I should point out that this was the suggested punishment put forward by the late arivers themselves - I could scarcely hold them back from offering their demonstration of physical strength before their peers and the young ladies present, all of which found it a frightful bore after the first three press-ups I'm sure...

As for the social program - a little way into the course, after trying my hand at 'basketball' - a game altogether too dangerous for anyone who values his fingers I'm afraid - I approached 'Big John', the Head Master, about instigating music and theatre workshops with another teacher, Eric. Eric had just arrived from Canada and we quickly became and are still good friends. We set about establishing our theatre workshops, which were religiously attended largely by a handful of hilarious young French comedians and dangerous Russian girls with dubious intentions...

These sessions were a lot of fun. We played all kinds of games and improvisation excercises to promote communication and build confidence in our young charges. Games included old favourites such as 'Zip-Zap-Boing', through to improvisation games like 'Battle Axe' and 'Red ball, Yellow ball', and some new ones that Eric introduced like 'Big Booty'. In Big Booty we'd form into a circle that didn't quite complete itself - like an exaggerated semi-circle. The first in the line was Big Booty - this was usually Eric. Whoever was next to Big Booty would be 'number one', then number two and three and so on. We usually had around twelve people participating at any time. The game would follow thus: all would sing the line 'Big Booty, Big Booty, Big Booty...Ooh Yeah!' in a slightly exaggerated New York street accent, to a palpable pulse. Big Booty would then call something like 'Big Booty Number Four', and whoever was number four would continue 'Number Four Number Eight' or something. This would continue until someone missed the pulse or made some other mistake (this doesn't take long) at which point all cry OOOOOOOoooh Yeah! And the person who made the mistake would go to the end of the line and become Number Twelve (if there are 13 players)whereby the whole thing begins again. This, of course, meant that every person after the number that made the mistake would take on a new number. That's where there's confusion - and that's what makes it all so fun...

We ended up producing sketch shows, based largely on one of Eric's favourite Canadian sketch shows called 'Kids in the Hall' - check it out on youtube. We got some really great performances out of them and it gave Eric and me and certain amount of confidence as well.

I took on the music sessions solo for the most part. There was a piano at the school and I had my guitar with me. Other students had bought their own instruments along too so we had some good little sessions learning music from all their countries. We also produced a group chorus of an old Nick Cave number, Into my arms, which became somewhat of an anthem for the starry eyed girls at the school that summer... I also did some drumming work-shops using plastic chairs and buckets and wooden spoons - we had a lot of fun with this and even performed some of what we had done at the school talent show.

After an incident with the previously mentioned Russians and an illicit bottle of vodka, we made a reworking of another old classic - What shall we do with the drunken student?'which got caught up the chair drumming and was also later performed. There was a nice moment when a bright young student from Crete joined in the fun. He had brought his lyre with him and between the two of us, with Victoria from Russia on the piano, we arranged our own version of the duelling banjos theme from Deliverence - I wish I had a recording of that! We performed it together at the talent show along with a traditional piece of music from Crete. He played the instrument beautifully and it was a real pleasure to play with him.

I learned a lot about teaching in my short time at Regent's. Summer school is a good way to get into teaching and work out a style that suits. I had a lot of fun and took a lot out of it. It'll be a long time before I work with teenagers again though...