Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Four: A Mistake in Leeds and a Recovery in Khartoum

four A Mistake in Leeds and a Recovery in Khartoum 41 The Overseas Educational Studies Group (OESG) Before we left Tripoli, I had obtained a lectureship in the Institute of Education at the University of Leeds. I suspect I got the job for a variety of reasons, one being that I had the WSE textbook in press. I was actually appointed to the OESG (The Overseas Educational Studies Group), which offered three diplomas for overseas educators, one of which was Teaching English Overseas (TEO) and where a large minority of the participants were Sudanese secondary school teachers. Clearly, in this circumstance, my experience with ESL in the Arab World would likely have been considered a plus. Third, I would be replacing Pablo Foster, who was on his way to Tunisia to work on a new English textbook for Tunisian secondary schools, and I suspect that Pablo put in a good word for me. So in the autumn of 1970, closing in on my 32nd birthday, I had obtained a permanent lecturership in a large and well-known British university . I was, so it seemed, set for life. In those days, the position of lecturer was “the career grade”, by which was meant that this was the 89 rank most people could expect to have for all their academic life. Only about 10 percent of the university posts were for professors (who often were also heads of departments), while another 25 percent or so were allocated to senior lecturers or readers, the remaining two-thirds would be lecturers and would remain so. The OESG in the early 1970s was staffed by about seven lecturers and one senior lecturer, most of these colleagues being considerably older and nearly all with experience as educators of various kinds during the closing years of the British colonial administrations around the world. The other “Young Turk”—and he was more of a young Turk than I aspired to be—was Steve Whiteley, who had recently been teaching at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. Anyway, soon after our arrival, we attempted to democratize the unit by suggesting that the “Staff Toilet” be made available to all in the building, arguing in effect that the students taking one of our diploma courses were all “staff” back in their home countries. No dice. We were firmly rebuffed by what we considered to be “the old guard” only too anxious, we muttered, to protect their sanitary privileges. 42 Teaching on the TEO etc One of my main teaching assignments was the course in ESL teaching methods at the secondary school level, where I made much use of a recently published book by Bright and McGregor entitled Teaching English as a Second Language and subtitled Theory and techniques for the secondary stage. Bright had worked in the Sudan and Uganda, while McGregor had spent most of his professional life in the latter country. I was sometimes rather uncomfortable with this assignment, often being uncertain about the applicability of the teaching techniques I was advocating in secondary school systems as diverse as Sudan, Nepal, Hong Kong and Malaysia. On the other hand, I was particularly impressed by what the authors had to say about ESL reading, not something I had 90 been much involved with until now. Here is an extract from the section on reading lesson techniques (and remember they were talking about large classes in African secondary schools): The passage should first be read silently by the pupils. It is direct response to the black marks on paper that we want to improve. We do not want to train pupils to read things aloud before they can understand them. It is necessary to deny them the help of the teacher’s voice. The slowest readers should not be given time to complete the passage. If we wait for them, most pupils will feel no pressure at all to read quickly. The slow readers will perhaps read a little faster themselves next time and will not suffer unduly in any case because there is time during the questioning for them to look at the text again. This advocacy of the largely silent reading class struck me forcefully, although I didn’t have any real opportunity to put anything into practice until a couple of years later. I also offered two short elective courses, one on Modern Syntactic Theories (if you can believe that), the other for...