My Bad (Part 1)

I'm not actually a very good teacher.

I'm a fairly popular teacher, which tends to get confused with being a good one. I'm fairly good at giving students the impression they've learned something, even when they haven't, and that's practically the definition of an effective communicator.

But turning the very complex into the very simple while not making it very abstract. Making digressions which illustrate the point rather than obscure it. Faking infectious enthusiasm.

No, not much cop on that.

At heart, I have always been a technician. A problem solver. The one who finds the better new way to do the old thing, and occasionally invents the new thing in the process.

I'm the one who's just spent a weekend working out how to take some badly scanned overlarge English-course PDFs, convert them to graphics, clean up the images and sort them into a more useful order...and how to automate each stage. The result is a set of presentable textbooks small enough to email, made while I slept.

Actually using them is the dull part, because I'm bored by what I already know, and the general idea of a teacher is that they already know the subject pretty well...and aren't bored by talking about it.

The interesting thing would be to write a better textbook, based on what I've learned while teaching from it. And I've a fairly good idea how to do it - mainly not using grammatical forms in the exercises that haven't been taught yet.

But there's no time, because I've got around six classes a day. It seems that to be productive you must have plenty of free time, but must also used to have been busy.

And no, I'm not sure whether that is a correct English sentence.