TEFL: horrible students

I was wondering how other teachers dealt with students who are rude, ignorant and just plain unpleasant. I mean the type who talk about you in their own language and moan about every single thing you do in class when the majority of students are perfectly happy. I've been teaching for several years and almost all my students have been lovely - I go out of my way to create a friendly and supportive atmosphere in class, so I haven't had too many problems, bar several bitchy girls creating problems over two years ago. I got great feedback from the classes I taught last term.

I now have a new class with several Spanish students who are just rude and cliquey. They speak Spanish constantly, even when they're in a group with other non-Spanish students. One girl is particularly bad. I've heard her moaning about me in Spanish all week, saying that my class is rubbish and I'm a bad teacher and today when she found out I understood Spanish, she made a big scene out of pretending to be mortified. She's a weak student and bone idle. Anything I give her, she just says 'that's not my level', yet when I offered to have her moved down, she said no. I try to give her extra help and attention in class and she just isn't interested. To be honest, I've had enough of her bull****. She's ruining the class - it's always so much nicer when she's late or leaves early. She tends to bring the other Spanish students down with her negativity. She makes a point of telling me every single day that she didn't like the exercise I gave them, even though she never even gives it a chance. I can only assume it's a personal grudge or that she has a problem with having a teacher so close to her own age (her last teacher was a woman in her fifties). To be honest, the girl is just a bitch (she's all fake sweet to my face and nods earnestly when I help her before she turns around and slags me off to her mates) but this needs to be dealt with.

How would you deal with this?

peanuthead

Well Izzy, first of all, about the non cooperation in class, I would go to the course director. Can he/she help you out here? Students like that should be moved away from friends.

Are there people in the class she is not cliquey with? Could you move her beside those ones?

Personally, what I would do in a situation like that, where a student isn't behaving well, I would not let it go on. I would warn her once in private. I would warn her a second time in front of the others and after that I would ask her to leave.

However, the slagging you behind your back thing - I think you just need to ignore that. Hard as it might be, if she doesn't think you are bothered by it she will get bored of it.

Tactical ignoring can work very well. She could be doing this for a number of reasons, from just wanting to be plain bold to covering up for the fact that her English isn't that great. I had a guy like that last year and in his case it was the latter.