interview questions

spurious wrote: »

And in some schools, Irish teachers have two levels in a class, plus the kids who don't do Irish at the back. The real world.

Three levels (Bonn, Gnáth & Ard Leibhéal)- and the ones who don't do it. Furthermore, in our school where there is an ideological opposition to streaming, there are c. 30 students in each Irish class.

It's nothing short of brazen that one teacher is expected to teach this range in each class. Learning "differentiation" in this reality is a theory of little relevance other than as a right-on, money-saving trite soundbite. When I taught English as a foreign language - i.e. with conversation at the heart of the class - there were 10 to 15 students in each class. As a policy, there was never more than 15 students so conversation and games were possible to facilitate - even with the foreign learners who did not want to be in English class (they had to attend class as a visa requirement).

For all the rants people have about the way Irish is taught, I have never heard anybody point out how both the size of classes and the range of students within them make it impossible to teach it as a living language of conversation and fun. Comparing the subject with subjects which had half the number of students (there were c. 15 students in our French class, which was optional) has always been specious.